Los Angeles, CA

The combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together form the San Pedro Bay Port Complex, the largest container gateway in the United States. The two ports handled roughly 20.1 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) in 2025 and accounted for approximately 31% of all U.S. containerized international waterborne trade. The two neighboring terminals on the south side of Los Angeles function as one enormous shipping ecosystem, generating a continuous flow of international 20ft, 40ft, and 40ft high cube containers through marine terminals, container depots, trucking yards, warehouses, and distribution centers across Southern California.

The Los Angeles–Long Beach complex also has one of the country’s most extensive intermodal rail networks, with numerous on-dock rail facilities feeding BNSF and Union Pacific double-stack trains through the Alameda Corridor. The enormous imbalance between loaded imports and loaded exports also means millions of empty container units are repositioned through the ports each year, creating an exceptionally large pool of excess shipping containers circulating through local depots and shipping lines. The combination of the nation’s highest container volume, extensive rail infrastructure, and massive concentration of container yards makes the Los Angeles–Long Beach region one of the country’s most important markets for used shipping-container availability. Due to the massive supply of used shipping containers, container prices in Los Angeles tend to be among the lowest in the country.