How Many Ships Pass Through the Strait of Hormuz Daily in 2026?

Between 85 and 125 a day, depending on who is counting. IMF PortWatch, which counts transits from ships’ automatic identification signals, recorded an average of 85.5 crossings a day in 2025 and 91.1 a day in 2024. Its busiest recent years were 2022 and 2023, at about 93 a day.

Commercial analysts who count larger cargo ships in their own way give higher figures. The analytics firm Kpler put the pre-war norm at about 125 large commercial vessels a day, Reuters reported on October 8, counting tankers, gas carriers, bulk carriers and container ships.

Traffic was still heavy in the last week of peace. PortWatch logged 127 crossings on February 22, 2026, and between 64 and 116 on each of the following five days. On February 28, the day the United States and Israel struck Iran, the count fell to 57. By March 2 it was four.

A handful a day. PortWatch’s daily count has not exceeded eight since the start of October 2026, and the latest figure, for October 18, was four ships: two tankers and two dry bulk carriers. Zero ships were recorded on October 1 and October 17.

Other trackers see somewhat more traffic but tell the same story. Kpler counted seven commodity vessels on October 6, the lowest since July 23, and 10 on October 7, after more than 20 a day on October 4 and 5. Lloyd’s List Intelligence counted 104 crossings by cargo ships not linked to Iran in the week of October 5 to 11, about 15 a day, down from 126 the week before.

The war’s busiest single day so far was June 24, 2026, with 51 crossings, during the weeks when the June memorandum between Washington and Tehran had paused the US blockade. Across the whole war, from February 28 to October 18, PortWatch recorded 1,516 crossings in 233 days, an average of 6.5 a day. In the same stretch of 2025 it recorded 21,985.

Because each tracker counts different ships in a different way. PortWatch counts every vessel whose position signals show it crossing the strait. Kpler counts commodity carriers. Lloyd’s List counts cargo ships over 10,000 deadweight tonnes and leaves out ships tied to Iran by ownership, trade or sanctions, and its figures are preliminary.

All of them depend on ships broadcasting their position. Vessels that switch off their transponders are not counted, Reuters has noted, so the real number is somewhat higher than any tracker shows.

US officials have at times cited far higher numbers for ships crossing under American protection, but the administration has not released ship-by-ship data to back them. Silent Dossier reports the independent counts and names the tracker behind each one.

Mostly tankers. In 2025, PortWatch counted an average of 48 tankers a day carrying crude oil, refined fuel and gas, out of 85.5 crossings in total. The rest were about 16 container ships, 13 dry bulk carriers, five general cargo ships and three roll-on/roll-off vessels a day.

The fall in cargo is even steeper than the fall in ship numbers, because the giant tankers have stopped coming. PortWatch’s measure of carrying capacity passing through the strait averaged about 3.2 million deadweight tonnes a day in 2025. In the first 18 days of October 2026 it averaged about 104,000 tonnes, roughly 3 percent of the pre-war level.

Because Iran has closed it to ships it does not approve, and shipowners will not risk the rest. Since the war began on February 28, Iran has attacked or threatened vessels that try to cross without its permission. A tracker run by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy counted 28 attacks on ships in and around the strait in October 2026 alone and 113 since the war began, Reuters reported on October 23, making October the worst month of the war for shipping.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has tied any reopening to seven conditions, including the end of the US blockade. Washington says the blockade stays. The US-Iran talks tracker follows each offer. As Silent Dossier has argued, a strait that opens only on Tehran’s terms and at Tehran’s price is still a closed strait.

About a fifth of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, in normal times. Oil flows through the strait averaged 20 million barrels a day in 2024, equal to about 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption, the US Energy Information Administration said in June 2025. Around one-fifth of global LNG trade also crossed it that year, most of it from Qatar.

Asia depended on it most. The EIA estimated that 84 percent of the crude oil and 83 percent of the LNG moving through the strait in 2024 went to Asian buyers. For the Gulf exporters themselves, the closure has been ruinous: Qatar’s state revenue fell 42 percent, as our report on why Qatar is now buying American gas sets out.