Port of Los Angeles

About the Port of Los Angeles

The Port of Los Angeles sits inside San Pedro Bay, wrapped by the Wilmington and San Pedro neighborhoods on the southern flank of the City of Los Angeles. It opened on December 9, 1907 and grew across roughly seven thousand five hundred acres of land and water with about forty-three miles of waterfront. That history is what gives the modern facility its odd-looking inner geography — long finger piers, a wide main channel cut to fifty-three feet of depth, and a chain of marine terminals that steps around the West Basin and the East Basin instead of running along a single linear waterfront. The port is operated as a unit of the City of Los Angeles, governed by a five-member Board of Harbor Commissioners appointed by the mayor, and its operating revenues come from leases and terminal fees rather than general municipal taxes. That self-funding structure is why the published terminal tariff schedule, not a citywide ordinance, is the document that ultimately controls per-container dwell and demurrage recoveries here.

Cargo-wise, San Pedro Bay is shared between two adjacent jurisdictions — the Port of Los Angeles to the west and the Port of Long Beach immediately east across the Cerritos Channel. The two complexes together handle the largest containerised throughput on the continent, and the LA side alone reports throughput in the millions of TEU annually. The operational scale shows up physically: eight container terminals, more than eighty container cranes, and one hundred and thirteen miles of on-dock rail connecting directly to the Alameda Corridor and the Pacific Harbor Line short-line railroad. The Port of Los Angeles statistics index publishes the monthly TEU totals; the JOC Top 25 North American Ports ranking triangulates the figure against carrier-reported volumes and tends to be the cleaner reference if the port-authority site is between publication cycles.

Primary cargo and trade profile

Los Angeles is the dominant trans-Pacific consumer-goods gateway into the United States. The cargo mix reflects that role precisely: the five primary categories registered for this gateway are consumer electronics, apparel, furniture, machinery, and chemicals. None of those are surprises if you have ever opened a container landed off a Chinese or Vietnamese sailing — they are the import flow that funded the buildout of San Pedro Bay in the first place, and they are the same five categories the calculator above will pre-fill when a visitor arrives on this page from a country times product landing route.

For top trading partners, the port has historically reported China (including Hong Kong), Japan, and Vietnam as the leading flag-state origins on inbound containers, and the cargo descriptions echo the same picture: in the years before the recent Section 301 escalation cycle, the top imports tracked here included furniture in the hundreds of thousands of TEU annually, automobile parts, and apparel. On the outbound side the leading commodities are wastepaper, animal feed, scrap metal, and soybeans. That outbound mix is structural: the port ships outbound mostly raw or recyclable bulk because the inbound consumer flow far outweighs the outbound finished-goods flow, and the loaded westbound container has effectively no near-term substitute on most rotations. The USITC DataWeb is the authoritative source for year-over-year imported value by commodity code and origin and is the place to verify the category-level claims above against the most recent trade publication.

Harbor Maintenance Fee and CBP code

Every ocean shipment that clears at this port pays the federal Harbor Maintenance Fee at 0.125% of cargo value. The fee is authorised by 19 CFR §24.24, collected by Customs and Border Protection at entry, and deposited into the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, which is then drawn against by the US Army Corps of Engineers to dredge federal navigation channels — including the channel that serves this port. The HMF applies to commercial ocean cargo only; there is no HMF equivalent on air freight, and the rate has been stable for a long stretch regardless of the broader tariff cycle. For this site the rate is always read from the central fee registry rather than typed inline, so the FY-current value on display is whatever CBP CSMS #65741993 last published.

The CBP Schedule D code for the Port of Los Angeles is 2704. That is the four-digit identifier that appears on the CBP Form 7501 entry summary in the district and port box; it is the machine-readable handle for the port of entry, which is why entry filers and the calculator both rely on it. The most recent CBP ACE Appendix E Schedule D publication is the authoritative list and is the document this site cross-checks the port code against on each data refresh.

Terminal handling and dwell fees

Beyond the federal HMF, the per-container costs an importer actually feels at this gateway are terminal handling charges, demurrage on containers that overstay free time inside the terminal, and detention on chassis or equipment kept past contractual windows. None of those three are flat-rate federal numbers — they are negotiated between ocean carriers, marine terminal operators, and beneficial cargo owners, and they are published in each terminal operator's own tariff document. Indicative terminal handling at this gateway runs roughly $300 to $500 per TEU depending on the operator and contract, and the umbrella reference is the Port of Los Angeles tariff and statistics index, which links downstream to the per-terminal schedules. Importers usually see terminal handling charges flow through their freight forwarder invoice rather than as a direct port-authority line item.

