How Wide Is the Strait of Hormuz? Width, Shipping Lanes and Depth

Each lane is about two nautical miles wide, and together with the buffer between them the whole traffic system is only about six nautical miles, or 11 kilometers, across. Inbound ships heading into the Gulf keep to one lane and outbound ships to the other, under a traffic separation scheme adopted through the International Maritime Organization in 1968 and agreed between Iran and Oman.

At the narrowest stretch, both lanes run through Oman’s territorial waters, just north of the Musandam Peninsula. That is why the shape of the coastline matters so much: a strait 21 nautical miles wide funnels most of the Gulf’s seaborne oil, liquefied gas and container traffic through a corridor only a few miles across.

The narrowest point lies between Larak Island on the Iranian side and Great Quoin Island off Musandam on the Omani side. Measured between the mainland coasts instead of the islands, the gap comes out wider, at around 30 miles, which is why published figures for the strait’s width vary.

No stretch of international water separates the two countries there. Iran extended its territorial sea to 12 nautical miles in 1959 and Oman did the same in 1972. Because the strait is less than 24 nautical miles wide at its narrowest, the two claims meet in the middle, and every ship crossing that section is in either Iranian or Omani waters. Most seafaring states, including the United States, say ships still have a right of transit passage there under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Iran signed that convention in 1982 but has never ratified it, and the United States has not joined it either.

Iran also holds most of the islands around the strait. Hormuz, Qeshm, Larak and Hengam sit off its coast, and in 1971 it took control of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, west of the strait, which the United Arab Emirates still claims. Seven of the eight major islands in the strait are under Iranian control.

The strait is about 104 miles (167 kilometers) long, and its width ranges from about 60 miles (97 kilometers) at its western and eastern ends to about 24 miles (39 kilometers) at the narrows. It links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, and it is the only sea route out of the Gulf.

It is deep enough for the largest tankers afloat. The deepest water lies on the Omani side near Musandam, where depths pass 200 meters, and the seabed grows shallower toward the Iranian shore. Fully laden supertankers could, if necessary, navigate most of the strait rather than only the marked lanes, which is one reason a closure depends on threats, mines and missiles rather than on geography alone.

Iran has tried to move shipping out of the Omani lanes and into its own waters. On April 8, 2026, Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization published a redrawn traffic scheme that sent inbound ships between Qeshm and Larak islands and outbound ships just south of Larak, inside Iranian waters, and said vessels must coordinate with the navy of the Revolutionary Guards. It marked the old lanes off Musandam as a danger zone, citing the risk of naval mines.

Oman answered with its own measures. On June 24, Muscat issued a notice to mariners opening two temporary routes north and south of the 1968 lanes, which it said were unsafe for normal navigation. In late July Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said Tehran no longer recognized the 1968 scheme, and on August 25 he said Iran and Oman had reached an understanding under which inbound traffic would pass entirely through Iranian waters and outbound traffic partly through Iranian and partly through Omani waters, with no military vessels allowed if the arrangement becomes binding. Iran’s mine claims, which the United States disputes, are set out in our explainer on how many naval mines Iran has.

Hormuz is wider than both, but carries more oil than either. The Strait of Gibraltar narrows to about 8 miles (13 kilometers) between Point Marroquí in Spain and Point Cires in Morocco. The Bab el-Mandeb, at the mouth of the Red Sea, is about 14 nautical miles (26 kilometers) wide at its narrowest. The Strait of Hormuz is about 21 nautical miles (39 kilometers) wide at its narrowest.

What the three share is that ships use only a small part of the width. Like Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb confines tankers to two lanes about two miles wide, one in each direction, and that narrow working channel, more than the coast-to-coast distance, is what makes each strait easy to threaten.

Before the war, about 20 million barrels a day. In 2024 that was roughly a fifth of the world’s consumption of oil and petroleum products and more than a quarter of all oil traded by sea, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s June 2025 figures. About a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade, most of it from Qatar, also passed through, and Asian buyers took 84 percent of the crude and 83 percent of the gas.

Only a small share can go around it. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to the Red Sea can carry 5 million barrels a day, and the United Arab Emirates’ line to Fujairah 1.8 million, leaving about 2.6 million barrels a day of spare capacity to bypass the strait, the Energy Information Administration estimated. The ship counts behind the closure show how far traffic has fallen since February.