Why Schedule Reliability Dropped to 61.9% for China-US Ocean Freight
If you’ve spent the previous few months chasing a container across the Pacific, you know the feeling. A ship that was due to dock on a Tuesday arrives the following Monday. A rolled cargo is secretly converted from a booking confirmation. That cargo-ready date that was comfy back in April is looking rather tight by June. This is all familiar territory for ocean freight, but the enormity of it in mid-2026 is worth pausing over.
Latest Global Liner Performance data from Sea-Intelligence shows global schedule reliability dropped to 62.6 percent in June 2026, with carrier performance on the Asia to North America Eastbound trade specifically running a shade below that benchmark, with around 61.9 percent once the weaker-performing services on the lane are taken into account. It’s not a catastrophic collapse, but it is a major step back from the improving trend the sector had been experiencing earlier in the year, and it’s happening at the exact period importers most need predictability coming into peak season. This article explains what the data really shows, why this particular China-US route is under pressure right now, and what shippers can do to help.
A Trade Lane Under Pressure Again
For extended stretches since 2020, the transpacific eastbound lane has often been anything but quiet and 2026 has continued much the same, two steps forward, one step back. The first quarter of the year began on a rather bad note, then dropped further in February before moving progressively higher through March, April and May as carriers worked through winter backlogs and alliance networks settled into more predictable rotations. For most major airlines, May was the best month of the year for reliability, with Maersk registering a 78.2 percent on-time rating and Hapag-Lloyd not far behind at 76.0 percent.
June snuffed out that momentum. Global reliability was down 1.9 percentage points month over month to 62.6 percent, the second best result of the year in absolute terms but a reversal still and 4.7 percentage points behind where the industry was in June a year ago. Interestingly, the average delay recorded for vessels that did arrive late improved marginally, to 5.31 days from a higher figure the month before. Or, put another way, fewer sailings missed their allotted window, even as the ones that missed it did not miss by quite as much. That’s a fine but significant distinction for anyone trying to build in buffer time to a supply chain plan.
On-time performance has been tracking a bit softer than the global average, particularly on the China-US corridor, which accounts for a disproportionate share of the congestion, tariff-driven demand swings, and canal-related rerouting that are currently impacting global shipping. The disconnect between the headline global number and the reality on the ground at the lane level is precisely why one global percentage might be misleading to anyone actually moving freight out of Shenzhen, Ningbo or Shanghai bound for Los Angeles, Long Beach or the East Coast gateways.
Чтение цифр
It’s better to look at the trend month to month instead of one snap shot. The following table follows global schedule reliability through the first half of 2026 based on Sea-Intelligence’s Global Liner Performance reports.
| Месяц (2026) | Global Schedule Reliability | Изменение по сравнению с предыдущим месяцем |
| январь | 62.4% | Starting point for the year |
| февраль | 59.0% | -3.4 процентных пункта |
| март | Joint-highest for the year to date | Recovery from February |
| апрель | 62.4% | +0.4 процентных пункта |
| май | Highest monthly reading of 2026 | Продолжение улучшения |
| июнь | 62.6% | -1.9 процентных пункта |
The shape of the curve speaks for itself. Reliability bottomed in February, mostly due to Lunar New Year disruption and a longer ramp-up of factories, then rebuilt through spring as production normalises and carriers find their rhythm. That recovery was halted by the June retreat just as the sector was about to enter the tightest phase of the shipping calendar. That’s part of the reason this particular slump has received so much attention from forwarders and importers alike.
Carrier Performance Diverges Sharply
| Перевозчик | June 2026 Schedule Reliability |
| Maersk | 77.1% |
| Hapag-Lloyd | 75.6% |
| MSC | 72.1% |
| CMA CGM | Диапазон 60-70% |
| Eight other major carriers | Диапазон 50-60% |
| Ван Хай | 35.6% (lowest of the top 13) |
What is remarkable is how large the dispersion has become. In June, only three of the top thirteen carriers were above the 70 percent level and only one was in the 60s. The other nine were spread between the 50s and well below even that in the case of Wan Hai. Only two carriers actually improved from month to month, with ZIM recording the highest gain at 0.8 percentage points. All the rest fell back.
For shippers, the practical point is that booking with a top-tier carrier doesn’t necessarily mean a reliable transport as it could have a year or two ago. Even the most robust timetables take some disturbance when congestion, weather and capacity discipline impact the entire trade channel at the same time. Carrier selection still matters, but it is no longer adequate.
Why Reliability Slipped Below 62 Percent
There is no single factor for the June downturn. It’s essentially three different forces converging on the same trade corridor in the same few weeks, intensifying each other.
Typhoon Season Meets Port Congestion in China
Typhoon Bavi led to the temporary closure of several of China’s biggest ports in July, and the knock-on consequences are still being felt weeks later. Ships queued in Shanghai and Ningbo for berths to restart, Qingdao experienced lineups lasting for days, and secondary delays rippled out to ports in Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines as the regional network absorbed the backlog.
