Port profile · Long Beach, California · USLGB · figures read 07/26–07/29/2026
Port of Long Beach cannot be ranked against Port of Los Angeles from the figures either of them publishes, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. Long Beach gives 4,829,578 TEU for the first half of 2026, up 1.7%; Los Angeles gives 10,239,318 TEU for calendar 2025. A half-year and a full year are not comparable, and reading the smaller number as second place is reading half a year as a year.
Two other superlatives get attached to this port and belong elsewhere. Port of Houston is first on foreign waterborne tonnage, a measure that counts liquid and bulk. And the largest complex in the country is San Pedro Bay, which is two ports rather than one. The coast, compared on what can actually be compared: the West Coast ports compared.
Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles statistics · read 07/26/2026.
Port of Long Beach free time is written by your carrier, not by the harbour department, and the one tariff we have read on the hour starts the count at 3:00 AM: Maersk begins at the first 3:00 AM after discharge at both San Pedro Bay ports.
Port of Long Beach itself may publish a free-time rule, and we have not located one. That is a statement about our reading rather than about the port, and it is deliberately a weaker cell than the one on the Los Angeles page, where the port’s own Tariff No. 4 was found in the results and left unopened. Found-but-unread and never-located are different findings and they render differently here.
How this profile is built · what we are paid
Container discharged at Long Beach · Maersk starts the count at the first 3:00 AM after discharge
| Whose tariff | Scope | The clock starts | Source · read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia Ports Authority | Savannah, Rule 34-025 | first 12:01 AM after discharge | GPA Rule 34-025 · read 07/26/2026 |
| Maersk | Los Angeles and Long Beach imports | first 3:00 AM after discharge | Maersk, USA Imports · read 07/26/2026 |
| Seaboard Marine | US imports | first 08:00 of the first working day after discharge | Seaboard Marine, 11/05/2024 · read 07/26/2026 |
Port of Long Beach costs a median $280 for the first paid day of carrier demurrage across the eight all-in lines we read, against $275 at Los Angeles. Two dollars apart is noise. The ceilings are not: $330 here against $300 there, and both of the dearest first-paid-day lines in the entire nine-tariff set are named Long Beach terminals.
Three of the nine carriers publish no comparable Long Beach line at all, and each declines in a different way: COSCO gives a tier structure with $375 on days 10 and 30 and no separate first day, MSC publishes no general rate at LBCT and passes the terminal’s charge through at cost, and Yang Ming bills line demurrage only at Long Beach PCT. All three are shown below as findings rather than dropped as blanks.
What a 40-foot import container picks up at Long Beach, and how much of it we can price
Medians on this site are rounded to the dollar; the thirteen rows counted here give exactly $295. The same stack ranked across every port: the cost stack ranked port by port.
Demurrage: nine US import demurrage tariffs · read 07/28–08/01/2026. Drayage: vendor range, no sample size — gap F.
| Charge at Long Beach | Billed by | Owed by | The document that sets it | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carrier demurrage | Ocean carrier | Consignee or the counterparty named on the invoice, not both | the carrier’s US import tariff | $295 median, $165–$370nine US import demurrage tariffs · read 07/28–08/01/2026 |
| Carrier demurrage at LBCT, MSC | Marine terminal operator, through the carrier | Cargo interest | the terminal’s own charge, passed through at cost | not publishedMSC publishes no general rate here; LBCT is among its fifteen named terminals |
| Terminal storage | Marine terminal operator | Cargo interest, usually via the carrier | the terminal’s tariff | not checked yetgap A |
| Terminal handling | Ocean carrier | Whoever the Incoterm assigns | the carrier’s tariff, by port | not checked yet |
| Drayage | Motor carrier | Cargo interest | a quote, not a published tariff | not publishedvendors quote $400–$900 with no sample size — gap F |
| Port traffic fee | Port of Long Beach | Motor carrier, passed through | the port’s own notice, which we did not find | found, not reada post dated 08/01/2026 reports an increase of 4.77%; we could not confirm it against the port |
Nine US import demurrage tariffs · read 07/28–07/29/2026. MSC US tariff, February 2026.
