Freight and container data
Government time series sit beside measurements computed from this directory. Every series names its publisher, unit, time range and the interpretation that would make it misleading.
Two kinds of evidence. “Government” means the named agency published the measurement. “Directory” means ContainerHelper computed it from records in this site. We never present the second as an agency statistic.
Companies linked to each port
HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT IS, WHICH IS NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. This counts companies LINKED to a port in our data, and essentially every link is derived from the distance between the company address and the port — not from the company saying it serves that port, and not from an interchange agreement. It is a measure of how many freight companies are registered near a port. Placing it beside a federal TEU figure is legitimate only if the page says these are two different measurements; dividing one by the other is not.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-04 | los-angeles-long-beach | 6,701 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | san-bernardino-ca | 4,082 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | new-york-new-jersey | 2,452 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | port-everglades | 1,621 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | chicago | 1,601 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | joliet-il | 1,567 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | miami | 1,554 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | houston | 1,407 listings |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement of this directory · source as of 2026-09-04
Companies listed by the public register they were sourced from
HONEST as a provenance count: every listing here came from a named public register and carries the date that register edition was read. The per-source as-of spread is in each note, and it is wide — some registers are read monthly and some were read once — so this is not a statement that all figures are equally current.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-04 | fmcsa wide | 29,630 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | fmcsa li | 18,506 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | fmcsa | 7,834 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | fmc oti | 5,046 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | fmcsa motus | 3,671 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | cbp broker | 1,744 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | ftz | 248 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | treasury 570 | 248 listings |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement of this directory · source as of 2026-09-04
Companies listed on containerhelper.com by service
HONEST: a direct count of what this directory publishes on the stated date. It measures OUR COVERAGE, not the size of any market — the number of drayage companies we list is not the number that exist. A company appearing under several services is counted once per service, so the dims sum to more than the listing total. Re-running on later dates appends new periods and turns this into a genuine growth series of the directory itself.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-04 | drayage | 26,496 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | freight-broker | 22,723 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | nvocc | 4,401 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | freight-forwarder | 3,204 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | customs-broker | 1,744 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | surface-forwarder | 1,340 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | foreign-trade-zone | 248 listings |
| 2026-09-04 | customs-bond | 248 listings |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement of this directory · source as of 2026-09-04
Fleet size of listed carriers, by self-reported power units
HONEST AS A CROSS-SECTION AT ONE DATE — it is a distribution, not a trend, and nothing here shows fleets growing or shrinking. Power units are SELF-REPORTED by the carrier on its MCS-150 and are only as fresh as that filing, which may be up to two years old; a carrier that has doubled since filing still reads at its old size. Buckets are counts of carriers, not of trucks.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-04 | not reported | 18,531 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | 1 | 15,775 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | 2-5 | 7,566 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | 6-20 | 3,436 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | 21-100 | 2,067 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | 101-500 | 723 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | 501+ | 256 listed carriers |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement against a U.S. federal government work · source as of 2026-09-04
FMCSA registration status of the carriers listed here
HONEST, and deliberately unflattering where it needs to be. Every DOT number we publish is re-checked against the live FMCSA census and bucketed by the status FMCSA itself reports. "inactive" means FMCSA no longer shows the registration as active — the company may still trade, but we should not be presenting a lapsed registration as a current one. This is the number to watch: it is the honest measure of whether this directory is a current register or a decaying copy of one.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-04 | active | 47,250 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | inactive | 1,103 listed carriers |
| 2026-09-04 | pending | 1 listed carriers |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement against a U.S. federal government work · source as of 2026-09-04
Listed carriers by the year their USDOT number was stamped (survival-biased)
NOT A GROWTH SERIES. MUST NOT BE CAPTIONED AS ONE. It is built from companies that are in this directory TODAY, so every company that registered in an earlier year and has since ceased is missing from that year, and the line slopes upward regardless of what the industry actually did. The bias compounds: our FMCSA ingest additionally took only carriers filing an MCS-150 since 2022, which removes older survivors too. Its legitimate use is COMPARISON — set it against fmcsa_usdot_registrations_by_year (dim "issued"), which counts the whole census including the inactive, and the gap between the two shapes is the bias made visible. Note also that the national series shows 1974 and 2015 to be bulk administrative load years, so those years are artifacts here as well.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-01-01 | listed carriers | 2,926 listed carriers |