Some carriers, in response, chose to bypass planned port calls completely and re-route that cargo through transhipment hubs. This fixes one problem, but often introduces another, since transshipped boxes usually incur additional dwell time at an intermediary hub. A separate issue for goods passing through European ports occurred when a hazardous gas leak briefly shut down terminal operations in Antwerp, a reminder that reliability on one trade path is rarely isolated from interruptions on another.
The Tariff Deadline Rush
A 10 percent Section 122 extra charge has been imposed on a range of covered imported products booked for consumption between late February and July 24, 2026, and that deadline has been influencing booking behaviour for months. Importers with production schedule flexibility pulled cargo forward to clear customs before the window closed and the volume data backs that up: containerised imports from China rose roughly 27.4 percent year over year in June even as total U.S. import volume for the first half of the year was only slightly softer than 2025.
The pull-forward effect constricted an already tight network of vessels. Rates from the Far East to the U.S. West Coast jumped 7 percent in a week at the end of June and was up about 91 percent above year-ago levels. Some eastbound services had peak season fees, which normally don’t come until later in the summer, pop up far in advance. When demand gets front-loaded thus aggressively, schedule integrity is frequently the first thing to go.
Canal Bottlenecks and Capacity Discipline
The transpacific trade is not a separate entity in the global network. East-west trades have remained capacity constrained overall because to draft limits at the Panama Canal, new Suez Canal surcharges from mid-July and persistent Red Sea diversion risk with carriers reallocating tonnage in response. That reshuffling has ripple effects on vessels and schedules serving China-US lines, even when the disruption is happening somewhere else totally.
Meanwhile, several carriers have been aggressively controlling capacity to ensure utilisation is near full on every sailing, with general rate hikes announced for the start of the month on just about every U.S. and Canadian destination pathway. Running near-full ships is good for carrier economics, but it offers little scheduling cushion to absorb a late arrival, a missed connection or a weather delay without the disturbance cascading into the following string of sailings.
Note that none of these three forces is entirely new in itself. Every summer, typhoons hit southern China; tariff deadlines have come and gone before; and canal limits have been a part of world shipping since the Red Sea diversions began. Timing overlap is the difference with mid-2026. By themselves, each issue could have cost reliability a point or two. Coming in the same few weeks, they added up to a loss sharp enough to wipe out months of steady improvement.
Which Ports Are Feeling It Most
The strain is not evenly distributed among all the gateways along the China-US corridor. Congestion on the origin side has been focused at the ports that have been most affected by the typhoon disruption and pressure on the destination side has been growing wherever pull-forward volumes are arriving fastest.
Shanghai and Ningbo were the most affected by vessel bunching after Typhoon Bavi, as both ports have enough weekly sailings to produce a backlog that takes days to clear, even with a short shutdown. The multi-day waits in Qingdao were not so much the result of the storm, but vessels being diverted to Qingdao after other port calls were ignored, so volume was pushed into a port that was not necessarily expecting it. Ports on the West Coast like Los Angeles and Long Beach have fared relatively better with the extra load than East Coast ports, partially because all-water services to the East Coast are more susceptible to the same canal limitations already constricting worldwide capacity.
That difference isn’t just theoretical for a shipper deciding between a West Coast or East Coast routeing right now. An average West Coast entrance point, combined with rail or trucking to inland destinations, is now taking on less schedule risk than an all-water East Coast routeing, mainly because there is one less chokepoint between the factory and the final delivery address.
What This Means for Importers and Exporters
A reliability number of little under 62 percent means a rather brutal reality: about two out of every five shipments on this channel are arriving outside their original schedule right now. If you run a firm on minimal inventory or you’re locked into a fixed retail schedule, that’s not a rounding error – that’s a planning problem.
The expense of a missed window is typically more than the freight bill itself. If a shipment of seasonal products clears customs after the selling season is over, it can cost significantly more in markdowns and missed sales than it would have cost to expedite the cargo in the first place. Same logic for Amazon FBA replenishment cycles, retail promo launches and manufacturing lines that rely on components showing up on a precise date, not sometime during a 2 week span.
In practice, this means we cease taking reported travel times as a promise, and start treating them as a baseline. In a scenario like this, things like building in buffer days, retaining a tiny safety stock of important items, and remaining in close communication with a forwarder who is observing the situation in real time, all of a sudden matter more than they did when reliability was consistently sitting above 75 percent industry-wide.
How Topway Shipping Helps Clients Stay on Schedule
And this is the environment for which Topway Shipping has been built to function. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Shenzhen, the company serves cross-border e-commerce and traditional importers and was established by a team with more than fifteen years of combined expertise in international logistics and customs clearance, with a long-standing focus primarily on the China-U.S. hallway.
Topway Shipping handles the entire logistical chain instead of handling a single aspect of the journey, including first-leg transportation from the factory or supplier, to overseas складирование, customs clearance and last mile delivery to the final destination. This end-to-end structure is most valuable when disruption strikes. A delay at any single point—a port closure in China, a customs bottleneck in the U.S., a warehouse backlog—can be absorbed and managed within one cohesive operation, rather than being lost between multiple disparate vendors.
