Find the closest seaports to any city, factory or coordinate. 380+ world ports ranked by distance, with UN/LOCODE, port type, maximum draft, throughput class, bearing, local time and an estimated inland haulage leg.
The load-port decision, explained properly
Everything below is written for people who actually book freight: how port distance really behaves, what draft and throughput tell you about a port, how to read the charges, and where the closest port is the wrong answer.
What this tool answers
Almost every international shipment starts with a question that sounds trivial and is not: which port do we ship from? The answer drives the trucking bill, the ocean rate, the transit time, the customs office you deal with and, quite often, whether the shipment arrives in time at all. Most people answer it from habit — "we always use Nhava Sheva" — and never test whether habit is still the cheapest option after a new plant opened, a new terminal was dredged or a carrier changed its rotation.
This tool gives you the raw geography in seconds. Enter where the cargo is and it ranks every port in a 380-port world database by straight-line distance, then layers on the attributes that decide whether a nearby port is actually usable: what kind of port it is, how deep it is, how much container traffic it moves, what time zone the agent sits in and roughly what the road leg will cost you.
Who it is for
Exporters & manufacturers
Test whether your default gateway still makes sense after opening a new plant or warehouse, and quantify the inland leg before you negotiate haulage.
Freight forwarders
Answer a client "which port?" question on the phone instead of promising to come back tomorrow, and build a defensible shortlist for a tender.
Supply-chain planners
Screen candidate sourcing regions, model a network change, or sanity-check a proposed distribution centre location against port access.
Procurement & sourcing
Compare suppliers in different regions on landed-cost logic rather than ex-works price alone. Port distance is a real cost line.
Chartering & project cargo
Filter by draft to find berths that can physically take your vessel, then work outward from there rather than starting with a wish list.
Students & new starters
Build an intuition for world port geography — where the hubs are, why they are there and how far apart the trading regions really sit.
What the tool deliberately does not do
It does not route ships. Ocean distance is not great-circle distance: the Suez and Panama canals, the Malacca and Gibraltar straits, ice limits and piracy zones all bend real routes a long way from the straight line. It does not carry sailing schedules, which change every season and are the single most important input after distance. And it does not price ocean freight, which moves week to week. Treat this as the geography layer of the decision, then bring schedules and rates on top of it.
Data quality and honesty about sources
Port coordinates are placed at the main harbour or principal terminal area, which is normally accurate to a few kilometres — immaterial at the scale of a load-port decision. Maximum draft figures are indicative planning values for the main container or general-cargo berths; real available depth varies by berth, by tide, by silting and by the current dredging programme, and some ports publish very different figures for their oil jetty and their box terminal. Throughput classes are broad bands rather than audited annual figures. Time-zone offsets are standard time and do not follow daylight-saving changes. All of that is fine for shortlisting; none of it substitutes for a terminal confirmation before you fix a vessel.
Step by step
Resolve the origin. Your input becomes a latitude and longitude one of four ways: a match in the built-in gazetteer of around 460 major cities, a match against a port name in the database, a coordinate pair you typed, or your device position. If none of those work and you have left online lookup enabled, the place name alone is sent to a public geocoding service.
Measure to every port. The haversine formula computes great-circle distance from your point to all 380+ ports, using a mean Earth radius of 6,371 km. This is a sphere approximation; against a true ellipsoid it is accurate to roughly half a percent, which is far inside the uncertainty of the port coordinates themselves.
Compute a bearing. The initial great-circle bearing from your position to each port is calculated and translated to a 16-point compass direction, so you know whether a port is behind you or on the way.
Apply filters. Region, port type, minimum draft and container-only screening remove ports you cannot use before the ranking is shown, so you are never comparing against a berth your vessel cannot enter.
Estimate the road leg. Great-circle distance is multiplied by your detour factor to approximate road kilometres, then by your haulage rate, plus a fixed origin allowance. Every one of those inputs is yours to change.
Rank and present. Results sort by distance (or throughput, draft or name if you prefer), and each row expands into the full port record.
