Asia-Europe Carrier Surcharge Wave: CMA CGM, MSC, Maersk, and Hapag-Lloyd All File PSS and FAK Increases for June 2026

The Analysis

Five hundred dollars a TEU from 1 June. Five hundred and a thousand dollars per 20ft and 40ft from 8 June. Three hundred and six hundred dollars per 20ft and 40ft from 10 June. And MSC, which did none of that, moving its FAK base from 2,820 and 4,700 dollars in the first half of June to 3,000 and 6,000 dollars in the second half. Four carriers, one trade, Far East to North Europe, and every one of them filed inside a fortnight. Let us work through it.

Two different mechanisms are in play and that matters more than the amounts. CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk put a peak season surcharge on top of whatever base rate you already pay. MSC left the surcharge alone and reset the base itself. A surcharge and a base reset behave differently on your invoice, differently in your contract, and differently again in any index your rate happens to be linked to. Anyone who treats these four announcements as one thing is about to make the same mistake four times.

Here is the part that made me sit up. MSC's 40ft went from 4,700 to 6,000 while its 20ft went from 2,820 to 3,000. Before the change a 40ft cost 1.67 times a 20ft. After it, a 40ft costs exactly twice a 20ft. Two 20ft boxes will cost 6,000 dollars, and one 40ft will cost 6,000 dollars. The 940 dollar advantage of shipping a 40ft has gone to zero in one filing. That number is worth a paragraph of anybody's time.

Start with the calendar, because the calendar is where the money is this month. CMA CGM's $500 a TEU took effect on 1 June, so as of today, 5 June, it is already in your invoices. Hapag-Lloyd's $500 and $1,000 lands on 8 June, three days from now. Maersk's $300 and $600 lands on 10 June, five days from now. MSC's second-half step lands on 15 June, ten days from now. One trade, four dates, and three of the four you can still act on.

Put a value on each of those windows. Assume you ship 10 40ft boxes a month on this trade. Move a Maersk box on or before 9 June and the $600 never applies; from 10 June it does, so the window is worth $6,000 on ten boxes. Move a Hapag-Lloyd box on or before 7 June and the $1,000 never applies; from 8 June it does, worth $10,000. Move an MSC box on or before 14 June and it prices at $4,700; from 15 June it prices at $6,000, a step of $1,300 a box, worth $13,000. Three windows, three prices, and the largest one is the one with the longest fuse.

The CMA CGM filing is the only one you cannot act on, which is worth saying out loud so nobody wastes a day on it. It has been in force since 1 June. Assume you move 10 20ft boxes a month on that carrier: $500 a TEU is $5,000 this month and every month until it is withdrawn. There is no clever move here. There is only one question, and it is the question underneath this whole wave: what exactly is a TEU in this tariff?

Assume the ordinary reading, that a TEU is a 20ft equivalent and a 40ft is two of them. Then CMA CGM's $500 a TEU is $500 on a 20ft and $1,000 on a 40ft, which is exactly the number Hapag-Lloyd filed for a 40ft a week later. Two carriers, independently, landing on $1,000 per 40ft. That is either a coincidence or a benchmark, and I would not bet on the coincidence. But it is an assumption, and surcharge tariffs have been known to define the unit in ways that do not match the container in your yard. Confirm it in writing before you build anything on it.

If the assumption holds, the June 40ft peak season surcharge table on this trade reads like this: CMA CGM $1,000 from 1 June, Hapag-Lloyd $1,000 from 8 June, Maersk $600 from 10 June. The spread between the dearest and the cheapest is $400 per 40ft. On 10 boxes a month that is $4,000 a month and $12,000 a quarter, purely from which carrier you put the box on.

Do not read that as a carrier ranking. It is the surcharge only. Base rates on this trade differ by carrier and I have no published base for three of the four, only MSC's $2,820 and $4,700 going to $3,000 and $6,000. Comparing $600 against $1,000 without the base underneath is how people end up on the wrong carrier. Get all-in numbers for both box sizes from all four, in writing, before you move a single box for $400.

Now the MSC filing, which is the interesting one because it is not a surcharge at all. The 20ft goes from $2,820 to $3,000, a step of $180, which is 6.4 percent. The 40ft goes from $4,700 to $6,000, a step of $1,300, which is 27.7 percent. Those are not the same increase, and the gap between them is not small. The 40ft is being repriced about 4.3 times harder than the 20ft, in percentage terms, in the same announcement on the same trade.

Divide one by the other and the reason shows up. Before 15 June the 40ft sits at 1.67 times the 20ft. From 15 June it sits at exactly 2.00 times. The ratio itself moved, and it moved to a round number. Somebody decided that a 40ft should cost precisely two 20ft boxes, and priced accordingly.

Work out what that does to your box mix. Before the change, two 20ft boxes cost $5,640 against one 40ft at $4,700, so the 40ft saved you $940 on the freight line. From 15 June, two 20ft boxes cost $6,000 and one 40ft costs $6,000. The saving is gone. Not reduced, gone. If your routing logic, your loading plan or your customer quotes still assume the 40ft is the cheap way to buy space per cubic metre, that assumption expired on 15 June.

