Freight markets,
made clear.
Track rates, trade lanes, congestion and market developments through one independent information platform — built for the people who quote, buy and move containers every day.
Everything a forwarder needs to read the market.
Four connected products, one data model. Rates give you the number, Pulse gives you the story, Port Watch gives you the friction, Outlook gives you the direction.
Rates & trade lanes
Spot and contract benchmarks on 240+ port pairs, with 12 months of history, percentile bands and volatility.
Open the explorer →Freight Pulse
The weekly market briefing: what moved, why it moved, and what it means for the quotes on your desk.
Read this week →Port Watch
Waiting times, berth pressure and terminal status across 90+ ports — so delays surface before your customer calls.
Check the ports →Rate Outlook
A 90-day directional view per corridor, with the drivers and scenarios behind it. Stated ranges, not false precision.
See the outlook →Biggest weekly moves.
Week 35, 2026 · spot, 40′ HC, all-in.
| Trade lane | Corridor | Spot 40′ HC | Week | Month | 13-week trend |
|---|
Data you can put in front of a customer.
Every number carries its definition, its sample size and its last update. When you quote against a benchmark, you should be able to say exactly what that benchmark is — and defend it in the meeting afterwards.
Independent of any carrier
No carrier owns a share of the index and no rate is boosted for a commercial partner.
Traceable to the source
Each benchmark shows contributor count, spread and the exact basis of the quote.
Free at the surface
Headline indices, port status and the weekly briefing stay open to everyone. Depth is the paid part.
Latest market analysis.
SeaFreightPrices.com stays an information platform. When a lane turns into a shipment, ContainerBooking.com handles the booking, customs and tracking side.
Every lane, priced and put in context.
Pick a port pair and see the spot benchmark, the contract equivalent, where today's number sits in its 12-month range, and how volatile the lane has been. Sample data shown for demonstration.
All benchmarked lanes.
| Trade lane | Corridor | Transit | Spot 40′ HC | Week | Month | 13-week trend |
|---|
All-in port-to-port benchmarks in USD, excluding local charges at origin and destination unless stated. Sample data for demonstration purposes.
The market, in the ten minutes you have.
Every Tuesday at 07:00 CET: what moved on the lanes you quote, which ports are tightening, and the two or three developments worth acting on this week.
Suez capacity returns just as Golden Week takes demand out
The two forces now setting Asia–Europe are pulling the same way. Containership transits through the canal keep climbing, and the holiday shutdown removes cargo for a fortnight. Carriers are blanking hard against it, and on the North Europe leg it is not proving enough.
- Drewry's composite fell 1% to $4,468 per 40ft on 24 September, reversing the previous week's rise. Shanghai–Rotterdam dropped 4% to $3,485 and Shanghai–Genoa 5% to $3,835.
- Suez containership transits rose to 48 in week 38 from 41 the week before. Drewry expects that returning capacity to outweigh the blanking programme on Asia–Europe, and rates to keep falling.
- Gemini restored four more loops — AE5, AE11, AE12 and ME2 — on 14 September, with the 19,000 TEU Marchen Maersk first onto the rebuilt AE5 on the 21st. MSC, CMA CGM and COSCO have each moved selected services back; Evergreen, ONE, HMM and Yang Ming had not as of 25 September.
- Transpacific is the exception, still firm: Shanghai–Los Angeles up 2% to $7,838, Shanghai–New York broadly flat at $10,373. Carriers announced 15 transpacific blank sailings for the coming week against nine the week before.
- Mid-Autumn Festival ran 25–27 September and Golden Week runs 1–7 October, with three working days between them. Alliances have blanked roughly 13% of planned October capacity on Asia to US and Europe services so far — below the 18% and 21% withdrawn at the same point last year.
- Worth an hour of someone's time: the US Federal Maritime Commission has confirmed there is no three-year limitation period on complaints about detention and demurrage charges assessed on or after 16 June 2022. Old invoices you wrote off may be back in scope.
- Still grinding in the background — German labour disruption and low water on the Rhine on the European side, constrained transit capacity at Panama on the Atlantic one.
Index levels as published by Drewry for 24 September 2026; canal transit counts and blanking figures from Drewry's Container Capacity Insight. Service and regulatory items as reported by gCaptain, 16–24 September 2026.
This week's balance
Composite readings from contributor submissions, booked volume proxies and deployed capacity.
Corridor sentiment
Direction expected over the next four weeks.
Previous issues.
See the friction before it reaches your customer.
Berth waiting times, yard pressure and terminal status across 90+ ports, refreshed daily. When a port turns, you hear it from the data rather than from the complaint.
| Port | Region | Berth wait | Yard utilisation | Week | Status |
|---|
Waiting time measured from arrival at anchorage to first-line ashore, rolling 7-day median. Sample data for demonstration purposes.
A 90-day view, with the reasoning attached.
A stated range and a confidence band per corridor — never a single number pretending to be certain. Every outlook lists the drivers behind it, so you can disagree with the logic rather than the output.
Forecast band
Spot benchmark, 40′ HC, USD · shaded area is the 80% confidence band
The four forces on Q4.
Each driver is scored for direction and weight, and re-scored weekly.
How the numbers are made.
A benchmark is only useful if you can explain it. This is the full basis of every rate, index and status published on SeaFreightPrices.com.
Collection
Rate submissions from forwarders, NVOCCs and shippers, combined with published carrier tariffs and booked-transaction data. Contributors submit under a fixed schema so like is compared with like.
Validation
Outliers beyond three median absolute deviations are quarantined and reviewed by hand. Any lane with fewer than eight independent contributors is published as indicative, and labelled as such.
Publication
Benchmarks are the trimmed mean of the validated sample, published at 08:00 CET each business day with contributor count, spread and revision history attached.
Independence
No carrier, terminal or forwarder holds an ownership stake in the index, and no commercial relationship affects a published number. Contributors can see their own submissions but never another party's. Where a lane is commercially connected to the wider ecosystem, it is disclosed on the lane page itself.
What each term means here.
Start free. Go deeper when you need to.
Headline indices, port status and the weekly briefing are open to everyone. Lane-level history, alerts and the API are where the platform earns its keep.
- All 12 corridor indices
- Port Watch status board
- Freight Pulse weekly briefing
- Insights archive
- 13 weeks of history
- Everything in Open
- All 240+ lanes, spot and contract
- Full 5-year history and CSV export
- Unlimited watched lanes and rate alerts
- Rate Outlook with scenario bands
- Percentile and volatility analytics
- Everything in Professional
- REST and streaming API access
- Custom lane and corridor baskets
- Index embedding in your own quoting tools
- SSO, team seats and audit trail
- Named analyst contact
Pull benchmarks straight into your own systems.
One REST call returns the benchmark, its confidence metadata and the full history for any lane. Rate your quotes against the market inside your own TMS, quoting tool or pricing sheet.
# Latest benchmark for Shanghai → Rotterdam GET https://api.seafreightprices.com/v1/rates ?origin=CNSHA&destination=NLRTM &equipment=40HC&basis=spot { "lane": "CNSHA-NLRTM", "rate_usd": 2480, "change_wow": -0.032, "percentile_12m": 0.31, "contributors": 41, "as_of": "2026-08-26T06:00:00Z" }
Talk to the data team.
Questions about a benchmark, a contributor agreement, API access or a custom lane basket — send a message and we reply within one business day.
Contribute rates
Forwarders who submit weekly get Professional access at no cost. Submissions stay confidential and are never attributed.
Media & research
Indices may be cited with attribution to SeaFreightPrices.com. Charts and underlying series available on request.
ContainerBooking.com handles bookings, customs and tracking.
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