The mathematics, for the curious
Haversine gives the central angle between two points on a sphere from their latitudes and longitudes. Written out: a = sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ₁ · cos φ₂ · sin²(Δλ/2), then c = 2 · atan2(√a, √(1−a)), and distance = R · c where R is 6,371 km. It is numerically stable for small distances, which the older spherical law of cosines is not, and that is why it is the standard choice for this kind of tool.
Initial bearing uses θ = atan2(sin Δλ · cos φ₂, cos φ₁ · sin φ₂ − sin φ₁ · cos φ₂ · cos Δλ), normalised to 0–360°. Note the word initial: on a great circle the bearing changes continuously along the path, so over long distances the heading you start on is not the heading you finish on. Over the few hundred kilometres of a typical inland-to-port leg the difference is negligible.
Why the detour factor matters more than people expect
The gap between straight-line and road distance is not a rounding error; it is often the difference between two ports. A 1.15 factor is realistic on a flat motorway corridor. A 1.35 factor is normal for mixed national roads. A 1.6 factor is what you get crossing a mountain range, working around a large estuary, or dealing with a river with few bridges. If two candidate ports are 400 km and 460 km away in a straight line but one is served by a motorway and the other by a hill road, the real road figures can invert the ranking entirely. Run the tool twice with different factors if the two front-runners are close.
A practical habit. Once you have the shortlist, look up the actual road distance for the top two candidates in any mapping service and back-solve your own detour factor for that corridor. Write it down. The next time you ship from that region you will have a calibrated number instead of a default.
Not all ports do the same job
The word "port" covers facilities with almost nothing in common. A container gateway and a crude oil terminal share a coastline and very little else. The type filter in this tool uses seven working categories, and knowing which one you need eliminates most of the world map immediately.
Type
What it is
When you want it
Typical tell-tales
Container gateway
A terminal with ship-to-shore gantry cranes serving local import and export cargo in boxes.
Almost all FCL and LCL general cargo.
Gantry cranes, a container yard, reefer plugs, an on-dock or near-dock rail head.
Transshipment hub
A terminal whose main business is moving boxes between ships rather than to and from a hinterland.
Routing analysis and connection planning, rarely as your origin.
Sited on a main trade lane, huge yard, small local market — Singapore, Salalah, Tanger Med, Freeport.
Multipurpose
General cargo berths handling break-bulk, project cargo, bagged goods and some containers.
Pipelines and manifolds instead of cranes, often a separate deep berth well outside the commercial port.
River / inland
A port on a navigable river or canal system, often hundreds of kilometres from the sea.
Barge feeder legs and low-cost inland distribution.
Draft limited by the river, air-draft limited by bridges, seasonal water levels.
Feeder / regional
A smaller port connected to the world through a nearby hub rather than by direct mainline calls.
Local cargo where an extra transshipment is acceptable.
Shallower draft, fewer services, longer overall transit, transshipment charge on the invoice.
The feeder trap
The most common expensive mistake in load-port selection is picking a nearby feeder port because the trucking looks cheap, without pricing the transshipment. A feeder leg typically adds a transshipment handling charge, five to twelve days of transit, an extra set of lifts (each one a chance for damage), and a second point where your box can be rolled if the mainline vessel is full. On a single container the inland saving is often 200 to 500; the transshipment penalty is often larger, and the schedule risk is unpriced. Where the nearby port is a feeder and the further one is a mainline gateway, model both properly before you commit.
Reading throughput class
Container throughput is a good proxy for how well connected a port is, because carriers put services where the volume is. The bands used here are: Mega hub above 10 million TEU a year, Major from 2 to 10 million, Regional from 0.5 to 2 million, Feeder below 0.5 million, and Non-container for ports that do not handle boxes in any meaningful quantity. A mega hub will have daily departures on the main lanes. A regional port might have one weekly service to your destination and nothing else — which means a missed cut-off costs you seven days, not one.
The seven factors that actually decide it
Inland distance and cost. The obvious one, and the one this tool quantifies. Usually 5 to 20 percent of the door-to-door cost on a long-haul move, and much more on a short sea leg.
Direct service availability. Does a carrier sail from this port to your destination without transshipment? One direct weekly sailing beats three indirect ones for reliability.
Sailing frequency. Daily departures absorb delays; weekly departures amplify them. A truck that misses a Tuesday cut-off at a weekly port has lost a week of working capital.
