Port of New York and New Jersey

About the Port of New York and New Jersey

The Port of New York and New Jersey is the busiest Atlantic-side cargo gateway in the United States and the dominant container complex serving the Northeast metropolitan corridor. Unlike the Pacific ports — which are city-owned harbour departments — this gateway is operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bi-state agency created by interstate compact in 1921 with the consent of the US Congress. The Port Authority runs maritime facilities, three major airports, the bus and rail terminals at the regional centre, and the tunnel and bridge crossings of the lower Hudson, all under a single governance structure. That bi-state arrangement is unique among US ports and is the reason a single agency publishes the master tariff that governs all four marine terminals in the harbour rather than each terminal sitting under its own municipal harbour department.

Geographically the port footprint covers a roughly twenty-five mile radius around the Statue of Liberty, anchored on the Newark-Elizabeth marine complex on the New Jersey side and extending around Newark Bay, Upper New York Bay, Kill Van Kull, Arthur Kill, and into the Staten Island and Brooklyn waterfronts. The four named container facilities are Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal (the largest, with APM Terminals Elizabeth as the marquee operator), Port Jersey Marine Terminal at Bayonne (operated as Global Container Terminals Bayonne), Howland Hook on Staten Island (operated as Global Container Terminals NY), and the historic Red Hook Marine Terminal in Brooklyn. The port handled more than seven million TEU in recent years and briefly topped the national rankings in 2022 before settling into its current position as the third-largest US container gateway behind the Pacific twins.

Primary cargo and trade profile

The five primary cargo categories registered for this gateway are consumer electronics, apparel, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and paper-packaging. The pharmaceutical line is the editorial signature that sets this port apart from the Pacific complex. Newark Liberty International Airport sits adjacent to the marine terminals, and the result is a unique multi-modal capability for temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical cargo that arrives by air and then transfers to ocean for outbound Mediterranean or European routings, or that arrives by ocean from European pharmaceutical manufacturers and clears here for same-day distribution into the Northeast Megalopolis warehousing footprint. The paper-packaging category similarly reflects the regional industrial backland: the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area is a massive consumer market, and the corrugated and folding-carton volumes feeding local fulfilment centres are visible in the import data.

On trading partners the picture diverges sharply from the Pacific story. The inbound flag-state mix at NY-NJ historically draws meaningfully from Northern European, Mediterranean, and South Asian origins alongside the trans-Pacific China-and-Vietnam consumer flow. That broader European and Mediterranean share is what makes this gateway operationally distinct — a sizeable slice of cargo clearing here transits the Atlantic and the Mediterranean rather than the trans-Pacific, which changes vessel rotation scheduling, transit times, and the underlying tariff treatment that the calculator on this page resolves to. For commodity-level import volumes the authoritative reference remains the USITC DataWeb, and for port-specific TEU and vessel-call data the cleanest source is the Port Authority of NY and NJ port-statistics portal, which publishes monthly volume tables and quarterly port-performance summaries.

Harbor Maintenance Fee and CBP codes

Every ocean shipment that clears at any of the four terminals in this harbour is liable for the federal Harbor Maintenance Fee at 0.125% of declared cargo value. The legal authority is 19 CFR §24.24, and the operational mechanic is identical to every other US ocean port: CBP collects the fee at the entry summary, the receipts feed the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, and the US Army Corps of Engineers draws against the trust fund to maintain federal navigation channels — in this harbour specifically the dredging of Kill Van Kull, Arthur Kill, and the Newark Bay channels that the post-Panamax vessel classes now require. The site reads the current HMF rate from CBP CSMS #65741993 at every build, so the figure shown above never lives as an inline literal.

Unusually for a US container gateway, this port carries two CBP Schedule D port codes rather than one. The codes assigned are 1001 and 4601 — the first identifies the New York district side, the second identifies the Newark district side, and the difference matters on a Form 7501 entry summary because the wrong code can route the entry to the wrong CBP team for downstream review. Importers who file their own entries should confirm which code their carrier used at vessel discharge before transmitting. The current authoritative list is the CBP ACE Appendix E Schedule D publication, which CBP republishes periodically and which this site cross-checks against on every data refresh.

Terminal handling and dwell fees

Beyond the federal HMF, the non-federal lines on a container-clearance invoice at this gateway look broadly like the Pacific complex but with a few East-Coast variations. Indicative terminal handling charges sit around $350 to $550 per TEU here, slightly higher than at the San Pedro Bay complex because of the labour cost structure on the Eastern seaboard and because two of the four terminals (APM Elizabeth and GCT Bayonne) operate post-Panamax-capable infrastructure that recovers its capital cost through the per-container charge. The umbrella reference for the published schedules is the Port Authority port portal, which links downstream to each marine terminal operator's tariff document.