Free time in Los Angeles is typically four to five calendar days before demurrage starts running, with the exact figure set by each terminal operator. After free time expires, demurrage runs in tiers — a smaller daily rate for the first several days of overstay, then steeper tiers thereafter. The escalation curve is intentional: it is designed to discourage importers from using the terminal as a warehouse-by-the-bay, because the marine terminal needs the slot cleared for the next vessel rotation. Chassis detention from the equipment provider stacks on top, and is the part of the bill that most surprises first-time importers because it is invoiced separately from the terminal's own dwell schedule. In a typical Pacific rotation, an importer who clears CBP cleanly inside the first seventy-two hours after vessel discharge will see zero demurrage; an importer who waits to fetch documents until day six is often paying through the nose. The single best operational defence against the dwell stack is filing the entry early and pre-paying any duties so that release happens the same day customs status flips to paid.

Sourcing decisions: which Pacific port?

For a shipper choosing between San Pedro Bay and the alternative Pacific gateways — Long Beach immediately next door, the Northwest Seaport Alliance to the north, and Oakland up the California coast — Los Angeles wins on consumer-electronics and apparel volumes that need direct trans-Pacific service into the Los Angeles basin distribution footprint, while Long Beach tends to win on the bulk-and-petroleum side and Oakland tends to win on agricultural outbound traffic. The four ports together form a single market for Asian imports, and steamship lines rotate vessel strings across all four every week, so the per-shipment decision is rarely about which carrier serves which port and almost always about which inland distribution centre the shipment is moving to next. The country times product table further down this page lists the largest US importers of categories that typically move through this port — those rankings are derived from the national trade picture and not from a port-of-entry signal per pair, so treat them as a discovery surface rather than a guarantee that a specific country's shipment actually clears here.

On the calculator side, the practical implication is that an importer sourcing electronics from China or Vietnam who has been splitting loads between Los Angeles and Long Beach can usually treat the two gateways as commercially substitutable for the landed-cost number itself. The federal duty and the HMF do not change with the gateway choice; only the terminal handling charge component changes, and that swing is typically in the hundreds of dollars per container rather than the thousands. For an importer evaluating a new sourcing country, the more consequential decision is whether the goods qualify for a USMCA or bilateral-deal preference — that single choice changes the all-in landed-cost figure by ten to thirty percentage points, which is far larger than any terminal-handling delta between adjacent ports.

Operators and infrastructure

The container terminals on the LA side of the San Pedro Bay complex are operated by a small number of specialised marine terminal operators. The major names are the Port of Los Angeles itself in its landlord-port role, APM Terminals at Pier 400 — the largest proprietary container terminal in North America by acreage — Yusen Terminals on the West Basin, and West Basin Container Terminal which rounds out the West Basin complex. Each operator has its own gate appointment system, its own terminal-handling tariff, and its own free-time schedule, which is why an experienced LA importer learns to read the gate-status pages of two or three operators rather than treating the port as a single integrated facility. Pier 400 in particular is a footprint anomaly: it is a man-made island terminal built out into San Pedro Bay specifically to give APM Terminals the depth and on-dock rail length that a modern post-Panamax mega-ship rotation needs.

Looking forward

Three policy threads will shape what landed-cost numbers look like out of Los Angeles for the next several years. The first is the Section 122 emergency tariff and its statutory expiry timer — if Section 122 lapses on schedule, the duty side of every ocean shipment through this port drops by ten percentage points overnight, which would be the largest single rate move at a US port of entry in over a decade. The second is the Section 232 list, which already covers steel and aluminium and which the calculator above stacks at the section-specific rate; for LA the 232 exposure is real but smaller than the Section 301 exposure because LA's import mix is dominated by consumer electronics and apparel, not steel. The third is the Section 301 China-specific overlay, which stacks on top of everything else when the country of origin is China; for a port where China is the leading flag-state origin, the 301 cycle is the dominant landed-cost mover. None of these three are gateway-specific — they would apply at Long Beach or Oakland too — but Los Angeles is where the volume sits, so the 301 lever is the one most likely to change the cost picture here first.

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