Ocean rate. Rates differ between ports on the same coast, sometimes materially, because of competition, imbalance and terminal cost. Get quotes from both candidates before assuming they are the same.
Terminal handling and local charges. THC, documentation, VGM filing, seal fees, gate fees and port dues vary widely by port and by country. These are quoted separately from ocean freight and are easy to overlook.
Customs and clearance quality. A port where clearance takes a predictable day is worth paying for compared with one where it takes anywhere from one to six days. Predictability has cash value in inventory terms.
Congestion and reliability. Yard density, gate queues, berth waiting time and labour stability. A congested port destroys the schedule advantage its geography gives it.
A workable decision process
Start wide, then narrow. Run the search with no filters and a 25-result list to see the whole geography. Then apply the constraints that are genuinely hard — a draft your vessel needs, a container-only requirement, a region limit if border crossings are impractical. That normally leaves four to eight candidates. Add the two or three that look strongest to the compare tray and take those to your forwarder for schedules and rates. Do not shortcut to one port before you have seen the alternatives; the point of the exercise is knowing what you turned down.
When the closest port is the right answer
It usually is when: the port is a container gateway with mainline calls to your destination region, its draft comfortably exceeds what your service needs, and its throughput class is Regional or better. In that case the geography and the service quality point the same way and there is nothing to agonise over. The analysis matters when those three do not line up.
When to deliberately ship from further away
Consolidation. If most of your volume already moves through one gateway, adding a second port splits your volume, weakens your rate negotiation and doubles your operational relationships.
Equipment availability. Empty containers pool where imports land. An export-heavy region far from an import gateway can suffer real equipment shortages, and a container you cannot get is infinitely expensive.
Specialised handling. Reefer plugs, hazardous cargo approvals, heavy-lift capacity, fumigation facilities and bonded warehousing are not universal. The right facility beats the closer gate.
Customs regime. Free-trade zones, bonded corridors, inland container depots with customs clearance and preferential inland-transit schemes can make a distant port administratively cheaper.
Rail connectivity. A port 900 km away with a double-stack rail link can be cheaper per container than one 400 km away reachable only by road, and considerably more reliable in winter.
Test it annually. Trade lanes move. New terminals open, channels get dredged, carriers reshuffle alliances and rotations every year or two, and rail links get built. A load-port decision that was right three years ago deserves a fifteen-minute re-test, which is roughly how long this exercise takes.
Why draft is the hard constraint
Rates are negotiable, schedules change, congestion clears. Water depth does not, at least not without a dredging programme costing hundreds of millions and taking years. If a fully laden vessel draws more water than a port can offer, that vessel simply cannot call — or must call part-loaded, which destroys its economics. That is why draft, more than any other single number, determines which ships serve which ports and therefore which ports have direct services.
Draft available
Vessel classes it supports
Practical meaning
Under 8 m
Coasters, barges, small general cargo
Local and river traffic only. Everything transships.
8 – 10 m
Small feeders, 1,000–2,500 TEU
Feeder port. Expect a hub connection and an extra handling charge.
Top-tier gateway or hub. Direct calls on the biggest services.
Over 17 m
Any container vessel afloat, laden capesize bulkers, VLCC at dedicated jetties
Unconstrained for commercial purposes.
The vocabulary you will meet
Declared draft. What the port authority publishes for a berth or channel. The planning number, and the one shown in this tool.
Tidal window. Many ports offer more depth at high water. A vessel may only be able to sail loaded during a two-hour window, which constrains scheduling and can add a day.
Under-keel clearance. The safety margin required between the keel and the seabed, typically 10 to 15 percent of draft, more in swell or soft mud. Declared draft already allows for this; do not deduct it twice.
Air draft. The vertical clearance under bridges and power lines. Critical for river ports and for anywhere upstream of a fixed crossing — a deep channel is useless if the bridge is too low.
Fresh water allowance. A ship floats lower in fresh water than in salt. River ports far upstream lose measurable draft to this effect, which matters for marginal loadings.
Length overall and beam limits. Draft is not the only physical constraint. Lock chambers, turning basins and quay lengths all impose their own ceilings, and a port can be deep but too short.
