How many ships are crossing the Strait of Hormuz?

What the data shows

• The collapse was immediate. The last full week before the war, 16 to 22 February, averaged 94.3 transits a day — 110% of the 2025 average, as ships moved ahead of the conflict. The first full week of March averaged 2.6, and no week between then and mid-June exceeded 12.3.
• The June memorandum produced the only real recovery, and it was partial. The week of 22 June averaged 30.4 transits a day, 14 of them tankers — 36% of the 2025 average — and the count was back in single figures within three weeks of the ceasefire collapsing on 8 July.
• Since the US Navy reinstated its blockade of Iranian ports on 14 July, visible traffic has run at 3 to 6 transits a day, with tanker deadweight passing at a small fraction of 2025’s average of 2.25 million tonnes a day.
• US Central Command said on 19 September that more than a billion barrels of crude had left through the strait in “the last couple of months”. The 90 tankers visible between 20 July and 19 September had a combined deadweight of 1.33 million tonnes, room for about 10 million barrels if every one sailed out full. Reconciling the two requires almost all crude exports to have moved with transponders switched off.

The data

Download CSV 37 rows · 8 columns · free to reuse with credit

How this was built

PortWatch, run by the International Monetary Fund with the University of Oxford, publishes a daily count of vessel transits through 28 chokepoints, built from satellite-collected AIS data and broken down by vessel type, with each vessel’s deadweight tonnage summed as “capacity”. We pulled every Strait of Hormuz record (portid chokepoint6) from 1 January 2023 to 20 September 2026 from the public ArcGIS service behind the PortWatch site: 1,359 consecutive days, no gaps and no duplicates.

Rows are Monday-to-Sunday weeks from 5 January to 20 September 2026. For each week we summed total transits, tanker transits and tanker deadweight, and divided by seven for the daily averages. The comparison column divides each week’s daily average by the 2025 daily average, 85.5 transits (31,218 transits over 365 days). No record was excluded, smoothed or adjusted.

The barrel figure in the findings converts tanker deadweight at 7.5 barrels a tonne, a typical figure for crude oil, and assumes every visible tanker left the Gulf fully laden. Both assumptions are deliberately generous; the result is an upper bound, not an estimate.

What this does not show

• Ships with their AIS transponders switched off are not counted. Reuters and tanker trackers report that Gulf producers have been exporting on darkened tankers, so these figures describe the traffic that can be seen, not all the traffic there is. The gap between the two is the whole question this year.
• A transit is a passage through the chokepoint in either direction. Inbound tankers usually travel empty, so tanker counts overstate laden crude movements even among visible ships.
• Deadweight is a vessel’s carrying capacity, not its cargo. It says how much a ship could carry, not what it did.
• PortWatch revises recent days as data arrive and has revised its series for AIS spoofing and incomplete transits. The latest week in this table may move.
• The 2025 baseline is one year. Hormuz traffic varies with OPEC+ output and freight markets, and early 2026 ran below it before the war (68.1 transits a day from 1 January to 27 February).

Use it

This table is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Republish it, chart it, or build on it — commercially or not — as long as you credit The Fold and link back to this page.

The Fold (2026). "Strait of Hormuz ship transits by week, 2026 (AIS-visible)." https://fold-news.com/data/strait-of-hormuz-ship-transits-2026 (updated September 24, 2026).