Port of Long Beach

About the Port of Long Beach

The Port of Long Beach was carved out of 800 acres of mudflats at the mouth of the Los Angeles River on June 24, 1911, four years after its larger neighbour opened across the Cerritos Channel. Today the harbour district covers about 11.9 square miles in total, of which roughly 4,600 acres are water and 3,520 acres are land, with twenty-five miles of waterfront, twelve piers, eighty berths, and a main navigational draft now cut deeper than fifty feet. It is administered as the Harbor Department of the City of Long Beach, a unit of city government governed by a five-member Board of Harbor Commissioners whose members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council for two six-year terms. That structure mirrors the Los Angeles model on the other side of the channel, but the two ports are independent jurisdictions, publish independent tariffs, and run independent terminal operators with different gate appointment systems.

The piers are the easiest mental model for someone new to this port. The marquee container facility is Middle Harbor, an amalgamated Pier E complex rebuilt over the 2010s into one of the most automated and electrified container terminals in the Western Hemisphere. Pier T anchors the south-western corner and is the home terminal for several green-fleet pilot programs. Piers G and J host additional container operations, and the landside on Pier S and parts of Pier B carry petroleum, liquid-bulk, and break-bulk traffic that the Pacific consumer flow doesn't obscure but doesn't describe either. Long Beach reports roughly two thousand vessel arrivals annually across the harbour district, and the resulting container throughput is the second-largest in North America measured in TEU.

Primary cargo and trade profile

The five primary cargo categories registered for this gateway are consumer electronics, apparel, autos, furniture, and steel-aluminium. Two of those five — autos and steel-aluminium — are the editorial wedge between Long Beach and its larger neighbour to the west. Long Beach is where the Pacific roll-on-roll-off automobile business actually clears, with finished-vehicle volumes that the Port of Los Angeles does not match. Steel and aluminium long products land here because the adjacent industrial backland in the Wilmington-and-Carson corridor needs heavier-lift quay equipment than the apparel-and- electronics terminals run on the LA side. The remaining three categories overlap with the trans-Pacific consumer-goods flow, and the per-shipment routing choice between LA and Long Beach is usually settled by which inland warehouse the load is headed to, not by which kind of goods are in the box.

On trading partners the picture is also broadly trans-Pacific, with China (including Hong Kong), Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea typically among the top inbound flag-state origins, plus a meaningful South Korean automobile flow that finds Long Beach rather than the LA side because of the roll-on capacity. For category-level import value the authoritative reference is the USITC DataWeb, which publishes US import volumes by commodity code and origin, and which is the right place to verify any specific cargo-flow claim against the most recent trade publication. The port's own data is collected at the Port of Long Beach facts-and-figures index, which is updated quarterly and is the cleanest source for TEU-by-terminal and vessel-call counts.

Harbor Maintenance Fee and CBP code

Long Beach is an ocean port, so every shipment that clears here is liable for the federal Harbor Maintenance Fee at 0.125% of cargo value. The legal authority is 19 CFR §24.24, and the mechanic is the same as at every other US ocean gateway — CBP collects the fee at entry, the receipts feed the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, and the US Army Corps of Engineers draws against the fund to dredge the federal channels that keep ports like this one navigable at fifty-foot draft. No equivalent surcharge applies to air freight, and the fee has no floor or ceiling — it scales linearly with declared cargo value. The site reads the current rate from CBP CSMS #65741993 each build, so the figure shown above always reflects the Treasury's current fiscal-year publication and never an inline literal.

On the machine-readable side, Long Beach carries CBP Schedule D port code 2709. That four-digit identifier is what gets written into the district-and-port box of every Form 7501 entry summary filed against a Long Beach arrival. It is also the lookup key the calculator on this page uses when it scopes HMF treatment and port-specific notes to a particular gateway. The authoritative list is the current CBP ACE Appendix E Schedule D PDF; CBP republishes that file periodically and this site cross-checks the port code against it on every data refresh.

Terminal handling and dwell fees

Beyond the federal HMF, the bill that an importer actually feels moving cargo through Long Beach breaks down into three lines that are not federal at all: terminal handling charges from the marine terminal operator, demurrage if a container sits on the terminal past its free-time allowance, and chassis detention from the equipment-pool provider if the chassis itself stays out past its contract window. None of those numbers are regulated by Treasury or CBP; each marine terminal operator publishes its own tariff document. Indicative terminal handling sits around $300 to $500 per TEU at this gateway, depending on operator and contract, and the umbrella reference for the published schedules is the Port of Long Beach facts-and-figures hub, which links downstream to the terminal-operator tariff PDFs.