Using the filter well. Set the minimum draft one step below what you strictly need and look at what appears. Ports just under your threshold are often dredging or have a deeper berth than the headline figure suggests, and they are worth a phone call — that is exactly where you find capacity nobody else is bidding for.
How the world's port geography is shaped
Ports cluster where three things meet: deep water, a large hinterland and a main shipping lane. That is why the map looks the way it does, and why the regional filter in this tool is a useful way to think rather than just a way to shorten a list.
East Asia
The densest concentration of container capacity on Earth. The Chinese coast alone carries several of the world's largest ports within a day's drive of each other, which means genuine competition on inland rates and near-daily sailings to every major destination. Deep water is widely available, so draft is rarely the binding constraint; the choice is usually about inland rail cost and customs district. Japan and Korea add high-service, high-cost gateways with excellent reliability, and Busan doubles as the region's main transshipment point for north-east Asia.
South East Asia
Dominated by the Singapore–Malacca corridor, through which a large share of world trade passes. Singapore and Tanjung Pelepas are transshipment giants; Port Klang and Laem Chabang are strong gateways. Vietnam's Cai Mep is the deep-water answer to Ho Chi Minh City's draft-limited river terminals and is worth checking whenever a shipment is large enough for a mainline call. Indonesia and the Philippines are archipelagic, which makes domestic feeder legs a normal part of the cost rather than an exception.
South Asia
India's west coast carries the bulk of its container trade, with the deep-water gateways drawing the largest vessels and the older ports serving established industrial belts. The east coast is growing quickly and is the natural choice for cargo from the eastern and southern interior. Colombo remains the region's transshipment hub, handling a large share of Indian and Bangladeshi boxes on their way to mainline services. Draft varies sharply here, so the filter earns its keep.
Middle East & Gulf
A region built around transshipment and energy. The Gulf gateways combine deep water, free zones and re-export infrastructure; the Arabian Sea and Red Sea ports sit directly on the Asia–Europe trunk route, which is why so much capacity has been built there relative to local demand. Note the seasonal and geopolitical sensitivity of Red Sea routings — a port can be physically excellent and commercially awkward at the same time.
Europe
The North European range from Le Havre to Hamburg is one of the most efficient port clusters anywhere, backed by barge and rail networks that push containers deep inland cheaply. That inland network is the real story: a container landed at a North European hub can reach a large part of the continent by barge for a fraction of road cost. The Mediterranean offers shorter sea transits from Asia and a growing set of hubs, and is often the smarter choice for southern Europe despite the North's scale. The Baltic is feeder-served from the North range, with ice conditions a genuine winter planning factor.
Africa
North Africa hosts serious Mediterranean transshipment capacity. West Africa is gateway-driven with rapidly modernising terminals but persistent congestion and inland-corridor challenges, and it is the region where landlocked countries depend most heavily on a single neighbouring port — worth remembering when you see a short distance to a border. East Africa serves large landlocked hinterlands through a small number of gateways. Southern Africa has deep, well-run ports with strong bulk capability alongside container terminals.
North America
Three distinct systems. The West Coast handles the bulk of trans-Pacific volume and pushes it inland by double-stack rail, so an inland shipper is often choosing between a West Coast port plus rail and an East Coast port plus a longer sea leg. The East Coast has grown substantially since the Panama Canal expansion allowed larger vessels to reach it directly. The Gulf serves energy, chemicals and grain alongside a growing container business. For any inland US or Canadian origin, compare rail-served options rather than assuming the nearest coast wins.
Latin America & Caribbean
Brazil's south-east coast concentrates the region's container volume; the west coast of South America is a string of gateways serving mining, agriculture and manufacturing hinterlands separated by the Andes, which makes the detour factor unusually high for inland origins. The Caribbean and Panama function largely as transshipment and relay points between the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Oceania
Long distances, modest volumes and a small number of well-run gateways. Australia's east coast ports serve the population centres, the west coast handles the mining trade, and New Zealand splits between its main container gateways and a set of regional ports. Because volumes are thin, sailing frequency rather than distance is very often the deciding factor.
Where the money actually goes
The inland leg this tool estimates is one line among many. Understanding the full stack tells you how much a port-choice decision is really worth, and stops you optimising a small number while ignoring a large one.
