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The news that moves freight
Ocean Oct 24, 2026 · 7 min read

Ship rents at a four-year high despite a record orderbook

Ship rents hit a four-year high while box rates slide. Braemar’s containership charter index stands at 325.8, up 21% on a year ago and the highest since autumn 2022, The Loadstar reported on 23 October. Charter rates are what carriers pay owners to rent ships. Our view: this sets a cost floor under ocean rates, even with a record orderbook. Braemar says charter costs, relative to freight rates, run at roughly double their 2021–24 average. Carriers now book ships 7.8 months before delivery, up from 6.8. Our call: the index will still be above 300 at the end of March 2027.

Why ship rents are rising while freight rates fall, and what it means for your 2027 contracts

Braemar’s containership charter index stands at 325.8. That is 21% higher than a year ago and the highest reading since autumn 2022, The Loadstar reported on 23 October.

Charter rates are the daily hire a carrier pays a shipowner to rent a vessel. Carriers own only part of the fleet they run. The rest is chartered in, often for months or years at a time. So the charter rate is one of the biggest single costs behind the ocean rate a forwarder is quoted.

That this rate is at a four-year high is odd. The orderbook for new container ships is at a record. Freight rates have fallen. In theory, carriers should be waiting for the coming flood of new ships and haggling rents down. They are not.

Our view: this is the most important number for anyone trying to work out how low ocean rates can go. High ship rents put a cost floor under carrier pricing. Spot rates can drop, but carriers locked into expensive charters have every reason to defend FAK (freight all kinds) tariffs, push GRIs (general rate increases) and dig in during 2027 contract talks. The oversupply story is real. It just arrives later than many shippers expect.

What the charter data shows

The Loadstar’s figures come from Braemar, a shipbroker. The main points:

  • Fixtures (signed charter deals) from 1 January to 17 October fell 15% year on year, to 853. The capacity fixed fell 10%, to 2.54m TEU.
  • Our read: fewer deals at higher prices means supply is short. There are not many ships free to rent.
  • The reason, according to the article, is that owners locked their ships into long employment during 2024 and 2025. Little is coming back to the market soon.

Carriers are reacting by booking further ahead. The average fixture is now made 7.8 months before the ship is delivered to the charterer, against 6.8 months a year earlier. For ships of 3,000 TEU and above, “the lead time exceeds 10 months,” the article says. In the third quarter, half of all fixtures were for ships delivering more than three months ahead. In the same period of 2025, that share was 23%.

Braemar’s report puts it bluntly: “You would expect charterers to be sitting back and waiting. They are not.”

Carriers are also taking older tonnage. Ships aged 20 years or more made up 30% of fixtures this year, up from 26% in 2025. Our read: a carrier that rents a 20-year-old ship is usually one that could not find a younger one.

Feeders and panamaxes feel it most

The pressure is sharpest in the smaller and mid-sized ships. These are the vessels that run feeder services, intra-Asia loops and regional trades.

  • Ships of 1,500–1,900 TEU on 9–15 month charters now cost a median $28,625 a day, up 18%. Recent 12-month fixtures have reached $36,500 a day, according to Braemar data.
  • In the 4,000–5,099 TEU segment, short-period rates rose to a median $58,000 a day, from $51,000.

For context, the big new orders are mostly for large ships. In August, FreightWaves cited Global Ship Lease figures showing the orderbook for ships of 10,000 TEU and larger at 55.2% of the existing fleet in that size range, against 24.7% for smaller ships. Global Ship Lease also estimated net growth of only about 0.7% through 2030 for ships below 10,000 TEU, if vessels older than 25 years are scrapped.

Our read: the orderbook headline is driven by big ships for the main east-west lanes. The feeder and regional fleet is not getting the same wave of new capacity. That is why those segments are tightest.

Among charterers, Maersk was the busiest, raising its fixtures by 14%. CMA CGM cut its fixtures by 41%.

Ship costs and freight rates have split apart

The striking part of the Braemar data is the gap between what carriers pay for ships and what they earn on cargo.

Relative to freight rates, Braemar says charter costs “have run at roughly double their 2021-2024 average.” Between January and October 2025, the Freightos Baltic Index (FBX), a widely used spot container rate benchmark, fell 61%. Over the same period, Braemar’s charter index rose 3%.

