Methodology

What an estimate is

Every result is a planning estimate: a range with a confidence label and a data-type label. It is never a carrier quote, a booking or a guaranteed price. Planning departure windows are modelled from typical sailing frequencies and are not confirmed sailings.

How routes are built

The planner resolves your origin and United States destination, selects candidate origin ports and U.S. gateways, and combines them with sea lanes (direct and via transshipment hubs) and inland patterns: truck, rail with final drayage, or drayage only. Each candidate is costed, timed, scored for risk and fuel exposure, and ranked against your objective.

Cost components

Costs are per container in U.S. dollars. Each route adds up these components:

• Origin drayage: factory to port, with a diesel surcharge.
• Origin terminal and documents: terminal handling, documentation, VGM and export customs.
• Ocean base freight: a licensed benchmark when available, otherwise a planning assumption by region, coast and container type.
• Ocean fuel (BAF): a share of the ocean base.
• Transshipment: a fee when the service calls at a hub.
• Destination port and terminal: handling, chassis days, pier pass and ISF filing.
• Customs and brokerage allowance: brokerage and entry fees. Duties and tariffs are excluded.
• Inland rail or truck, and destination drayage, with fuel surcharges.
• Risk contingency: a percentage of the base subtotal, set by the route's risk bucket.

How ranges are built

Each component has a low, base and high value from component spreads in the assumption set. Fuel-linked components widen with recent diesel volatility, and ocean spreads widen during seasonal events. The route low is the sum of component lows and the high is the sum of highs. This is deliberately conservative, not a statistical confidence interval. Contingency is computed on the base subtotal only, so uncertainty is not counted twice.

Confidence reflects how much observed data supports a range. Lower confidence means a wider spread and a stronger case for requesting a quote.

Transit, delivery and booking

Leg durations come from sea lane transit ranges, distance and speed assumptions, port dwell and transshipment dwell. Delivery windows add the cumulative low and high days to each planning departure window. The booking recommendation follows a fixed rule table: insufficient lead time, book now, request a quote, monitor or book in window, using a single delivery safety buffer.

Data-type labels

• Public actual: an observed value published by a public source.
• Public reference: a published reference value, not transaction level.
• Customer rate: a rate supplied by your organization.
• Licensed benchmark: a licensed market benchmark, not a booking quote.
• Live quote: a live carrier quote.
• Planning estimate: a modelled estimate, not a quote or guaranteed price.
• Forecast estimate: a modelled forward view with an uncertainty band.
• User assumption: a value set in the published assumption table, with its public reference named.
• Unavailable: no data for this field. We show Unavailable instead of inventing a value.

Data sources and refresh cadence

• U.S. Energy Information Administration weekly retail diesel prices: weekly, after the Monday release.
• U.S. Census Bureau international trade data: monthly.
• Bureau of Transportation Statistics port performance statistics: monthly, best effort.
• UN/LOCODE and port reference data: reviewed on each release.
• OpenStreetMap-based map tiles: continuously.
• Assumption sets: versioned; every estimate records the version it used.

Limitations

• Road and rail distances are approximations based on great-circle distance and circuity factors.
• Ocean benchmarks are not licensed in this release, so ocean freight uses planning assumptions.
• LCL shipments, live quotes, bookings and customs filing are not supported.

Attributions

• Map data from OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License.
• Map style by OpenFreeMap.
• UN/LOCODE, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
• Diesel prices from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Disclaimer

Planning estimates only. Ranges are modelled from public reference data and published assumptions, are not carrier quotes, and do not constitute a booking or a guaranteed price.