Cost line
Who charges it
Driven by
Port choice affects it?
Export haulage
Trucker or rail operator
Distance, weight, route quality, fuel
Strongly — this is the line the tool estimates
Origin terminal handling (THC)
Carrier, on behalf of the terminal
Port tariff, container size
Yes — varies materially between ports
Export customs clearance
Broker
Country, commodity, declaration complexity
Somewhat — by country and customs district
Documentation & B/L
Carrier or forwarder
Fixed per shipment
Marginally
VGM filing
Carrier or weighbridge
Regulatory requirement per container
Marginally
Ocean freight
Carrier
Lane, capacity, season, contract
Yes — different ports on one coast can price differently
Transshipment charge
Carrier
Whether the routing needs a relay
Strongly — feeder ports carry it, gateways do not
Destination THC & delivery
Carrier, trucker
Discharge port and final address
No — set at the other end
Demurrage & detention
Carrier, terminal
Free days used, congestion
Yes — congested ports burn free days
Calibrating the tool's cost estimate
Out of the box the estimate is generic and should be treated as an order of magnitude. To make it genuinely useful, do three things. Replace the per-kilometre rate with your own contracted haulage rate for the equipment you actually use — a 40-foot trailer rate is not a 20-foot rate. Set the fixed origin cost to cover the things that do not scale with distance: stuffing labour, the container pick-up and drop-off legs, seals, and waiting time at the gate. And calibrate the detour factor against one real corridor you know, as described in the How it works tab. With those three inputs set, the cost column becomes something you can put in a comparison memo.
The costs the tool cannot see
Inventory in transit. Every extra day of transit is working capital tied up. On high-value goods this dwarfs a haulage difference; on low-value bulk goods it is negligible. Value your days before you optimise your kilometres.
Schedule reliability. A port with a reputation for rolling cargo imposes a safety-stock cost that never appears on any invoice.
Equipment repositioning. If empties are scarce at your chosen port, you may pay a pick-up charge from a depot far away, or wait.
Risk and insurance. Longer inland legs mean more road exposure. Some corridors carry meaningfully higher theft and damage rates, and insurers know it.
Carbon. Increasingly a reported metric and in some jurisdictions a priced one. Rail and barge legs are dramatically lower-emission than road for the same distance.
Port and shipping terms used in this tool
Air draft
The vertical distance from the waterline to the highest point of a vessel. Determines whether a ship can pass under bridges and power lines — a binding constraint at many river ports.
Bearing
The compass direction from one point to another, measured clockwise from true north. Shown here as degrees plus a 16-point cardinal direction.
Beam
The width of a vessel at its widest point. Limits which locks, channels and berths it can use.
Break-bulk
Cargo shipped as individual pieces rather than in containers or as bulk — machinery, steel coils, project pieces.
Demurrage
A charge for leaving a container inside the terminal beyond the free period. Distinct from detention, which applies outside the terminal.
Draft
The depth of a vessel below the waterline. Maximum draft at a port is the deepest vessel it can accept.
Feeder
A short-sea service linking a smaller port to a hub where cargo joins a mainline vessel.
FCL / LCL
Full Container Load, where you take the whole box, versus Less than Container Load, where your cargo shares a container with others and is consolidated at a depot.
Gateway port
A port whose main business is serving the region behind it, as opposed to relaying boxes between ships.
Great-circle distance
The shortest distance between two points across the surface of a sphere. The straight-line figure used throughout this tool.
Haversine formula
The numerically stable method for calculating great-circle distance from latitude and longitude pairs.
Hinterland
The inland area a port serves. A port with a large, wealthy, well-connected hinterland attracts more services.
ICD / dry port
An inland container depot with customs facilities, letting cargo clear inland and move to the port under bond.
Nautical mile
1,852 metres, or one minute of latitude. The standard unit for sea distances; 1 km is about 0.54 nm.
Panamax / neo-Panamax
Vessel size classes defined by what fits the Panama Canal's original and expanded locks respectively.
Ro-Ro
Roll-on/roll-off — vessels loaded by driving wheeled cargo aboard rather than lifting it.