Check the same thing per unit of volume to make sure it is not an artefact of the box count. Assume a 40ft gives you roughly twice the usable volume of a 20ft, which is the usual planning rule and close enough for this purpose. Before the change, one 20ft-equivalent of volume in a 40ft costs 4,700 divided by 2, which is $2,350, against $2,820 in a 20ft: the 40ft is cheaper by $470. After the change, 6,000 divided by 2 is $3,000 against $3,000. Identical. The $940 gap and the $470 gap are the same fact viewed from two ends, and both of them close on 15 June.

So re-dimension the book, and do it before the second half of the month rather than after. For every 40ft you ship, test the same shipment as two 20ft boxes at $3,000 each. On the freight line they are now equal. Everything after that is a tie-break, and the tie-breaks mostly run against splitting.

Count the tie-breaks honestly. Two boxes mean two bookings, two terminal handling charges, two documentation fees, two customs lines and two sets of any fixed per-box fee in your tariff. I do not know your numbers, so use your own: pull the fixed per-box charges off last month's invoice, add them to both sides, and see which way it falls. If those fixed charges are more than the freight difference and the freight difference is now zero, the answer is to stay on 40ft, and the arithmetic will tell you so in about ten minutes.

The other tie-break runs the other way. Two boxes give you two chances to sail, two discharge points if your destination network allows it, and two smaller units to fit into a tight delivery slot. If part of your book is being held back by delivery windows rather than by cost, splitting has a value that does not show up on the freight line. Price that separately and do not let it contaminate the freight comparison.

There is one more test worth running on the split, and it is the one that actually flips the answer for some commodities. If your cargo is heavy rather than bulky, the constraint is payload, not volume. Two 20ft boxes carry two payload allowances against one 40ft allowance, and at the same money from 15 June that is free capacity. Check your own weight data and confirm the allowances with your carrier before you count it, because tare weights and road limits vary, but on heavy cargo this is the case where splitting wins outright rather than on a tie-break.

Now the question that decides more money than any of the above, and it is the same boring one every time. MSC's filing is dated by period: 1 to 14 June at $2,820 and $4,700, 15 to 30 June at $3,000 and $6,000. Which date puts you in which period? The booking date, the sailing date or the bill of lading date? Assume you book on 12 June for a vessel sailing 17 June. On a booking-date reading you pay $4,700. On a sailing-date or bill-of-lading reading you pay $6,000. On a 40ft that is $1,300, and on 10 boxes it is $13,000. One email settles it and nobody sends it.

Size the quarter on the MSC numbers, because they are the only complete set we have. Assume 10 40ft boxes a month. At $4,700 every month the quarter is $141,000. Assume June splits evenly, five boxes at $4,700 and five at $6,000, giving $53,500 for the month, then July and August at $6,000 each, $60,000 each. The quarter comes to $173,500. The difference is $32,500 on ten boxes a month, and roughly half of it lands in July and August rather than June.

Translate that into the unit your commercial people argue about. Assume a 40ft holds 4,000 units. The MSC step of $1,300 is $0.325 a unit. The Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM 40ft surcharge of $1,000 is $0.25 a unit. The Maersk 40ft surcharge of $600 is $0.15 a unit. Now the 20ft, at half the volume, so assume 2,000 units: the $500 surcharge is $0.25 a unit, the $300 surcharge is $0.15 a unit, and MSC's $180 step is $0.09 a unit. Six numbers, one trade, two weeks. Notice what they do: the two surcharges cost the same per unit whether you ship a 20ft or a 40ft, $0.25 and $0.15, because they scale with box size.

MSC's step does not scale, it costs $0.09 a unit in a 20ft and $0.325 a unit in a 40ft, which is 3.6 times as much, and that is the same fact as the ratio moving from 1.67 to 2.00, seen from the cost side. If your margin on this lane is thinner than $0.325 a unit after everything else, the MSC filing has just made the lane unprofitable at the old selling price and that is a pricing conversation, not a logistics one.

Then the contract question, and for this particular wave it is sharper than usual. Three carriers added a surcharge on top of base. One moved the base. If your agreement fixes the base and passes through named surcharges, the three PSS filings are almost certainly yours and the MSC move may sit outside the pass-through list entirely, because it is not a surcharge. If your agreement is all-in, the reverse: the carrier eats what it filed, in both cases, until the next round. Same trade, same month, opposite answers depending on which mechanism your carrier chose. Read the clause before you forecast either way.

And if any part of your rate is linked to a published index, ask whoever owns that contract how the index treats a base reset against a filed surcharge. Some assessments capture one and not the other, some capture both, and the difference shows up as a lag you did not budget for. I am not going to guess which applies to you. Somebody at your company has the contract, and it takes them an afternoon.

Step back and look at what four carriers filing on one trade inside a fortnight actually tells you. It tells you they are not competing on price this month, and the filings say they expect elevated rates to hold deep into the third quarter. That is their conviction, not your forecast, and carriers have been wrong before. But it is free information about the next round. If you are going to fix anything, fix it before the July filings rather than after, because a fixed rate agreed on 20 June is priced against a different market than one agreed on 20 July.

