New Jersey Industrial · Market Intelligence · September 2026
| Port | Mid-Year 2026 Total Container Volume |
Y-O-Y % Change |
Loaded Import Volume |
Y-O-Y % Change |
Share of top-five loaded imports |
|---|
NY/NJ handles 374,758 loaded TEU a month on a six-month rolling basis, 19.3% above its 2019 average. Its share of the three largest U.S. container gateways nonetheless peaked at 34.8% in mid-2023 and now sits at 30.4%. The Northeast did not lose cargo; Southern California simply grew faster off a deeper 2023 trough. The routing thesis that underwrote a generation of New Jersey big-box development is no longer supported by the volume data.
The four industrial sectors held 55,781 worksites in Q1 2018 and hold 56,079 today, 0.5% higher across eight years and 0.4% above the pre-pandemic average. The 2022 peak was a formation spike, not a baseline. The combined count bottomed in Q1 2025 and has risen in three of the four quarters since.
New Jersey has completed 24.6 million square feet across 131 industrial properties since the start of 2024, nearly all of it big box above 100,000 square feet. Sub-100,000 square foot product accounts for 41 properties and 2.5 million square feet, roughly a tenth of the delivered footage. Small bay does get built, just never at the rate the tenant base would take.
Raw monthly volume is too noisy to read, so every point is a six-month rolling average. Levels come before growth rates here, because levels are what put boxes into buildings.
NY/NJ volume is genuinely higher than it used to be. The current six-month average of 374,758 loaded TEU a month stands 19.3% above the 2019 monthly average of 314,248. That is real structural growth, and it is the floor under any New Jersey demand argument.
Two things are happening at once in that gap. All three gateways bottomed in early 2023 during the destocking cycle and all three have recovered. NY/NJ fell less far and has climbed less far: up 20.1% off its April 2023 trough against 42.2% for Los Angeles and 51.1% for Long Beach. A substantial part of the growth gap is Southern California climbing out of a deeper hole rather than the Northeast losing cargo.
Where the mechanical explanation runs out. NY/NJ still sits 12.2% below its own August 2022 peak of 426,925, and it is the only one of the three shrinking this year. On a like-for-like January-to-July basis, NY/NJ averaged 374,503 loaded TEU a month against 379,000 in the same seven months of 2025, a decline of 1.2%. Los Angeles rose 2.7% on the same basis and Long Beach 2.1%. The level is sound, the trend has gone flat, and the growth is on the other coast.
Everything above concerns goods flow. This section concerns businesses: how many establishments exist in New Jersey across the four sectors that occupy industrial buildings, and how large they are. It draws on the state's own count of every private worksite covered by unemployment insurance, a near-census of New Jersey employers rather than a survey. These four sectors barely move with the seasons. Averaged across eight complete years, the four quarters sit within three quarters of one percent of each other, so no quarter runs systematically high or low because of the time of year. A first-quarter reading is therefore comparable to a third-quarter reading, and the chart can be read straight with no seasonal pattern to strip out first.
After falling in 2025, the occupier base is slowly improving. The four sectors held 55,781 worksites in Q1 2018 and hold 56,079 today, a gain of 0.5% across eight years. Against the pre-pandemic average of 55,872 the current count is 0.4% higher. The 60,607 recorded in Q1 2022 was a pandemic business-formation spike rather than a baseline, which means the 7.5% fall from that peak is normalization rather than deterioration.
The trough is behind us and it was Q1 2025. The combined count bottomed at 55,173 and has risen in three of the four quarters since, to 56,079, up 1.6% off the low. Quarter-over-quarter moves ran +0.82%, +0.29%, +0.53% and then flat. Modest, but it is a floor with four quarters of evidence under it rather than a single annual reading.
Two of the four sectors are larger than they were in 2018. Transportation and warehousing is up 14.2% to 8,191 worksites and manufacturing 7.2% to 9,800. Construction is essentially unchanged at 98.8% of its 2018 level, and wholesale trade is the one genuine decliner at 93.6%, down roughly 1,100 worksites. The logistics and production side of the occupier base grew over the eight years; the loss sits almost entirely in wholesale distribution.
Census M3 output, seasonally adjusted, through July 2026: shipments, new orders and unfilled orders. An industry with a high score and building backlogs is one whose occupiers are more likely to be making decisions. Blank new-order and backlog cells are not errors, since Census collects those series for durable goods only; semiconductors report no figures at all in this release and appear as an empty row.
The momentum column is a rate of change, not a level. It annualizes the latest three months of shipments and compares that pace against the trailing twelve months. Running more than two points faster than the annual rate reads as accelerating, more than two points slower as cooling, and anything in between as in line. The two columns answer different questions, so a sector can be far larger than a year ago and still be cooling: HVAC and refrigeration equipment is up 16.2% year over year on shipments and 23.9% on new orders, but its recent three months annualize to roughly 11%, which is a strong sector growing at a slower pace than it was. High level with cooling momentum is a call to make now rather than a reason to skip it.
| Industry | M3 score | Shipments YoY | New orders YoY | Backlog trend | 3-month pace | Momentum vs annual |
|---|
To close, a note on what has and has not been measured in this report. Each of the three datasets above measures one specific thing, and none of them measures demand for space. Keeping them apart is the point: a composite score blended across all three would describe none of them.