Suez is back above 1,300 ships a month, and the schedules follow

The Suez Canal Authority reported 1,358 vessel transits in August 2026, a 27 percent rise on the 1,070 recorded a year earlier, with net tonnage up more than half to 68.3 million tonnes and monthly revenue reaching USD 567.1 million against USD 326 million a year before. Chairman Osama Rabie framed the figures, dated 20 September 2026, as a recovery trajectory rather than a one-month spike.

The context matters. Canal revenue had fallen by roughly two thirds in 2024 as carriers diverted around the Cape to avoid Red Sea risk. A return to 1,300-plus ships a month is the market voting that the short route is worth using again.

When carriers route through Suez again, three things ease for a shipper. Transit times shorten because the Cape detour is off the table. Schedules firm up because vessels hold their rotations. And the surcharge stack thins as the risk premiums that came with the long way round are withdrawn.

It does not make every rate fall on cue, and capacity discipline can hold pricing up. But the direction of travel for an Egypt-facing booking in late 2026 is toward more predictable service, which is worth as much as a headline rate.

The recovery is not only maritime. The Suez Canal Economic Zone drew USD 7.26 billion of contracted investment across 117 projects in the 2025/26 fiscal year, and Egypt's ports handled about 233 million tonnes of cargo in 2025, with container throughput up roughly a quarter. A canal that carries more ships and a zone that attracts more factories reinforce each other.

For an importer that means more reason to route through Egyptian gateways, and more local capacity to consolidate, clear and forward against.

A recovering Suez is good news, but a booking still turns on the specifics: the commodity, the port pair, the clearing file and the timing window. MIDTRANS handles Egyptian freight through Alexandria, Port Said, Damietta and Ain Sokhna, with the ACID and Nafeza filing done before the box arrives.

The canal's numbers set the weather. The operations desk sails the shipment through it.

Every figure above is attributed to the source named beside it. MIDTRANS reports third-party market data as third-party data, and marks its own view as an operational read.