Free time at the four NY-NJ container terminals typically runs five calendar days from vessel discharge before demurrage starts, which is a day longer than the Pacific complex and reflects the longer typical truck-cycle time around the Northeast metropolitan area. After the free-time window closes, demurrage runs in escalating bands per the same model used across the industry — small for the first overstay days, larger thereafter. Chassis detention from the equipment-pool provider invoices on top, and there is a specific local wrinkle here: the regional chassis pool serving the harbour has historically had different shortage and surge patterns from the West Coast pools, and an importer can be surprised by a chassis bill on a Northeast import that would not have materialised on an identical Pacific arrival. The most durable defence remains pre-filing the entry and pre-paying any duties so that release happens on the same day the customs status flips to paid.

Sourcing decisions: NY-NJ versus the Atlantic alternatives

For an importer choosing between this gateway and the other major Atlantic-side ports — Savannah, Norfolk, and Charleston — the trade-offs are real and differ from the Pacific complex's gateway-substitution story. NY-NJ wins on same-day distribution into the Northeast Megalopolis, on post-Panamax vessel capability, on European and Mediterranean rotation density, and on pharmaceutical cold-chain integration with Newark Liberty Airport. Savannah wins on per-TEU handling cost and on Southeast rail intermodal connectivity. Norfolk wins on naval-base adjacency and on Mid-Atlantic rail intermodal. Charleston wins on recent capacity expansion and on the Inland Port connection at Greer in South Carolina. For an importer sourcing pharmaceuticals from European manufacturers, NY-NJ is almost always the right answer; for an importer sourcing bulk consumer goods routed to the Southeast distribution footprint, one of the Southern Atlantic ports usually wins on landed cost.

The country times product table further down this page lists the largest US importers of categories that typically move through this port, derived from the national trade picture rather than from a port-of-entry signal per pair. Treat the table as a discovery surface for which countries dominate the categories that flow through this gateway, rather than as a guarantee that any specific country's shipment actually clears in this harbour. The all-in landed-cost figure on the calculator does not change based on which Atlantic port the box discharges through — the federal duty stack is gateway-agnostic — but the terminal-handling line item can move by hundreds of dollars per TEU between ports, and the inland transportation leg almost always changes.

Operators and infrastructure

The four named operator entities running container terminals in this harbour are the Port Authority itself in its landlord-port role, APM Terminals at Elizabeth (the largest single facility, neo-Panamax capable, served by the ExpressRail intermodal yard), Global Container Terminals at both Bayonne and Howland Hook, and Port Newark Container Terminal (PNCT) on the Newark waterfront. The Bayonne Bridge raising project, completed in 2017, lifted the air-draft clearance over the back channel from one hundred and fifty-five feet to two hundred and fifteen feet so that the larger post-Panamax vessels coming through the expanded Panama Canal could reach the Newark-Elizabeth complex — a capital project that fundamentally changed the vessel rotation calculus for this gateway and is the single piece of infrastructure most cited when carriers discuss East Coast capacity. ExpressRail is the on-dock intermodal rail network feeding the CSX and Norfolk Southern systems out of the harbour district, and is the operational handle that keeps Northeast container traffic moving onto the rail leg without near-dock drayage.

APM Terminals Elizabeth is the marquee container facility, sitting on the Elizabeth side of the marine complex with direct ExpressRail loadout and the deepest berths in the harbour, which is why most ultra-large vessel calls discharge here rather than at the older terminals. GCT Bayonne anchors the New Jersey waterfront across Newark Bay and runs a partially automated yard that came online in the 2010s as part of the broader Port Authority modernisation push. GCT New York at Howland Hook handles the Staten Island flow and is the only major container facility on the New York side of the harbour, which gives it a quirky operational profile — smaller calls, more frequent rotations, and a meaningful Caribbean and Latin American service density that the Newark-Elizabeth side does not match. PNCT on the Port Newark waterfront completes the four, and is the operator most often used by Mediterranean and Northern European carrier alliances rotating into the East Coast. Each terminal publishes its own per-container handling tariff under the Port Authority master document, so the operator-by-operator detail matters when an importer is modelling landed cost across multiple potential discharge terminals.

Looking forward

This port's forward-looking exposure profile differs from the Pacific complex precisely because of its trading geography. Section 122 cliff exposure is universal — any lapse on the schedule drops the duty side of every ocean shipment through this port by ten percentage points overnight — but the Section 232 list, which is most acute for steel and aluminium imports, bites less here than at Long Beach because steel-aluminium is not in this port's primary cargo register. Section 301 hits the Chinese share of consumer-electronics and apparel imports through this gateway, but the share of cargo originating from China at NY-NJ is meaningfully smaller than at the Pacific complex because of the European, Mediterranean, and South Asian flows that anchor the East-Atlantic rotation. The single largest forward-looking infrastructure question is whether further Bayonne Bridge improvements or Newark Bay channel deepening will be needed in the coming decade to accommodate the next generation of ultra-large container vessels, and the answer will shape carrier rotation choices for the Northeast for years. A secondary thread is the energy-transition push on the inland drayage side: the Port Authority has its own clean-trucks program and a published timeline for tightening emissions standards on the trucks that pick up containers at the gates, and that timeline interacts with the per-container drayage cost that an importer ultimately pays on the inland leg even though the federal duty calculation itself is unaffected.

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