Port of Long Beach terminals are what the tariffs actually price here. Three of them carry a rate of their own in the documents we read, and the swing between berths inside San Pedro Bay is larger than the difference between the two ports: how los angeles and long beach actually differ.
| Terminal as the tariff names it | Whose tariff | First paid day | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| ITS / STEVED | Hapag-Lloyd | $330 | the dearest first paid day in the whole nine-tariff set |
| ITS Long Beach (USLGB02) | ONE | $315 | the second dearest — both are Long Beach berths |
| LBCT | MSC | not published | the terminal’s own charge, passed through at cost |
| TTI · SSA Terminal A · APM · WBT | HMM | $210 | a bay-wide group in the tariff; which of the four sit in Long Beach rather than Los Angeles is not something we separated from a source |
| Long Beach PCT | Yang Ming | not applicable | line demurrage only — the terminal bills storage separately |
nine US import demurrage tariffs · read 07/28–08/01/2026
Port of Long Beach has one dwell figure that was read and three live dashboards that were not. The read one is rail dwell: 5.06 days in April 2026 against 4.41 in March, from a trade association with its measure and its period attached. The figure the market quotes for this port — about four days — comes with no definition of what is being measured.
| Figure | What it measures | Status of the number |
|---|---|---|
| 5.06 days | rail dwell, April 2026, against 4.41 in March | read, with its measure and periodPacific Merchant Shipping Association, reported 05/20/2026 |
| about 4 days | quoted without saying what is counted | consensus, no primary documentsearch results · read 07/26/2026 |
| found, not read | the Operations Dashboard at the port’s own site | located, not openedgap E |
| found, not read | the Cargo Operations Dashboard at Los Angeles, which covers the same bay | located, not openedgap E |
| found, not read | the trade association’s own live panel | located, not openedgap E |
Three live panels cover one bay and define dwell three different ways, which is the whole reason no dwell number from this page enters a ranking column.
Port of Long Beach local charges are the thinnest part of this profile, and one row of it is a sighting rather than a figure: a post dated 08/01/2026 reports the port traffic fee rising 4.77%. Both the date and the percentage are there, and the port’s own notice is not — so it is shown, marked and never summed into anything.
| Fee | Port | Amount | Who pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Port traffic fee increase | Long Beach | found, not readreported as 4.77% on 08/01/2026; the port’s own notice was not found and a social post is not a tariff source | not checked yet |
| The rest of the fee schedule | Long Beach | not checked yetgap J | not checked yet |
| Clean Truck Fund rate | Los Angeles, for contrast | $10 per TEU · $20 over 20 ftPort of Los Angeles · read 07/26/2026 | Motor carrier, passed through |
Port of Long Beach publishes actively on volume and left us with nothing on cost. Its own site holds six of the twenty-three positions across this port’s queries and eleven of the twenty-three results carry a date, which is better dating than most of this subject manages — and the tariff cell below is still empty, because we never located the document at all.
| What an importer needs | Published? | Read by us? |
|---|---|---|
| Container volume, dated | Yes — half-year figure with its period | readread 07/26/2026 |
| A monthly TEU series | not checked yetgap D | not checked yet |
| A live operations feed | Yes — Operations Dashboard | found, not read |
| The port’s own tariff | not checked yetnever located — gap B | not checked yet |
| Free time in days | not checked yetgap B | carrier tariffs read insteadnine US import demurrage tariffs · read 07/28–08/01/2026 |
| A local fee schedule | not checked yetgap J | found, not readone reported increase, unconfirmed |
| Dwell with a definition | found, not readthe dashboard — gap E | not checked yet |
| Gate hours and appointment systems | not checked yetgap H | not checked yet |
| Confirmed 2 of 8 · found but not read 3 · not checked yet 3. The comparison worth making is with Los Angeles, whose tariff at least ranks in its own results: the same cell there says found, not read, and here it says never located. | ||
Every port we cover, with the same eight questions asked of each: every US container port we cover.
