Global schedule reliability plateaus around the 65% mark - what it means for Aussie importers.

If you were hoping schedule reliability would keep steadily climbing post-pandemic, the latest data just tapped the brakes. Global on-time vessel arrivals rose only 0.1 percentage points month-on-month to 65.2%, confirming what many of us suspected: reliability has officially plateaued in the mid-60s.

Yes, it’s the second-highest figure recorded since 2019 - but it also shows the industry has hit a ceiling (for now). The easy gains are gone.

What does 65% actually mean?

• Only around two thirds of vessels are arriving within their scheduled window

• The average delay for late arrivals is still sitting at around 4.88 days

• Year-on-year, reliability is 14.7 percentage points higher, so we’ve recovered from the chaos - but improvement is now crawling, not sprinting

  
  

Translation: planning still needs a buffer, because “on time” is basically a 1-in-3 gamble.

Carrier performance – winners and laggers

Across the major players:

Carrier	Approx. Reliability
Maersk	~77% (industry leader)
Hapag-Lloyd	~74%
Wan Hai	~48% (bottom of the pack)

If you’re booking with top-tier lines, you get better odds - still not perfection, but workable. Go further down the league table and you’re back in “roll the dice” territory.

Why this hits Australia differently

Even though 65% is a global average, it matters more here because:

1. Our lanes are longer → more ports, more touchpoints, more risk

2. Transhipment is common → every hop is a chance for delay

3. Retail lead times are tighter → miss your window and you lose the shelf

4. Opportunity cost hits hard → cashflow, storage, promo cycles… all shift

Australia doesn’t just feel delay — we compound it.

What smart operators should do now

This is the “plateau era,” not the “rapid recovery era.” So the winning play is proactivity not optimism.

Playbook for importers / supply chain leads:

• Build delay into your planning assumptions

• Ask your forwarder to show reliability by carrier, not just rate

• Stretch your order cycle to allow a buffer where seasonal or high-turnover SKUs are involved

• Use data, not hope, as your risk hedging tool

• If you’re working on premium retail timelines → negotiate reliability first, price second

In short: stop planning like reliability is improving, and start planning like it’s static.

The Cargo Confidential take

Peak-season volatility isn’t the anomaly anymore - it’s the baseline. Mid-60% reliability is the new “normal,” which means resilience is now a strategy, not just a buzzword.

The operators who win in 2026 won’t be the ones with the cheapest freight - they’ll be the ones who anticipated disruption before it landed on the wharf.

Sources: Sea Intelligence