Regulators on both coasts are moving to impose new performance standards on major container ports. Shippers and carriers have a narrow window to prepare before penalties begin.
Key Takeaways
The Federal Maritime Commission has spent the better part of two years building the evidentiary record for a rulemaking that the shipping industry has been watching with a mix of anticipation and dread. The trigger is a number that regulators have cited repeatedly in public testimony: $14 billion. That is the estimated annual economic cost of U.S. port congestion in 2025, according to analysis commissioned by the FMC and published in March 2026. It is a figure derived from dwell-time data, vessel idle costs, intermodal delay statistics, and downstream inventory disruption estimates across every major U.S. container gateway. And it is the number that has moved port performance standards from a policy discussion to an active rulemaking with a comment period that closed in April.
"For years, the industry talked about port efficiency as an operational problem for terminals to solve," said a senior logistics director at a major U.S. retailer. "Now it is becoming a regulatory problem with a cost attached, and shippers are going to feel that in ways they have not planned for."
The FMC's proposed performance standard framework, released in February 2026 as an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, would establish minimum dwell-time benchmarks for federally regulated marine terminals at the nation's ten largest container ports. Under the proposal, terminals would be required to clear 90% of import containers within five calendar days of vessel discharge. Terminals failing to meet the standard in any 30-day rolling period would face financial penalties structured on a sliding scale tied to vessel size and delay severity. A terminal missing the benchmark for vessels over 10,000 TEUs by more than two days would face fines beginning at $150,000 per vessel call, with multipliers for repeat violations within a 90-day window. The proposal has drawn pointed responses from the Pacific Maritime Association and the Ocean Carrier Equipment Management Association, both of which argue that dwell-time is not solely within terminal control and that penalizing terminals for shipper-driven delays would create perverse incentives. The FMC acknowledged those objections in its February release but indicated that the final rule would likely include a shipper-attribution mechanism allowing terminals to document and exclude delays caused by late container pickup, incorrect documentation, or customs holds. For shippers, that attribution mechanism carries its own risk: terminals with strong documentation practices could reclassify container dwell as shipper-caused in ways that transfer costs back through the supply chain.
The regulatory framework being developed in Washington is responding to a congestion landscape that looks materially different at the two ends of the country. On the West Coast, the dominant congestion driver is not terminal throughput but chassis availability and drayage capacity in the inland distribution networks behind the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to the Harbor Trucking Association's 2025 annual report, available chassis in the LA-LB complex dropped to a rolling 30-day average of 82% utilization in Q3 2025, meaning that at peak demand periods, every serviceable chassis in the market was in use and incoming containers had nowhere to move. The intermodal rail networks connecting the port complex to inland distribution hubs compounded the problem: Union Pacific and BNSF both reported average intermodal transit times from LA-LB to Chicago that were 1.4 days longer in Q4 2025 than in Q4 2023. On the East Coast, the picture is different. The ports of New York-New Jersey, Savannah, and Charleston have seen sustained volume growth driven partly by cargo diversion from West Coast ports following labor disputes in 2023 and 2024. That growth has outpaced terminal infrastructure upgrades, and labor productivity gaps within the longshoremen workforce have become a visible constraint. Crane moves per hour at New York-New Jersey averaged 26.1 in Q1 2026, compared to an industry benchmark of 32 to 35 moves per hour at equivalent terminals in Rotterdam and Singapore, according to a World Bank container port performance index released in March 2026. The productivity gap translates directly into vessel dwell and berth delay, and it is the primary reason the East Coast terminals are the most exposed to the FMC's proposed dwell-time standards.
"We can't control when the crane moves or when the chassis shows up. But under the proposed attribution rules, we need to make sure every delay that isn't our fault is documented in real time, or it will look like ours." Director of import operations at a national consumer goods distributor
The shippers managing port congestion risk most effectively in 2026 are doing so through a combination of gateway diversification and technology investment in port visibility. A 2025 JOC Group survey of 280 importers found that shippers routing through three or more port gateways reported average dwell times 22% lower than those relying on a single primary gateway, primarily because multi-gateway strategies allow volume to shift dynamically toward the least-congested option in any given booking window. Building that kind of routing flexibility requires relationships and contracts with multiple port agents, inland drayage providers, and intermodal rail operators, along with the technology infrastructure to monitor real-time terminal conditions and make booking decisions accordingly. The practical steps that well-prepared shipper organizations are taking now include:
The FMC has indicated that a final rule is unlikely before Q1 2027, but that timeline gives shippers only two or three peak freight seasons to restructure their port strategies before the standards carry legal weight. The organizations that treat the rulemaking as a planning event rather than a future concern will be the ones with diversified gateways, documented delay-attribution processes, and port visibility infrastructure already operational when the compliance clock actually starts.
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