TL;DR: Sea-Intelligence's second-quarter data shows the average delay for alate container ship hit 5.49 days, the worst Q2 figure since 2022, as the Strait of Hormuz closure cascaded through global schedules. Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and MSC all beat their historical reliability averages anyway, while most other carriers fell well short of theirs. That split in performance, not the disruption itself, is what shippers should be planning around.
Sea-Intelligence's Sunday Spotlight newsletter reported that late-arriving container ships missed their scheduled arrival by an average of 5.49 days in the second quarter of 2026, the highest Q2figure since 2022's 6.39-day average. The cause traces directly to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid the war between the US and Iran. Westbound transits through the strait fell from more than 10per day before March to roughly one every two days since. Vessels rerouting around the conflict zone lost berthing windows, extended their transit corridors, and pushed congestion into ports that were never built to absorb it. The UAE's Khorfakkan terminal alone saw container ship calls jump from 40 in the first quarter to 158 in the second.
Average numbers hide the more useful detail. Maersk's global schedule reliability jumped from 68.6% in the first quarter to 76.9%in the second, the biggest rebound of any major carrier. Hapag-Lloyd posted 75.6%, above its own historical Q2 average. MSC held at 70.9%,in line with its typical performance. All three cleared 70% globally, forming what Sea-Intelligence called an "isolated top tier. "On the Gemini alliance's core east-west lanes (Asia-US, Asia-North Europe, Asia-Mediterranean), Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd topped 90%reliability. MSC's Asia-Mediterranean service hit 81.4%.
Everyone else absorbed the disruption Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and MSC largely avoided. Ocean Network Express beat its own typical second-quarter number by 3.5 points to reach 58.5%, an improvement that only looks good because its baseline sits so far below the top tier's. Sea-Intelligence was direct about the cause: carriers "lacking top-tier network buffers" took the brunt of the disruption. Scale and alliance depth, not just route choice, decided who kept their schedules.
If your freight moves on a carrier outside that top tier, the Q2 numbers preview what a Middle East-adjacent or transshipment-heavy lane can do to your planning assumptions. A vessel running five-plus days late doesn't just arrive late. It throws off dock and labor scheduling at the destination DC. It forces safety stock decisions that were sized for a tighter variance. It complicates any rail or drayage capacity booked against a fixed ETA. Procurement teams that locked in freight contracts on pre-2026 reliability assumptions are now working with numbers that no longer hold for a meaningful share of the carrier market.
The obvious risk is direct exposure to Hormuz. The less obvious one is what happens at the ports absorbing the diverted traffic. Khorfakkan's call volume nearly quadrupled quarter over quarter, and every vessel funneled through a reroute port is competing for a berth window that didn't exist at that scale six months ago. That congestion won't disappear the day the strait reopens. Recovery loop sat overloaded transshipment hubs tend to outlast the event that caused them, so lanes depending on Gulf-adjacent transshipment could see disrupted schedules well past any political resolution.
Three moves worth making this quarter. Ask carriers for alliance-level and lane-level reliability data, not just headline company averages: a carrier's global number can mask a much worse figure on a Gulf-adjacent or transshipment-dependent route. Rebuild lead-time buffers around actual Q2 variance instead of pre-2026baselines, particularly for shipments connecting through Middle East transshipment hubs. And where freight is time-sensitive enough that a five-day delay carries real cost, weigh the reliability premium of top-tier carriers against the rate difference. The data suggests that premium bought something real this quarter.
This is the same two-speed dynamic that's shown up in carrier earnings through much of 2026: the largest networks convert scale into resilience, and everyone else pays for disruption in ways the headline numbers alone don't show. Whether it's EBIT margins or on-time arrivals, the metric that matters increasingly depends on which carrier tier you're measured against.
Source:https://www.joc.com/article/hormuz-closure-drags-down-schedule-reliability-except-for-top-carriers-6260100