Budget on that basis. Take $6,000 per 40ft as the working assumption for the second half rather than $4,700, and $3,000 per 20ft rather than $2,820. On the 10 boxes a month above, that is the difference between a $173,500 quarter and a $141,000 one. If you budget the lower number and spend the higher one, the variance lands in September and it will not be a surprise to anybody except finance.

Now the alternatives, and the traps.

Pulling cargo forward is the first lever and it is the only one with a hard expiry. Three windows: Hapag-Lloyd boxes out by 7 June, worth $1,000 a box; Maersk boxes out by 9 June, worth $600 a box; MSC boxes out by 14 June, worth $1,300 a box. On 10 40ft boxes those are $10,000, $6,000 and $13,000 respectively. Nothing else you do this month has that kind of return for that little effort, provided the cargo is actually ready.

The trap in pulling forward is not the freight, it is everything downstream. Assume pulling forward means the goods sit at destination for two to three extra weeks. Assume your destination warehousing charges a known rate per cubic metre per week. Take 10 boxes at roughly 60 cubic metres each, 600 cubic metres, times three weeks, times your rate, and compare against the $13,000. If the holding cost is lower, pull forward. If it is higher, pay the filing. That is the whole decision and it is per shipment, not per policy.

There is a second trap in pulling forward that catches people who plan in units rather than in readiness. A box you pull forward has to be packed, documented and released before an earlier cut-off, and sales will happily agree to a date they cannot hit. Ask one question before you move anything: is this cargo physically ready, and is the paperwork ready with it? A box that misses the earlier cut-off achieves nothing except a late booking and a wasted afternoon.

Re-dimensioning is the second lever and it is the one that keeps paying after June. From 15 June a 40ft costs exactly two 20ft boxes on the MSC tariff, so the 40ft discount is gone and the choice is a genuine choice for the first time in a while. Run it per commodity, since volume-limited cargo stays on 40ft and weight-limited cargo may not. Do not run it as a blanket rule, because the answer flips within a single product range.

The trap in re-dimensioning is equipment. Two 20ft boxes need two pieces of equipment, two bookings and two slots on a service that may be tight. If you switch a whole book from 40ft to 20ft and the yard is short of 20ft boxes, you have traded a freight question for a space question. Ask your carrier what the equipment position looks like on your service before you commit, and phase the change over two or three sailings rather than one.

Carrier mix is the third lever, and here the honest answer is that you do not yet have enough of the picture to use it. You have one carrier's complete base rate and three carriers' surcharges. That is not a comparison, it is half a comparison. The $400 per 40ft gap between Maersk's $600 and the other two at $1,000 is real and worth $4,000 a month on 10 boxes, but it is only decisive if the base rates are close, and you do not know whether they are. Get the all-in quotes first and decide after.

The fourth lever is the one nobody likes, which is not shipping. A $1,300 step on a 40ft is a real cost against inventory you may not need until the fourth quarter. Assume a box holds 4,000 units of a line turning three times a year. One thousand three hundred across 4,000 units is $0.325 a unit of one-off cost on stock that will sit. If the carrying cost plus the margin risk on that stock is less than $0.325 a unit, ship it; if not, leave it. Nobody ever got promoted for not shipping, which is roughly why so much of it happens in peak season.

Documentation is where July's arguments come from. Four carriers, two mechanisms, four effective dates, two box sizes, and one trade. When the invoice lands and it is $13,000 over plan on ten boxes, the only thing that settles it is a written quote naming the base, each surcharge, its amount, its unit and its trigger date. Ask for all of it now, per carrier, per box size. Assume it takes your forwarder two days and saves you two weeks of arguing later.

One more trap, specific to this wave. Because three carriers filed a surcharge and one moved a base, a comparison done on surcharges alone will make MSC look like it did nothing. It did not do nothing. It moved a 40ft base by $1,300, which is more than any single surcharge in this batch. Any spreadsheet with a column called surcharge and no column called base rate will rank these four carriers wrongly, and the error is $1,300 a box in the wrong direction.

Then there is the internal reporting problem, which is the same every year. Increases that arrive as a surcharge get coded to freight and blended into a rate. Increases that arrive as a base reset get blended even faster, because they look like the rate. If you want to know next quarter what this quarter cost you, split them: one code for peak season surcharges, one for base rate movements. One clean month on those two lines tells you more about your exposure than any composite index anybody publishes.

Where I land on this one. The three surcharges are survivable, and the ladder of effective dates gives you three to ten days to act on each of them. The MSC base reset is the one that will cost the most and get the least attention, because it does not have the word surcharge on it and because it quietly removed the 40ft discount that half your loading plans were built on. Confirm the TEU question on the CMA CGM filing, confirm the trigger date on the MSC period, and get all-in quotes for both box sizes from all four carriers. Those three things, in that order, before 15 June.

Freight budgets are rarely destroyed by the charge with the loudest name. They are destroyed by the base rate that moved while everybody was watching the surcharge, which is a very old trick and it still works.

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— By Vivian Zhao