Liner shipping schedule reliability hit its strongest level of 2026 in May, rising 2.5 percentage points from April to 64.7%, according to Sea-Intelligence.
The result, published in issue 178 of the Global Liner Performance report, covers schedule reliability up to and including May 2026 across 34 trade lanes and more than 60 carriers. Reliability has improved month on month since March, but remained 1.2 percentage points lower than a year earlier.
The improvement in reliability was not matched by better delay performance. The average delay for late vessel arrivals increased to 5.52 days, up 0.04 days month on month and 0.88 days year on year.
Maersk led the top-13 carrier ranking in May with schedule reliability of 78.2%. Hapag-Lloyd followed at 76.0%, ahead of MSC at 71.6%. Six carriers were in the 60% to 70% range, while three were in the 50% to 60% range.
Wan Hai was the weakest performer among the top-13 carriers, with schedule reliability of 38.0%. Nine of the 13 carriers improved month on month in May, while eight posted year-on-year gains.
For April and May 2026, Gemini Cooperation delivered schedule reliability of 89.5% across “ALL arrivals” and 91.4% across “TRADE arrivals”. MSC followed with 79.5% for “ALL arrivals” and 79.7% for “TRADE arrivals”.
Premier Alliance recorded 53.4% for “ALL arrivals” and 54.0% for “TRADE arrivals”.
For the “old” alliances, “ALL arrivals” remained equal to “TRADE arrivals”, with Ocean Alliance scoring 69.7%.
Sea-Intelligence said alliance scores have traditionally been based on arrivals in destination regions. It introduced a broader measure in February 2025 covering all arrivals, including origin-region calls on /West trades, because the destination-region metric was not available for the new alliances at the time.
Sea-Intelligence is a maritime analysis and advisory company focused on container shipping data, liner network performance and market intelligence.
