TL;DR — Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is dragging ocean container rates up on lanes that have nothing to do with the Gulf. If you're importing from the US, your freight line just got more expensive — re-quote before you sign anything.
The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly a fifth of the world's oil. When it gets disrupted, the first headlines are about crude prices. The second wave — the one that hits importers — is freight.
Carriers don't run separate fleets for separate regions. A vessel pulled off a Gulf rotation, or re-routed the long way round, is a vessel not available somewhere else. Capacity tightens globally. And when capacity tightens, the spot rate goes up — on the trans-Atlantic lane out of New York, on the trans-Pacific lane out of Los Angeles, on lanes where no ship has been anywhere near Hormuz.
What changed
Three things moved in the last two weeks, and they stack.
Bunker costs jumped. Marine fuel tracks crude. Carriers pass that straight through as a bunker adjustment factor (BAF) — a surcharge that lands on top of your base rate, usually within a billing cycle.
War-risk insurance premiums climbed. Underwriters widened the Gulf risk zone and repriced it. Some of that bleeds into general cargo insurance and into the rates carriers quote, because their own hull cover got dearer.
Shippers started converting air to ocean — and then panic-buying ocean. Matson and other carriers have flagged cargo switching modes as buyers scramble for certainty. That demand spike hits an already-tight market. The Xeneta and Freightos indices both show spot rates ticking up week-on-week across the major lanes.
None of this is a US-lane problem specifically. That's the point. It's a global-capacity problem, and the US export lanes are part of the same pool.
What it means for buyers importing from the US
If you're sourcing from a US supplier and shipping to the UK, EU, Canada, Australia, India or anywhere else, the freight quote you got three weeks ago is probably stale.
A concrete example. A UK buyer importing US-made Yeti coolers budgeted $1,620 for an LCL shipment, Houston to Felixstowe, two and a half cubic metres. Re-quoted this week, the same shipment came back at $1,910 — an 18% jump, almost all of it BAF and a "market disruption" line item. On a 500-unit order that's roughly $0.58 a unit. Not catastrophic. But if you'd already quoted your retail price off the old freight number, you just gave away half a point of margin without noticing.
The pages most exposed: anything heavy or bulky, where freight is a big share of landed cost. A pallet of cast-iron cookware feels this more than a carton of supplements.
Run your shipment through the Sea Freight Cost Calculator with the new number, then push the result into the Landed Cost Calculator to see what it does to your per-unit cost. If the per-unit move is under a cent or two, carry on. If it's meaningful, you have a pricing decision to make before the goods ship, not after.
What to do this week
- Re-quote every open shipment. Don't assume a quote from earlier this month still holds. Ask your forwarder specifically what the BAF and any disruption surcharge are, as separate line items, so you can see what's structural and what's temporary.
- Lock rates where you can. If you ship regularly from the US, ask your forwarder about a short-term fixed rate or a named-account rate. A locked rate through the disruption window is worth a small premium.
- Re-run landed cost before you commit pricing. Use the Sea vs Air Freight Calculator too — for high-value, low-volume US goods, the air premium may have narrowed enough to be worth it for time-critical stock.
- Check your cargo insurance. Confirm your marine policy still covers your routing and that the rate hasn't quietly moved. It should still cost 0.3–0.5% of CIF — if your forwarder's quote is higher, shop it.
The longer view
Freight markets overshoot on the way up and overshoot on the way down. Rates spiked hard after the Red Sea disruptions in 2024 and then unwound over the following two quarters. This will likely do the same once the Hormuz situation stabilises.
So don't rebuild your whole sourcing model around this week's number. Do re-quote, do protect any pricing you've already given customers, and do build a slightly fatter freight contingency — 15% rather than 10% — into US orders you place over the next two months.