Port of Long Beach shares its inland routes with Los Angeles: the basin by road, the Midwest by rail. The road leg is the line this site cannot price at any port, and what circulates for San Pedro Bay is a vendor range with no sample behind it.
| Destination | How the box moves | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| The Los Angeles basin | road, same day | not publishedvendors quote $400–$900 with no sample size — gap F |
| Chicago and the Midwest | rail from the bay, then road | not publishedgap F |
| Dallas–Fort Worth and Memphis | rail, then road | not publishedgap F |
Which port an inland market should actually import through is a different question from which port is cheapest to enter: which port your chicago cargo should enter through, which port your dallas cargo should enter through, which port your memphis cargo should enter through, which port your midwest cargo should enter through. What the road leg costs from each port, and why the column is empty: what the road leg costs from each port.
A call switched from a Los Angeles berth to a Long Beach one can move the first paid day from $165 to $370 with the same carrier and the same box.
Cargo interest, and the difference is not negotiable after the fact.
Your box lands somewhere else and the tariff that applies is the one where it actually landed — which in this bay may be a different rate from the same carrier.
Who pays depends on the cause: the carrier for its own schedule change, the shipper for a late gate-in.
A shipping-lane crisis on the other side of the world shows up here as a call that does not happen. It is named as a class of event that moves schedules, not as a forecast about any lane.
The carrier’s terms decide, and they are the terms of your bill of lading rather than the port’s.
Charges do not stop accruing because nobody collects the box.
The named consignee, and the liability survives the abandonment.
When the ship skips your port, in detail: when the ship skips your port.
Port of Long Beach demurrage arrives on a carrier’s invoice, not the port’s, and that invoice answers to a federal rule: 46 CFR Part 541, in force since 05/28/2024. The rule has been before the D.C. Circuit twice since, and the decision of 09/29/2025 changed who may be billed — so the text to read is the current one at eCFR, not a summary of the 2024 announcement.
Descriptive, not legal advice. The tariff and the invoice in your own file govern your case.
Port of Long Beach shares its harbour basket with Los Angeles, and 95 organisations in the Federal Maritime Commission’s register of ocean transportation intermediaries give an address in it — a basket of five place names: the two port cities together with San Pedro, Wilmington and Terminal Island. That is a count of addresses and not a port count: the register carries an organisation’s address, not the port it works through.
FMC OTI register download · read 07/28/2026.
How each status is defined and what it may be used for, plus the corrections log: how every figure here is sourced.
A median of $280 for the first paid day across the eight tariff lines we read, ranging from $165 to $370. The answer above these results gives $65 to $1,500 and over: the low end is a Florida rate and the high end appears in none of the nine tariffs we read.
4,829,578 TEU in the first half of 2026, up 1.7%. The quick answer gives that same figure with no period attached, and the period is what makes it comparable to anything else.
The rows are not comparable: calendar 2025 for Los Angeles against the first half of 2026 for Long Beach. The port's own headlines disagree with each other inside a single quarter, and not one of them names the period it measures.
About four days is the consensus of the results, given without a definition. Three live dashboards cover this one bay and none of them has been read here. The one figure read is rail dwell of 5.06 days in April 2026 against 4.41 in March.
Under your carrier's tariff rather than a port rule: eight of the nine carriers publish a number of days, and Maersk starts the count at 3:00 AM at Los Angeles and Long Beach. The port authority's own free-time rule has not been read here.
The terminal. Hapag-Lloyd charges $330 at ITS/STEVED while HMM charges $210 at four named terminals in the same bay — a 22% swing on the first paid day, decided by where the service calls.
No. Two ports in one bay, two authorities and two sets of tariff lines. The medians are two dollars apart and the ceilings are thirty dollars apart, which is the part that decides an invoice.
A post dated August 2026 reports a local traffic fee rising 4.77%. We could not find the port's own notice, so the row is marked as found and not read rather than published as a figure.