Container Spot Rates Hit Four-Year Highs on Frontloading and Hormuz Disruption
Container spot freight rates jumped again this week, pushing global benchmarks to their highest levels since the pandemic-era peak of 2022. Drewry’s World Container Index rose 9% week-on-week to $4,530 per 40ft container, with gains concentrated on the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades. S&P Global’s Platts Container Index corroborated the move, climbing 80% over the 30 days to June 24 to its highest reading since April 2022.
The transpacific is leading the surge. Shanghai to New York rates climbed 11% to $7,902 per FEU, while Shanghai to Los Angeles rose 10% to $6,349 per FEU. Freightos’ West Coast and East Coast indices moved in the same direction, up 8% on the week to roughly $6,200 and $8,000 per FEU respectively — increases of 120% and 85% since earlier in the year. Drewry has recorded eight blank sailings scheduled on the transpacific for the coming week, evidence that carriers are managing capacity tightly rather than chasing volume with discounted space.
Two forces are compounding each other. The first is frontloading: importers have been pulling cargo forward ahead of a threatened US tariff of 10-12.5% on dozens of countries over forced labor concerns, adding urgency to bookings that would otherwise have been spread more evenly through the summer. The second is the lingering disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, which has kept freight markets on edge even as an interim US-Iran agreement has allowed the strait to reopen and vessel traffic to begin recovering.
Carriers have moved quickly to bank the gains. HMM introduced a $3,000 per 40ft peak season surcharge effective July 15. CMA CGM lifted its Asia-North Europe freight-all-kinds rate to $6,300 per 40ft from July 1, adding a $1,000 per TEU peak season surcharge, with Mediterranean FAK rates reaching as high as $10,200 per 40ft for Algeria-bound cargo. Container analyst Lars Jensen framed the dynamic bluntly: the pandemic taught carriers that pricing can follow supply and demand and does not have to stay tethered to cost — a lesson they appear to be applying again.
The underlying numbers support the pricing power. Linerlytica estimates global teu-mile demand is expanding by 7.3%, comfortably ahead of fleet supply growth of 5.4%, producing the widest demand-supply gap since late 2024. Port congestion has returned in force: nearly 11% of the global containership fleet — roughly 3.7 million TEU — is currently waiting outside ports, the highest level since 2022, with North Asia accounting for 38% of that congestion and North Europe another 13%. Rotterdam alone has export dwell times running to seven days.
The rate strength has already shown up in carrier earnings guidance. Maersk, which only months ago warned investors of a possible underlying EBIT loss of up to $1.5 billion this year, now expects an underlying operating profit of $2 billion to $4 billion, with EBITDA guidance lifted to $8 billion-$10 billion from a prior $4.5 billion-$7 billion range. The company has also raised its full-year global container demand forecast to around 4% growth, up from an earlier 2-4% range.
Whether this holds through the back half of 2026 is the open question. The pattern of the past two years — Red Sea diversions, tariff-driven frontloading, and now Hormuz disruption layered on an early peak season — has produced repeated spikes that eventually gave back their gains once the triggering event passed. The orderbook-to-fleet ratio remains elevated at over 30%, and new deliveries are set to surge again in 2027 and 2028. For now, though, tight capacity, active congestion, and geopolitical risk are all pulling in the same direction, and carriers are pricing accordingly.