Global shipping schedule reliability improved in November, bringing it back in line with the levels seen between May and September, likely due to fewer and shorter vessel delays, as well as operational stability returning to mid-year levels.

Sea-Intelligence said in a new analysis that global schedule reliability in November improved month-on-month (M/M) by 2.8 percentage points to 64.1%, bringing it back in line with the levels seen between May and September.

This is higher than the 61.4% recorded in October.

Sea-Intelligence said this is also the second-highest recorded figure for November.

On a year-on-year (Y/Y) level, schedule reliability was up 9.5 percentage points. The average delay for LATE vessel arrivals decreased M/M by 0.16 days to 4.88 days, making it the second-lowest figure for this month.

On a Y/Y level, the November 2025 figure was 0.54 days lower.

Meanwhile, for November, Maersk was the most reliable top-13 carrier with schedule reliability of 78.1%, followed by Hapag-Lloyd with 77.1%.

The next three carriers were in the 60-70% range, while the remaining eight carriers were in the 50-60% range. ZIM was the least reliable carrier in November 2025 with schedule reliability of 52.8%.

In October/November 2025, Gemini Cooperation recorded 89.7% schedule reliability across ALL arrivals and 88.3% across TRADE arrivals, followed by MSC at 74.4% for ALL arrivals and 75.2% for TRADE arrivals.

Premier Alliance recorded 55.7% for ALL arrivals and 55.0% across TRADE arrivals. For the "old" alliances, "ALL arrivals" remain equal to "TRADE arrivals," and Ocean Alliance scored 61.1%.

Sea-Intelligence said traditionally, alliance scores are based on just the arrivals in destination regions, but as that metric was not available for the new alliances in February, they introduced a new measure, based on all arrivals, including the origin region calls on the East/West trades.

"We continue to present both measures, "All arrivals" which is comparable to the February measure, and "Trade arrivals", which is comparable to the "old" alliances. When the new alliances are fully rolled out, these two measures will converge," said Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.