Free time in Long Beach typically runs four calendar days from vessel discharge before demurrage starts ticking, with each terminal operator setting its own precise window. Once the free-time clock expires, demurrage runs in escalating bands — small for the first few days of overstay, larger thereafter, designed to push the slot back to the next vessel rotation rather than to subsidise cargo storage on the dock. The Middle Harbor terminal is worth a separate mention here: because it is heavily automated, its gate appointment cadence runs differently from the older Pier J and Pier G operations, and an importer who has only ever cleared through one Long Beach terminal can be surprised by the appointment density at another. As at LA, chassis detention invoices separately from the marine terminal's own dwell schedule, and the most durable defence against the dwell stack is filing the entry early and pre-paying duties so that release happens the same day the customs status flips to paid.

Sourcing decisions: Long Beach or its neighbours?

The single most common sourcing question at this gateway is the choice between Long Beach and the adjacent LA-side complex. Functionally the two are commercially substitutable for most consumer-goods flows — the federal duty stack does not change, the HMF does not change, and only the terminal handling charge line moves, by a few hundred dollars per TEU at most. The rotation choice is usually driven by which inland distribution centre the freight is destined for and which terminal operator the importer's contract carrier serves. Where Long Beach wins outright is on autos (the roll-on-roll-off finished- vehicle business clears here), on steel-aluminium long products that need the heavier-lift terminal equipment on the LB side, and on shippers who specifically want a partner terminal with committed green-fleet drayage for low-carbon supply-chain reporting.

For a sourcing decision that crosses time zones — Oakland or the Northwest Seaport Alliance versus the San Pedro Bay complex as a whole — the trade-off is different. Northwestern routings cut sailing time from Northeast Asia by about a day and pair well with rail intermodal into the upper Midwest, while Oakland is the better choice for outbound agricultural exports that originate in California's Central Valley. The country times product table further down this page lists the largest US importers of categories that typically move through this port — that ranking is derived from national trade data, not from a port-of-entry signal per pair, so treat it as a discovery surface for which countries dominate the categories that flow through Long Beach rather than as a guarantee that a specific country's containers actually clear here.

Operators and infrastructure

The container terminals at Long Beach are run by four named operators. The Port of Long Beach itself functions as the landlord and as a master-tariff publisher; International Transportation Service (ITS) operates Pier G; Pacific Container Terminal (PCT) anchors Pier J; and SSA Marine runs Pier A and is present across multiple berths. Long Beach Container Terminal at Middle Harbor (Pier E) is the marquee facility — an extensively rebuilt complex that consolidated three older terminals into a single automated, mostly electric operation and is held up as the proof-of-concept for the port's Green Port Policy that has been the operating doctrine since 2005. The practical implication for an importer is that gate appointment systems, free-time schedules, and per-container handling rates differ noticeably between Middle Harbor and the older Pier G and Pier J operations, so reading the right operator's tariff is more important here than at ports with a single dominant terminal.

Beyond the marine terminals themselves, two infrastructure notes are worth flagging for an importer planning a Long Beach rotation. The first is on-dock rail: most container terminals at this port have direct rail loadout to the Alameda Corridor, which feeds the BNSF and Union Pacific intermodal networks directly out of the harbour district without truck repositioning to a near-dock yard. That matters for landed-cost modelling because it eliminates a drayage leg on the inland-bound side that would otherwise add per-container cost. The second is the Gerald Desmond Bridge replacement, completed in 2020, which lifted the height clearance over the back channel to accommodate the larger neo-Panamax vessels that increasingly dominate the trans-Pacific rotation; the bridge change does not affect the duty calculation but does affect which vessel classes can actually call here, which in turn affects the carrier scheduling decisions that determine whether a particular service rotates through Long Beach or routes to another Pacific gateway.

Looking forward

Long Beach's cargo mix gives it a different forward exposure profile than its larger neighbour. The Section 122 emergency tariff cliff matters everywhere — if it lapses on schedule, the duty side of every ocean shipment through this port drops by ten percentage points overnight — but the Section 232 list bites harder at Long Beach than at LA because steel and aluminium are in the primary cargo register here and are not at LA. Any change to the 232 tariff schedule will therefore land on a meaningful share of Long Beach's category mix, not just at the margin. The Section 301 China overlay is the largest single landed-cost mover for the consumer-electronics and apparel flow, exactly as it is across the channel, and the calculator above will stack 301 on top when the country of origin is China. Layered onto all of that is the Green Port and Clean Air Action Plan trajectory, which is not a tariff matter but does affect drayage cost on the inland leg — battery-electric terminal tractors fully deployed at Middle Harbor in late 2023, and operators continue to electrify the broader fleet on a published schedule.

Tariff rates from Tax Foundation, USITC, and Penn Wharton Budget Model. For commercial-stakes decisions, confirm against a licensed customs broker.