PortMiami or Port Everglades: which one should your container come through?

The year the assumption broke

PortMiami moved 1,115,058 TEU in fiscal 2025, up 2.35 percent, its eleventh consecutive year above a million. That is Miami-Dade County's own figure, published in December 2025.

Port Everglades moved 1,167,552 TEU in the same fiscal year, an all time record for the port, per Port Everglades itself.

So Port Everglades handled more containers than PortMiami last fiscal year. Both ports run the same October to September fiscal year, and each is reporting its own total on its own basis, which makes the comparison a fair one. It still surprises people, including people who ship through both.

We are deliberately not telling you where either port ranks nationally. You will see PortMiami called the eleventh largest in the country all over the internet. We could not trace that to any federal ranking. The most recent one we could stand behind is the US Department of Transportation's 2022 table, which put PortMiami twelfth and Port Everglades sixteenth on loaded TEU. That is four years old, and a four year old rank quoted as current is the kind of number that ends up in somebody's business plan.

Why the volume figure is not your answer

A port's annual TEU count tells you about the port's year. It tells you almost nothing about what happens to your container.

What decides that is narrower and more practical: which carriers call there on your lane, which terminal your line uses, how the free time reads in that port's tariff, where your cargo is actually going once it leaves, and whether your commodity needs an examination site or a cold facility that only one of the two has.

A container that discharges at the port closer to your customer, on a service that sails when you need it, will beat a container at the statistically busier port every time.

Free time is not the same at the two ports

This is where the tariffs genuinely differ, and it is worth knowing before you choose. Under PortMiami's tariff, effective October 1, 2025, free time is 10 days including weekends and holidays. Under Port Everglades Tariff No. 12, also effective October 1, 2025, inbound containers get 12 days and outbound get 15.

Read that carefully before you plan around it, though, because it is not the free time most importers get billed against. The tariff free time belongs to the port's own charges. Your ocean carrier has its own separate free time and its own demurrage, and that is usually the invoice that lands on your desk. We wrote a separate piece on which clock is whose, because the confusion is expensive and extremely common.

What we tell clients who ask

Route on the service and the destination, not on the league table. Ask your carrier which terminal, ask your broker what that terminal does with your commodity, and count the drayage miles to where the freight is really going.

And file early either way. An entry filed ahead of arrival is worth more than any difference between these two ports, because it is the one variable you control completely.