Suez vs Cape of Good Hope: Days, Miles and Cost per Container

Ask what the Cape of Good Hope costs instead of Suez and you will be given a number. Ask where that number came from and it is usually a distance with no cost attached, a cost with no emissions exposure in it, or a transit time lifted from a different trade lane.

The honest answer is more complicated than a toll against a fuel bill. It varies enormously by destination, two of the largest cost lines sit outside freight entirely, and only one intergovernmental body has published a like-for-like comparison of the two routings. Everything else has to be assembled, which is what this guide does.

This guide gives the verified distances and days lane by lane, explains how a Suez toll is calculated, prices the Cape alternative, gives the official comparison per container, and covers the emissions cost most comparisons leave out.

Carra Globe provides importer of record and exporter of record services, so we have a commercial interest in your answer. What follows is written to be usable whether or not you ever speak to us.

Distance and days, lane by lane

How many days does the Cape of Good Hope add? Published comparisons put the pure sailing penalty on Shanghai to Rotterdam at seven to ten days one way. Once port calls and service patterns are included, seven to twelve is the more realistic planning range. On Asia to the Mediterranean it is materially more, and on East Mediterranean services it can be roughly double the North Europe figure. There is no single number that works for every lane, and anyone quoting one has borrowed it from somewhere else.

The cleanest published pair is from Port Economics, Management and Policy, calculated at 16 knots with no port calls.

The Singapore row needs its arithmetic stated. UNCTAD’s published wording is that a container shipped from Singapore to Rotterdam “sees the journey cut by 29 per cent when using the Suez instead of the Cape of Good Hope”. Measured the other way round, from the Cape, that is about 41 per cent further, not 29. Applying it to the commonly published 8,440 mile Suez distance gives roughly 11,900 nautical miles via the Cape. The Suez figure is published; the Cape figure is derived from UNCTAD’s percentage.

Other institutions land in a similar band with different assumptions. The World Bank puts the Asia to Europe penalty at 3,000 to 3,500 nautical miles and seven to ten days. The International Transport Forum works in round trips and puts it at about 8,500 nautical miles and twenty days, which is roughly ten days each way.

Two things to take from that spread. The published sailing penalty on Asia to North Europe runs seven to ten days one way, and for planning across a range of services seven to twelve is the safer assumption. And the port-to-port numbers above are clean sailing times: a real Asia to Europe rotation with five to ten port calls runs longer than either column suggests.

Why the Mediterranean penalty is bigger

This is the part that gets copied wrong most often. A Cape-routed ship bound for the Mediterranean rounds southern Africa, continues north through the Atlantic to Gibraltar, then reverses direction eastward into the Mediterranean. The relative penalty is therefore materially larger than on a North Europe service.

Sea-Intelligence measured minimum transit times against a pre-crisis baseline and found Asia to North Europe up about 15 per cent, Asia to the Mediterranean up about 39 per cent, and East Mediterranean port pairs up 61 to 63 per cent. Baltic services moved least, at 7 to 11 per cent.

Peer-reviewed work published in Transportation Research Part A in January 2026 reached the same conclusion from vessel tracking data, measuring round trip durations rather than port pairs.

Do not reuse the North Europe number for a Mediterranean shipment. An East Mediterranean round trip gains roughly 34 days on the Cape against about 20 for West Europe. If your planning assumption came from a Rotterdam comparison and your cargo is going to Piraeus, Mersin or Alexandria, you are working from a figure that understates the penalty by a wide margin.

One honest gap. We could not find a credible published nautical mile pair for any Asia to Mediterranean lane from a source we would rely on. The asymmetry is well documented in days and percentages, not in miles, so this guide does not invent the miles.

What a Suez transit actually costs, and why the figure is hard to quote

Suez dues are not charged on containers, deadweight or the tonnage on a ship’s certificate. They are charged on Suez Canal Net Tonnage, a system unique to the canal that still applies nineteenth-century principles, a century older than the international tonnage convention.

• The basis is SCNT, not TEU. A vessel’s Suez Canal Net Tonnage is established through the canal’s own tonnage certification system and is what the dues are calculated on.
• The scale is regressive. Container ships sit at Rate 7 of the transit dues schedule, priced in special drawing rights per ton across successive bands, with each band cheaper than the last, and separate laden and ballast columns.
• Deck-stowed containers are charged separately. Containers carried on the weather deck attract additional container tier dues alongside the tonnage-based charge, so two ships of the same SCNT can pay differently depending on how they are stowed.
• A temporary surcharge sits on top. Suez Canal Authority circular 2 of 2026 set a temporary 12 per cent surcharge for laden and ballast container ships in either direction, applying to transits from 15 July 2026. The same round raised other classes far more steeply, with laden crude tankers at 37 per cent and bulk carriers at 22 per cent.

So the bill stacks: tonnage-based dues on the regressive scale, plus additional dues for deck-stowed container tiers, plus the temporary 12 per cent, and no rebate. The base tariff itself has not moved since 15 January 2024. What has changed in 2026 is everything around it.

The authority introduced a 15 per cent rebate for container ships of 130,000 SCNT and above under circular 3 of 2025, applied automatically on transit with no application required. It was extended twice, the second extension taking its planned validity to 30 June 2026. The authority nevertheless suspended it early, effective 7 April 2026. So a large container ship transiting today pays no rebate and a 12 per cent surcharge, on an unchanged base tariff.

We are not publishing a headline dollar figure for a single transit, because the calculation is vessel-specific. It needs the vessel’s SCNT with the applicable band and surcharge, and SCNT is not the tonnage printed in a ship’s specification. The authority publishes a toll calculator, but no reliable number follows from headline TEU capacity alone. Published estimates for large container ships run from a few hundred thousand dollars to well over a million, and the gap between them is an assumption rather than a fact.

What the Cape costs instead

Avoiding the toll is not free. The International Transport Forum priced the alternative on a 12,500 TEU vessel at 80 per cent load, burning around 100 tonnes of fuel a day.

• Fuel. About 2,000 tonnes more per round trip, which the forum costed at roughly one million dollars, an increase of about 33 per cent, holding speed constant.
• Ships. Fifteen vessels instead of twelve to maintain a weekly Far East to Europe service, a 25 per cent increase in deployed tonnage for the same sailing frequency. On a shorter loop the effect is smaller: UNCTAD’s India to Europe example goes from 56 days and eight vessels to 63 days and one more ship.
• Time. Around twenty additional days of charter and container hire per round trip.
• Emissions. At constant speed the fuel effect is about a third. UNCTAD put the greenhouse gas increase at over 70 per cent for a Singapore to Northern Europe round trip, because carriers speed up to protect the schedule, and a one per cent speed increase raises fuel consumption by about 2.2 per cent.

That last point is the one most comparisons miss. The gap between a 33 per cent fuel increase and a 70 per cent emissions increase is not a disagreement between sources. It is the difference between sailing the same speed for longer and sailing faster to arrive on time.

The system-wide effect is visible in UNCTAD’s own numbers. The average voyage haul rose from 4,831 nautical miles in 2018 to 5,245 in 2024, and tonne-mile demand grew 5.9 per cent in 2024 against volume growth of only 2.2 per cent. The World Bank estimated that the longer route absorbed between 700,000 and 1.9 million TEU of capacity.