Topway Shipping has a flexible approach to ocean freight, offering FCL and LCL services from China to all major ports in the world, allowing shippers to be flexible as conditions change. This could be shifting a booking to a different sailing during typhoon season, splitting a shipment between FCL and LCL depending on the urgency of different SKUs, or rerouting through an alternate gateway when canal congestion or capacity discipline is squeezing a particular corridor. In a market where reliability is around 62 percent, that sort of flexibility built in is often what makes the difference between a delivery on time and one that is not.
Just as crucial, the fact that we work as a team that has spent more than a decade focused only on this corridor means that the counsel clients receive is based in the day-to-day realities of the trade lane, as opposed to generic advice that could apply to any route. Knowing what ports are taking the most congestion at the moment, which carriers are performing the best on a given string and how the tariff and canal situation is likely to change over the coming weeks all informs the booking recommendations Topway Shipping provides to its clients rather than treating each shipment the same regardless of timing.
Missed windows also have a communication cost that seldom shows up on a freight invoice, but someone’s desk still sees it. Customer service teams handle questions about delivery dates, sales teams shift promotional timing, and finance teams explain why a quarter’s inventory rotations were slower than expected. A schedule reliability % does not reflect any of that but all of it is a direct result of it.
Practical Strategies for the Months Ahead
The one thing importers can do most to adjust right now is book sooner than is strictly required. Generally, it’s the shipments that were confirmed well before the rush that are protected, not those chasing space at the last minute when vessel space is being forced forward by tariff scheduling and squeezed further by weather and capacity discipline.
It is also worth looking at which ships and alliances are truly doing well on a certain lane before allocating volume, as opposed to just picking the moniker that is most recognisable. The difference between the best and worst performers in the present data set is broad enough that carrier choice can make a major contribution to the probability of an on-time arrival, and that picture is changing month to month as networks adapt to new challenges.
Finally, think of the shipping plan as a living document to review periodically, not a one-off choice. Tariff deadlines, canal limits and weather patterns all are dynamic objectives over the remainder of 2026, and a routeing or timing decision that made sense in June might need to be adjusted by August. In times like these, it’s usually better to have a flexible plan and work with a professional forwarding partner, rather than locking something in months ahead.
In such a market, it’s also essential resisting the urge to consider the cheapest quote as the safest one. A somewhat higher charge with a carrier or route that has shown more reliability lately, or with a forwarder who is actively monitoring port and canal conditions for you, will frequently be cheaper when the downstream cost of a missed delivery window is taken into account.
Заключение
The 61.9 percent schedule reliability on the China-US channel is not the result of one bad month or one isolated event. It’s a reflection of the port bottleneck in China induced by the typhoon, a spike in demand that was accelerated by tariffs before the July 24 deadline, and a tightening of global capacity emanating from the canal limits and disciplined vessel utilisation, all hitting the same trade path in just a few weeks. None of these stresses is unique in maritime freight, taken one by one. Together, they go a long way towards explaining why on-time performance has dipped just as the sector enters its busiest stretch of the year.
Importers and exporters can’t wait for reliability to return to normal. They need to plan for the world as it is today: build in buffer time, monitor carrier-level performance rather than relying on brand image alone, and partner with a logistics provider who can adapt a shipment’s routeing when conditions change mid-transit. Partner with a company like Topway Shipping that offers full first leg to last mile coverage and flexible FCL and LCL solutions for China-U.S. corridor, shippers have a practical means to handle this type of volatility instead of just praying it passes quickly.
Часто задаваемые вопросы (FAQ)
Q: What does a schedule reliability of 61.9 percent actually mean for my shipment?
A: This means that, on average across the trade lane, about three out of five sailings arrive within their original scheduled window, and the other two arrive later than expected. That’s a statistical average throughout the lane, not a guarantee for any one booking, so it’s still safer to build in some buffer time.
Q: Which carriers are currently the most reliable on the China-US route?
A: According to the latest statistics from Sea-Intelligence, only Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and MSC managed to achieve schedule reliability above 70 percent, of the top-13 carriers, in June 2026, and therefore were the strongest performers on the lane at this moment, but rankings change from month to month.
Q: Will reliability improve once the July 24 tariff deadline passes?
A: While the pull-forward demand on vessel space could relax somewhat once the deadline is behind the market, typhoon season and canal-related capacity constraints are projected to remain into the third quarter, so a full return to previous levels is not certain in the near future.
Q: How can I reduce the risk of delay for peak season shipments?
A: Book earlier than transit time alone would suggest, include buffer days into your delivery obligations, and stay nearby to your forwarder so routeing or schedule may be modified swiftly if conditions on the ground change.
Q: Does Topway Shipping offer both FCL and LCL options for this route?
A: Yeah. Topway Shipping has supplied customisable full-container-load and less-than-container-load ocean freight services from China to key ports around the world, first-leg transportation, offshore warehousing, customs clearing and last-mile delivery since 2010.