| 2025-01-01 | listed carriers | 4,912 listed carriers |
| 2024-01-01 | listed carriers | 3,904 listed carriers |
| 2023-01-01 | listed carriers | 4,384 listed carriers |
| 2022-01-01 | listed carriers | 5,159 listed carriers |
| 2021-01-01 | listed carriers | 4,178 listed carriers |
| 2020-01-01 | listed carriers | 3,263 listed carriers |
| 2019-01-01 | listed carriers | 2,267 listed carriers |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement against a U.S. federal government work · source as of 2026-09-04
Most recent MCS-150 filing year of listed carriers (left-censored)
CENSORED BY OUR OWN FILTER, NOT BY REALITY. The bulk FMCSA ingest selected carriers with mcs150_date >= 2022-01-01, so the shortage of pre-2022 filings in this distribution is a property of how we ingested, not of how carriers file. Read it as "how recently did the carriers we DID take last update their federal filing" — a freshness measure of our own data — and never as an industry-wide filing-compliance statistic.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-01-01 | listed carriers | 14,952 listed carriers |
| 2025-01-01 | listed carriers | 15,675 listed carriers |
| 2024-01-01 | listed carriers | 6,433 listed carriers |
| 2023-01-01 | listed carriers | 3,350 listed carriers |
| 2022-01-01 | listed carriers | 2,643 listed carriers |
| 2021-01-01 | listed carriers | 746 listed carriers |
| 2020-01-01 | listed carriers | 490 listed carriers |
| 2019-01-01 | listed carriers | 389 listed carriers |
Open the named source · Licence: Internal measurement against a U.S. federal government work · source as of 2026-09-04
Monthly container throughput (TEU) at selected major U.S. ports
HONEST as published, with three limits a page must carry. (1) COVERAGE: nine ports only, out of the 117 in this directory — most port pages have no benchmark and must say so rather than imply zero. (2) VINTAGE: these two BTS releases end in 2023; this is not current-month data and the period is stored on every point. (3) LOS ANGELES / LONG BEACH: BTS reports them separately while this directory treats San Pedro Bay as one complex; both dims are attached to the complex, and any page that sums them must say it is summing two authorities. TEU counts boxes moved, loaded and empty; it is not a count of importers, shipments, or companies, and must not be divided by our listing count.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-08-01 | los-angeles | 828,016 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | long-beach | 682,313 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | new-york-new-jersey | 662,740 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | savannah | 413,294 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | houston | 307,624 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | norfolk-virginia | 287,233 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | charleston | 203,170 TEU |
| 2023-08-01 | oakland | 179,162 TEU |
Open the named source · Licence: Public Domain Mark 1.0 (declared by the publisher) · source as of 2026-09-04
Transportation Services Index — freight (seasonally adjusted, 2000 = 100)
HONEST as a national freight-volume index. It is an INDEX, not a count: it measures movement of freight by all domestic modes relative to a year-2000 base, and cannot be compared in level terms to anything in this directory. It is a backdrop — "was freight up or down while our listing count moved" — and nothing in it can be attributed to any port or company. The most recent month or two are routinely revised, and months BTS has not populated are omitted rather than carried forward.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-01 | tsi freight | 134.9 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2026-05-01 | tsi freight | 135.3 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2026-04-01 | tsi freight | 138.1 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2026-03-01 | tsi freight | 139.3 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2026-02-01 | tsi freight | 138.2 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2026-01-01 | tsi freight | 136.3 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2025-12-01 | tsi freight | 137 index (2000 = 100) |
| 2025-11-01 | tsi freight | 137.2 index (2000 = 100) |
Open the named source · Licence: Public Domain, U.S. Government work (declared by the publisher) · source as of 2026-09-04
USDOT numbers stamped per year, how many remain active, and how many were bulk administrative loads
HONEST ONLY IF ALL THREE DIMS ARE READ TOGETHER. "issued" counts add_date across the ENTIRE census including the 2.26M registrants now inactive, so unlike a cohort of survivors it is not distorted by attrition; the paired "still_active" dim is exactly what a naive chart of currently-active companies would show, and the widening gap between the two IS the survival bias, measured rather than asserted. "bulk_stamped" is the correction that matters most: add_date is a record-creation date, and FMCSA has bulk-loaded records — every one of the 122,636 rows dated 1974-06-01, and 75,923 rows on 2015-06-12 — so 1974 and 2015 are administrative events, not registration surges. 1975-1980 are genuine zeros in the record, not years without registration. Finally, this counts REGISTRATIONS, not companies: one business can hold several USDOT numbers over its life, and a number is not evidence the holder ever moved freight.
| Period | Breakdown | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-01-01 | issued | 128,107 USDOT registrations |
| 2026-01-01 | still active | 123,996 USDOT registrations |
| 2026-01-01 | bulk stamped | 0 USDOT registrations |
| 2025-01-01 | issued | 171,607 USDOT registrations |
| 2025-01-01 | still active | 150,851 USDOT registrations |
| 2025-01-01 | bulk stamped | 0 USDOT registrations |
| 2024-01-01 | issued | 166,386 USDOT registrations |
| 2024-01-01 | still active | 124,380 USDOT registrations |
Open the named source · Licence: No licence declared; U.S. federal government work, not subject to domestic copyright (17 U.S.C. 105) · source as of 2026-09-04