TEU
Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, the standard container counting unit. A 40-foot container is 2 TEU.
THC
Terminal Handling Charge — the terminal's fee for moving your container between quay and yard, billed by the carrier.
Transshipment
Moving a container from one vessel to another at an intermediate port. Adds cost, time and handling risk.
ULCV
Ultra Large Container Vessel, generally 18,000 TEU and above. Requires deep water and long quays.
Under-keel clearance
The safety margin of water between a vessel's keel and the seabed, required by port regulations.
UN/LOCODE
The United Nations five-character code identifying a trade location: two letters of country plus three of place.
VGM
Verified Gross Mass — the SOLAS requirement that a container's total weight be verified and declared before loading.
Frequently asked questions
Is the nearest port always the best port?
No, and assuming so is the most common error in load-port selection. A nearby feeder port with one weekly connection through a hub often costs more door to door than a mainline gateway twice the distance away, because the transshipment charge and the extra week of transit outweigh the trucking saving. Use distance to build the shortlist, then let service quality decide.
Why does my mapping app give a different distance?
Because it measures roads and this measures a straight line. The gap is real and often substantial — typically 20 to 40 percent on well-connected corridors and considerably more in mountains or across estuaries. That is exactly what the detour factor is for.
Can I search for a port by name?
Yes. Typing a port name shows it in the suggestion list, and selecting it centres the search on that port so you can see what else is nearby. This is useful for checking alternatives to a port you already use.
What coordinate formats work?
Decimal degrees separated by a comma or a space (18.96, 72.95), signed decimals for southern and western hemispheres (-33.87 151.21), and degrees-minutes-seconds with hemisphere letters (18 57 36 N, 72 57 00 E). Latitude comes first in every case.
Why is a port I know missing?
The database covers the ports that matter for international trade decisions — roughly 380 of them — not every harbour on Earth. Very small local ports, fishing harbours, marinas and single-user private jetties are out of scope. If a significant commercial port is missing, it is a gap worth reporting.
How current are the draft and throughput figures?
They are indicative planning bands rather than live data. Dredging projects and new terminals change draft; annual volumes shift with trade cycles. Use them to sort ports into the right order of magnitude, and confirm anything decision-critical with the terminal.
Does the compare tray survive a page reload?
The comparison selection lives in the page for your current session. Use the shareable link button to capture a search you want to come back to — it encodes your origin and filters into the URL.
Can I use the results commercially?
Yes. Export the CSV, drop it into your own analysis, put it in a client memo. It is a planning aid, so present it as an estimate rather than a verified quotation, and confirm the decision-critical facts before anyone signs anything.
Does the online lookup send my data anywhere?
Only if you use it, and only the place name you typed. Coordinate searches, built-in city matches and every distance calculation are entirely local. Untick the online lookup box to guarantee nothing leaves your browser.
What about landlocked countries?
The tool handles them naturally: enter the inland city and it returns the nearest coastal ports, which will usually be in a neighbouring country. Remember that a border crossing adds transit time, transit-bond paperwork and often a corridor-specific set of charges that distance alone will not reveal.
About Nearest Port Finder
The Nearest Port Finder identifies the closest seaports to any city, factory, warehouse or coordinate pair, ranked by great-circle distance across a database of more than 380 world ports. Each result carries the information you actually need to make a load-port decision: UN/LOCODE, country, world region, port type, indicative maximum draft, container throughput class, local time zone, compass bearing and an estimated inland road leg with a cost figure you can tune to your own haulage rates.
Filter by region, restrict to container gateways, set a minimum draft to screen out ports your vessel cannot enter, and add candidates to a comparison tray to see the shortlist side by side. Everything runs in your browser, so it is fast, private and works on patchy connections.
Features
380+ world ports: Container gateways, transshipment hubs, bulk and energy terminals, river ports and ro-ro ports across every trading region.
Search any way you like: City name with autocomplete, port name, decimal coordinates, DMS coordinates, or your device GPS position.
Three distance units: Kilometres, nautical miles and statute miles shown together, plus an estimated road distance using a detour factor you control.
Compass bearing: Every result shows the true bearing and cardinal direction from your location to the port, plotted on a radar chart.