Our view: a gap like that cannot last forever, but it also does not close quickly. Charters are fixed for months or years. A carrier that signed a 12-month deal at $36,500 a day this autumn is paying that rate well into 2027, whatever happens to spot. That cost sits in the carrier’s network and shapes what it will accept from shippers.

This helps explain a pattern forwarders know well: carriers keep filing rate increases that spot markets do not support, and contract offers that look high against the index. Part of that is negotiation. Part of it is a real cost base that has not fallen.

The record orderbook is a 2028 problem

None of this means the orderbook does not matter. It means the timing is later.

FreightWaves calculated in August that about 13.1m TEU was on order, against an operating fleet of about 33.8m TEU. That is an orderbook-to-fleet ratio of about 38.7%. Global Ship Lease, using Maritime Strategies International data, put it at 39.1%. FreightWaves calculated fleet growth of about 4.2% in 2026, against expected trade growth of roughly 3–4%, and said supply growth could be stronger in 2027–2029.

Carriers are already chartering some of those future ships. According to Braemar, since January 2025, 94 fixtures, about 570,000 TEU, have involved newbuildings due for delivery in 2028. Braemar has described the coming 2028 delivery wave as the size of the 2002 fleet.

Braemar analyst Jonathan Roach warns that this wave, a possible easing of Red Sea disruption and weaker expected demand in 2027 could all hurt owners. “Charterers are queuing today. By 2028, owners may be the ones in the queue,” he said.

The Red Sea is the wild card. FreightWaves reported that avoiding the Red Sea has absorbed more than 2m TEU a year since 2023. MPC Container Ships estimated that a return to the Suez route could release capacity equal to roughly 12% more TEU-miles. If that happens, the charter market would lose its main prop much sooner than 2028.

What happened last time

We have seen a charter market turn before, and it turned fast.

In early October 2022, gCaptain, republishing The Loadstar, reported that time-charter rates for some ship sizes fell about 60% in September 2022 alone. Classic panamax ships of 4,000–5,300 TEU had earned up to $150,000 a day in 2021. By September 2022, daily rates had roughly halved, from about $90,000 to about $45,000. One London broker said “charterers have taken back full control of the market and are dictating terms and conditions again.”

By January 2023, Lloyd’s List, republished by Kuehne+Nagel, reported that boxship charter rates had fallen about 80% in five months. A 4,250 TEU ship that once earned up to $107,000 a day on a 12-month charter was fixing at $22,000.

Our view: the lesson is that charter rates lag freight rates, then fall hard once enough ships come open. In 2022 the trigger was collapsing cargo demand after the pandemic boom. This time the likely trigger is a wall of new deliveries plus a Red Sea reopening. Neither is due in the next few months. Today’s index is at its highest since autumn 2022, the moment that last slide started.

What forwarders should do now

  • Do not bank on a fast fall in contract rates. Carriers’ ship costs for 2027 are already largely fixed, and many were fixed this year at high rates. Expect firm pushback in annual tenders.
  • Watch feeder and regional lanes. These rely on the 1,500–5,000 TEU ships that are tightest. Expect less spare space, more blank sailings when carriers cannot find tonnage, and higher feeder surcharges.
  • Shorter contracts may pay off. If the 2028 wave and a Red Sea return land as Braemar warns, the rate cycle should turn in shippers’ favour. Locking in long fixed rates at today’s cost-driven levels could look expensive in 18 months.
  • Track the Red Sea closely. Any credible return to Suez routings is the event most likely to break the charter market early. Build that into contract clauses where you can.
  • Ask carriers about their charter exposure. Carriers chartering heavily, like Maersk this year, have more ship costs locked in. That may shape how hard they will negotiate.

Our prediction

Our call: Braemar’s containership charter index will still be above 300 at the end of March 2027. Ships fixed this year are tied up well into next year, carriers are still booking months ahead, and the big delivery wave does not land until 2028.

The one thing that would break this call is a sustained return of carrier networks to the Red Sea and Suez Canal before then. If that happens, we expect the index to fall below 300 within three months of the shift.

Sources