Port congestion right now, at 44 ports and 12 chokepoints

How to read this

• Status. Five words, LOW to CRITICAL, from the port's current reading. A dash means there is no reading, and the words after it say why.
• Exceptions. A note after the status means that port was measured differently or less recently than the rest.
• Last scan. When the vessel positions behind the statuses were read, shown once above each table.
• Weather and natural disruption. A weather note follows the status only when weather at the location reads ELEVATED or higher, or could not be read. A natural disruption note follows only when an active earthquake, storm, flood or volcano is near.

What port congestion looks like from a forwarder's desk

Congestion shows up as ships holding at anchor or drifting outside the port while the berths stay full. For a forwarder that means later berthing, later gate-out, longer dwell, and demurrage and detention clocks that start before the box moves. Checking the destination port before you quote a transit time, and again when the vessel is a day out, is the cheapest hedge there is.

How to use the statuses

NORMAL means the port has its usual number of vessels waiting. ELEVATED means more are waiting than is usual for that port; expect berthing delays and tighter trucking windows. HIGH and CRITICAL mean many more vessels are waiting than is usual for that port; look at alternative discharge ports, pull container releases forward, and tell the customer now rather than later. LOW means fewer vessels are waiting than is usual for that port. Every status is relative to the port's own history, so a port that is always busy is not called congested for being busy.

How chokepoints are read

A chokepoint has no berths to wait for, so it is read two ways: ships moving through the passage and ships holding in it, and the status follows whichever reading is further from that passage's own baseline. When carriers divert, as they have around the Red Sea, transits through one passage fall and transits around another rise, and both show here as a change from baseline. Where a passage has too little history for the holding reading, the status says transit only.

Where the statuses come from, and what this page does not do

Statuses come from vessel positions read around the clock at every monitored port and passage, each compared against that location's own history. When positions are missing, or a port has no usable history yet, the page says so instead of showing a status. This page does not track individual vessels or containers and does not report berth or terminal queues. For shipment-level tracking with port and chokepoint risk on the route, see Avizor, the SupplyMaven platform for freight forwarders.