Serious filters: Region, port type, minimum maximum-draft and container-only screening.
Port detail panel: Full record for any port including throughput class, draft band, coordinates and local time.
Side-by-side compare: Add up to four ports to the comparison tray and evaluate them in one table.
Inland cost estimate: Set your per-kilometre trucking rate and see the estimated origin haulage cost to each candidate port.
Export everything: CSV download, clipboard copy, print or save as PDF, and a shareable link that reproduces your exact search.
Private by default: All ranking is local; only the optional online place lookup touches the network.
How to Use
Enter your origin — start typing a city or port name and pick from the suggestions, paste a coordinate pair, or press Use my location.
Set your filters — narrow by region, restrict to container ports, or set a minimum draft if you know the vessel class you need.
Tune the inland assumptions — adjust the road detour factor and your per-kilometre haulage rate so the cost column reflects your real contracts.
Read the ranked list — nearest first, with distance, bearing, draft and throughput for each port.
Open a port — click any row to expand the full port record and local time.
Compare the shortlist — tick two to four ports and switch to the Compare tab.
Export — download the CSV for your analysis, copy the table into an email, or print a clean PDF that contains only the results.
Examples
Example 1 — choosing an export gateway in India: A furniture maker outside Jaipur searches for its factory city. The tool returns Mundra at roughly 620 km, Nhava Sheva at 900 km and Kandla at 640 km. Mundra and Kandla are closer, but with the container-only filter on and a 15 m minimum draft set, Mundra stands out as the deep-water gateway with the strongest mainline coverage. At a 1.3 detour factor and a rate of 45 per km, the estimated road leg to Mundra is around 800 km — a number the exporter can take straight into a haulage negotiation.
Example 2 — a European distribution decision: An importer with a warehouse at 51.50, -0.12 in London searches by coordinates. London Gateway, Tilbury and Felixstowe come back inside 120 km, with Southampton just beyond. Expanding the region filter to North Europe shows Rotterdam and Antwerp at roughly 300 to 350 km, which matters because a short-sea or barge feeder from a continental hub is sometimes cheaper than a direct UK call.
Example 3 — screening by draft in West Africa: A project-cargo shipper needs a berth that can take a heavy-lift vessel drawing 13 m. Searching from Accra and setting minimum draft to 13 m removes several nearby ports and leaves Tema, Lome and Abidjan as the viable options — a two-minute answer to a question that usually takes a day of emails.
Benefits
Shortlist load ports in seconds: Replace guesswork and stale spreadsheets with a ranked, filterable list.
Screen out unusable ports early: Draft and port-type filters stop you quoting a port your vessel cannot enter.
Quantify the inland leg: Turn a vague sense of distance into a road-kilometre and cost estimate you can negotiate against.
Speak the industry language: Every result carries the UN/LOCODE your carrier, broker and customs system expect.
Compare like for like: A single comparison table for the two to four ports that actually matter.
Free, private and instant: No sign-up, no upload, no account, and the calculation never leaves your browser.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the nearest port finder work?
You enter a city, a port name or a coordinate pair. The tool resolves that to a latitude and longitude, then calculates the great-circle (haversine) distance from that point to every port in its 380+ port database. Results are ranked nearest first and shown with distance in kilometres, nautical miles and statute miles, plus the compass bearing from your location to each port.
What is great-circle distance and why does it matter?
Great-circle distance is the shortest path between two points measured across the surface of the Earth. It ignores roads, railways, mountains and coastlines, so it is always equal to or shorter than the real journey. As a rule of thumb, road distance from an inland point to a port runs about 1.2 to 1.4 times the straight-line figure in countries with dense highway networks, and 1.5 times or more where terrain or river crossings force detours. The tool shows an estimated road distance using a configurable detour factor so you can sanity-check trucking quotes.
Can I search by coordinates instead of a place name?
Yes, and several formats are accepted. Decimal degrees (18.96, 72.95), signed decimals with a space, and degrees-minutes-seconds with hemisphere letters (18 57 36 N, 72 57 00 E) all resolve correctly. Coordinates are the most reliable input for a factory gate, a warehouse yard or a mine site that has no obvious town name.
What does maximum draft tell me?
