Global container schedule reliability fell to 49.9% in August 2026 — below 50% for the first time since the pandemic — and Sea-Intelligence warns the congestion now gripping Asian ports is unlikely to clear before the Chinese New Year cargo peak in February 2027.

The Danish consultancy puts the recovery window at six to ten months, based on how capacity absorbed by delays unwound during the pandemic and the Red Sea crisis. Delays are currently locking up 8.5% of global fleet capacity, roughly 3m TEU — a fleet that would rank as the world's fifth-largest carrier, between COSCO and Hapag-Lloyd.

How bad is the delay picture?

Half of all container vessels globally are now missing their berthing windows by at least two calendar days. Late vessels are running an average of 6.8 days behind schedule in August, and Sea-Intelligence says the two-month decline of 12.7 percentage points in reliability is the largest such increase in delay magnitude since its records began in 2011.

"Reliability continued to plummet in August, following an already large decline in July. We are now marginally below 50% reliability and the drop in reliability over just 2 months is -12.7%. We are, however, not at pandemic-level low performance," said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence.

The lowest comparable reading remains September 2022. For shippers, the practical consequence is straightforward: buffer stocks, longer transit assumptions and renegotiated delivery windows, since a vessel that misses its berthing window arrives nearly a week late on average.

Where is the disruption concentrated?

Asia. Schedule reliability across Asian ports fell to 32.3% in August against 49.9% globally, with average delays for late vessels exceeding seven days. Measured from May, Asian reliability dropped 28.6 percentage points — almost twice the 14.7-point global decline.

"Given that Asia accounts for over a third of all monthly global port calls, any stressors on Asian ports will undoubtedly cause a drag on the global metrics," Sea-Intelligence said.

Northeast Asia is hit hardest, at 29.7% reliability versus 37.9% in Southeast Asia. Country-level declines in August ranged from 5.9 points in Vietnam to 13.1 points in South Korea; Thailand was the sole exception, improving 3.0 points. China performed worst of all at 23.9%.

At port level:

• Shanghai: reliability collapsed to 12.2% across roughly 400 vessel arrivals in August, compounded by typhoon-related closures
• Ningbo: 16.9% reliability on about 450 arrivals
• Singapore: 32.3% reliability despite the region's highest volume at 581 arrivals, showing delays cascading from export hubs into major transhipment centres

Peter Sand, chief shipping analyst at Xeneta, described the situation as a "special typhoon season" — the normal recovery window between storms has repeatedly been squeezed. Instead of several days to work through accumulated vessels and containers, terminals have taken the next disruption before clearing the previous one.

When will it unwind?

Sea-Intelligence bases its forecast on two precedents. During the pandemic, capacity absorbed by delays fell from a peak of 13.8% to 3.6% over 16 months; during the Red Sea crisis it declined from 6.5% to 3.7% within six months. Applying a recovery rate of 0.5–0.6 percentage points per month to the current 8.5% suggests six to ten months to normalise.

"If we apply the lessons from the pandemic disruptions, as well as the initial Red Sea disruptions, we get an indication that it will take 7-10 months to revert the current congestion back to the low point we had in June 2025," Murphy said. "If we 'merely' want to restore the situation back to what we saw at the end of 2025, this will take 6-8 months."

The consultancy cautions that vessel arrival reliability does not capture everything shippers care about — transhipment performance, rolled or blanked sailings and inland movements sit outside the metric — but it remains a useful proxy for overall schedule reliability trends.

On the consultancy's own arithmetic, carriers and shippers should plan for constrained effective capacity well into the second quarter of 2027, with the February 2027 Chinese New Year peak likely to arrive before Asian ports have fully recovered.