Tariffs Were Supposed to Shrink Imports. American Ports Just Had Their Biggest Month on Record.

Descartes Systems Group released its November Global Shipping Report on Tuesday, and the headline number should not exist in a year like this one. U.S. ports handled 2,674,808 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containerized imports in October — up 5.0% from September, up 16.0% from a year earlier, and the highest monthly volume Descartes has ever recorded. The old record, 2,622,465 TEUs, was set in May 2022, when pandemic-era demand had ships queuing for weeks off San Pedro Bay. October beat it by 52,343 TEUs.

Think about what this record had to climb over: a tariff regime that was explicitly designed to reduce import dependence, a U.S.–China port-fee skirmish, a war around the Strait of Hormuz that has rerouted global shipping, and a consumer that every sentiment survey says is miserable. None of it mattered. The boxes came anyway.

The Year Imports Were Supposed to Fall

The strangest part of this story is that the people who watch this data closest spent the early part of 2026 expecting the opposite.

Ben Hackett, whose firm produces the Global Port Tracker with the National Retail Federation, described the sequence in Monday's release: the import surges of 2025 were driven by retailers front-running a series of tariff increases. When the Supreme Court struck down the high "Liberation Day" tariffs at the start of 2026, that motive looked dead, and expectations for another extended peak season faded with it. Then a new round of tariffs arrived in the second quarter — and the front-running started all over again. The result was a peak season that ran from May to mid-October, months longer than normal, with household spending holding up "despite rising inflation," in Hackett's words.

Through ten months, 2026 import volumes are now running 2.3% ahead of 2025 — the second consecutive month the cumulative line has been above last year. Tariffs did not shrink the flow of goods. They rearranged its timing, and in doing so they manufactured the biggest month in the history of the dataset.

China Is Back to Pre-Trade-War Volume

The engine of the October record is the country the tariffs were aimed at. Imports from China rose for a fourth consecutive month to 987,805 TEUs — the highest monthly total since January 2025, up 6.9% from September and up 22.9% from October 2025. China's share of total U.S. container imports ticked up to 36.9%. The growth came in exactly the categories you would expect a holiday-season pull-forward to produce: plastics, furniture, toys, and manufactured goods.

The Map Is Being Redrawn Mid-Record

Underneath the national number, the cargo is moving — literally — away from the West Coast.

Houston posted the largest monthly gain of the ten major ports Descartes tracks, up 26.7% (an additional 42,665 TEUs versus September). Charleston rose 18.6%, Norfolk 17.7%, Savannah 12.6%. Meanwhile Los Angeles slipped 1.4%, Long Beach fell 2.0%, and Oakland dropped 10.9%. The five leading East and Gulf Coast gateways took 39.9% of national imports in October, up from 36.7% in September; the top five West Coast ports fell from 47.0% to 44.9%. The Gulf Coast as a region handled 266,905 TEUs — up 24% in a month, and the most since Descartes began tracking the series in August 2023.

The system is starting to creak under the volume. Average transit delays across the ten major gateways reached 6.3 days in October, up from 6.0 in September and 4.2 in June, with seven of the ten ports deteriorating. The NRF's Jonathan Gold flagged cargo sitting at West Coast docks "for extended periods" waiting for rail cars — and something more acute: a strike threat at the nation's largest port complex. A short-term contract extension between ILWU Local 26, which represents watchmen at Los Angeles and Long Beach container terminals, and the Pacific Maritime Association has now been extended three times, a few days at a time. The current extension runs through November 20. The underlying contract expired in July 2025. There is still no long-term deal.

So here is the puzzle worth paying for: the busiest month on record for American ports should be a pricing bonanza for the companies that move the boxes. Instead, ocean freight rates are falling — and have been for weeks. Record demand with no pricing power is not a healthy market. It is a signal, and it points directly at what happens to this trade in the next 90 days.

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