Transit Times Study
87,080US ocean import shipments from CBP manifest data, scored against each shipment’s own estimated arrival — how late they run, which carriers and lanes run latest, and how long the crossing actually takes.
How late, when late
Every shipment placed in a band. Early and on-time are shown too, so the delayed share is read against the whole, not on its own.
Delays by carrier — all companies
Every carrier in the dataset, ranked by volume.
- Maersk15,3153,074 late
- MSC9,6315,845 late
- ONE8,8622,274 late
- CMA CGM8,2905,448 late
- Zim7,8073,003 late
- Hapag Lloyd6,5782,353 late
- Evergreen6,5091,206 late
- HMM4,2213,547 late
- COSCO3,4431,713 late
- Wan Hai Lines3,0783,011 late
- HEDE Shipping2,3910 late
- Kuehne + Nagel1,9961,711 late
Delays by vessel — all companies
The 12 busiest of 439 named ships. Vessel names arrived with the latest pull, so this covers 24,516 of 87,080 shipments rather than all of them.
- Gerd Maersk78922 late
- Ain Snan Express72759 late
- Madrid Express5000 late
- Ever Mild4510 late
- Maersk Seletar3900 late
- Ym Width35439 late
- Ever Muse344114 late
- Zeal Lumos33023 late
- Good Prospect321321 late
- One Sprinter299161 late
- Conti Conquest29265 late
- Budapest Express279279 late
Delay rate by arrival date
Share of each day’s arrivals that came in late. A single late vessel puts the same delay on every container it carried, so a tall isolated bar is usually one sailing rather than a bad week — the count under each bar is the check on that.
Delays by route — all companies
The 12 busiest lanes of 887.
- Shanghai > Los Angeles, Ca5,4981,205 late
- Yantian > Long Beach, Ca3,670546 late
- Ning Bo > Los Angeles, Ca3,539747 late
- Yantian > Los Angeles, Ca2,620856 late
- Vung Tau > Los Angeles, Ca2,254917 late
- Yangshan > Long Beach, Ca2,230156 late
- Pusan > Tacoma, Wa2,108803 late
- Pusan > Los Angeles, Ca1,857731 late
- Ning Bo > Newark, Nj1,7601,159 late
- Mina Raysut > Newark, Nj1,411681 late
- Colombo Harbor > Newark, Nj1,24424 late
- Hai Phong > Los Angeles, Ca1,243515 late
How these are calculated
A shipment is delayed when its actual arrival is later than the estimated arrival on the same manifest record — so the comparison is against what was expected for that shipment, not against a lane average. Days late is the difference between the two, and averages of it are taken over delayed shipments only; including the on-time ones would dilute severity into something that reads like a small number when it is not.
Shipments that arrive early or exactly on the estimate both count as not delayed, and are shown separately in the distribution above. Companies with 21 or fewer shipments have no page: a delay rate off a handful of boxes moves ten points on one late arrival, which is noise presented as a finding.