Maximum draft is the deepest a loaded vessel can sit in the water and still safely enter the port. It is the single biggest constraint on which ships can call. Ports with 16 metres or more can handle fully laden ultra-large container vessels of 20,000+ TEU. Ports around 12 to 14 metres serve mainline Panamax and neo-Panamax tonnage. Below roughly 10 metres you are generally looking at feeder services, coasters and barges, which means an extra transshipment leg and additional cost. Draft figures here are indicative channel or berth depths and vary with tide, dredging programmes and berth; always confirm with the terminal or your line.
Is the closest port always the cheapest to ship from?
Rarely. Distance to the port is only one line in the total cost. A hub port 300 km away with three direct weekly sailings to your destination usually beats a small port 60 km away that only has a feeder connection, because the feeder adds a transshipment charge, five to ten days of transit and an extra handling risk. Weigh the inland haulage saving against ocean freight, sailing frequency, transit time, terminal handling charges, customs clearance efficiency and congestion. The tool gives you the shortlist; the sailing schedule decides the winner.
What is a UN/LOCODE?
UN/LOCODE is the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations: a five-character code where the first two characters are the ISO country code and the last three identify the place. INNSA is Nhava Sheva in India, NLRTM is Rotterdam in the Netherlands, USLAX is Los Angeles. It is the standard identifier on bills of lading, booking confirmations, customs declarations and EDI messages, so quoting it removes ambiguity between similarly named places.
Why do some ports show zero container throughput?
Because they are not container ports. The database includes bulk terminals, oil and gas terminals, river ports, ro-ro and ferry ports and general multipurpose ports alongside container gateways. A bulk terminal handling iron ore or grain has no meaningful TEU figure. Use the port-type filter to restrict results to container gateways if you are shipping in boxes.
How accurate are the distances?
The haversine formula used here is accurate to roughly 0.5% against the true ellipsoidal distance, which is far tighter than the uncertainty in the port coordinates themselves. Port coordinates are placed at the main harbour or terminal area rather than at a specific berth, so treat results as accurate to within a few kilometres. That is more than good enough for choosing a load port.
What is the difference between a gateway port and a transshipment hub?
A gateway port serves the hinterland behind it: cargo enters or leaves the country through it. A transshipment hub mostly moves boxes between ships, with little local cargo — Singapore, Tanger Med, Salalah, Freeport Bahamas and Colombo are classic examples. If your cargo originates inland, you want a gateway. Transshipment hubs matter when you are analysing routings and connection options rather than choosing where to truck to.
Does the tool account for time zones?
Each port record carries its standard UTC offset, and the results show the current local time at the port so you can judge when a terminal or agent office will actually be open. Offsets shown are standard time and do not track daylight saving transitions, so during summer months some ports will be one hour ahead of the figure shown.
Can I compare several ports side by side?
Yes. Tick the compare box on any result row to add up to four ports to the comparison tray, then open the Compare tab to see distance, bearing, draft, throughput class, port type, time zone and estimated inland haulage laid out in a single table. This is the fastest way to build the shortlist you take into a freight tender.
How is the estimated inland cost calculated?
It multiplies the estimated road distance (great-circle distance times your chosen detour factor) by a per-kilometre trucking rate that you set yourself, and adds a fixed origin handling allowance. The defaults are deliberately generic. Replace them with your own contracted haulage rate and the figures become genuinely useful for comparing load ports; leave them at the defaults and treat the output as an order-of-magnitude guide only.
What if my location is not in the built-in city list?
The built-in gazetteer covers roughly 460 major world cities and works with no network connection. If a name is not matched, the tool offers an online lookup that resolves almost any populated place worldwide. Failing that, drop a coordinate pair in and you are done — coordinates always work.
Can I use this to find the nearest port to me right now?
Yes. The Use my location button asks your browser for a GPS or network-derived position and searches from there. Your browser will prompt for permission and you can decline; nothing is sent anywhere, the coordinate is used locally to run the same distance calculation.
Is my data stored?
No. The port database and every distance calculation run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is logged or transmitted, with one exception you control: if you press the optional online place lookup, the place name alone is sent to a public geocoding service to convert it to coordinates. Coordinate searches and built-in city matches never leave your device.