Merchant fleet and port traffic in 2026: what 1.59 million port calls show

Singapore was the busiest port in the world by port calls from January to September 2026, with 51,974 calls by trading vessels, 3.3% of all calls recorded worldwide. Shanghai followed with 26,233 calls and Ningbo-Zhoushan with 24,865. Singapore ranked first for tanker and dry bulk calls and second for container calls behind Shanghai, partly because many vessels call there to bunker, change crew or wait for orders. Rankings measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) count containers handled rather than ship arrivals, so they can order ports differently.

The median trading vessel stayed 28 hours in port from January to September 2026, measured from arrival to departure across 1,593,387 arrivals. The median varies by segment: 11 hours for ro-ro and vehicle carriers, 22 hours for container ships, 32 hours for tankers and 52 hours for dry bulk carriers. Time in port is total elapsed time and includes waiting, working and idle time, which port-call records cannot separate. One in ten dry bulk stays ran past 257 hours.

Container ships spent a median of 22 hours in port from January to September 2026, based on 358,824 container ship arrivals. Turnaround differs by port: among the 15 busiest container terminals, Xiamen had the shortest median stay at 13 hours and Jakarta the longest at 41 hours, a 3.2x difference. Shanghai recorded 16 hours, Singapore 24 hours and Rotterdam 36 hours. A long median can reflect congestion, larger cargo exchanges per call, or both.

MagicPort's fleet register held 54,003 trading vessels with a combined 2.40 billion deadweight tonnes (dwt) on 8 October 2026. The trading fleet counts seagoing ships that carry cargo between ports: bulk carriers, tankers, gas carriers, container ships, general cargo, reefer, ro-ro and vehicle carriers. It excludes passenger ships, ferries, fishing vessels, tugs, offshore units and government ships, so totals that include those categories are higher. General cargo ships are the most numerous type, at 14,760 vessels.

The trading fleet in MagicPort's register had an average age of 19.7 years in October 2026, but the answer depends on how the fleet is counted. Vessels aged 25 years and older make up 27.1% of hulls yet carry only 6.0% of deadweight tonnage (dwt), because the oldest ships are mostly small. Weighed by carrying capacity, 82.6% of the fleet is younger than twenty years, and the heaviest age band is 15 to 19 years, with 24.7% of deadweight.

Panama is not the largest ship registry by deadweight: Liberia leads with 481.9 million deadweight tonnes (dwt) on 5,697 vessels, 20.1% of the trading fleet. The Marshall Islands ranks second with 334.1 million dwt and Panama third with 272.9 million dwt, although Panama still has the most vessels, at 5,721. Between March and September 2026, the Panama register lost a net 970 vessels to other flags, most of them to the Marshall Islands.

A commercial manager is the party commercially responsible for a vessel's employment and acts for the owner on chartering and trading decisions, while a technical manager, often the International Safety Management (ISM) manager, is responsible for the ship's operation, maintenance, crewing and safety management. The commercial manager named on a port call is not necessarily the registered owner, the corporate parent or the charterer operating the ship. In MagicPort records, 99.5% of port calls from January to September 2026 named a commercial manager.

Every figure in State of the Maritime Industry Q1-Q3 2026 comes from MagicPort's own maritime data: port-call records inferred from Automatic Identification System (AIS) position reports, the fleet register, newbuild deliveries and vessel lifecycle events. No external series, estimate or forecast enters a figure. Because the AIS position data behind the record became far denser from June 2026, call counts before and after that month are not directly comparable, so this Q1-Q3 2026 edition publishes no growth rates.