Strait of Hormuz ship transits: daily AIS counts since 2019 for all ships and tankers, with Bab el-Mandeb, Suez and the Cape

1. How many ships are passing through the Strait of Hormuz right now?

On 25 Oct 2026, the most recent day published by IMF PortWatch, 2 ships transited the Strait of Hormuz, 1 tanker and 1 cargo vessel; across the fourteen days to that date PortWatch counted 49 transits, 10 of them tankers, with a daily maximum of 7 and 5 days without any tanker. The seven-day average of 3.3 ships and the thirty-day average of 3.4 put current traffic at 3.8% of the 2023–2025 average of 89.7 a day; for tankers alone the thirty-day average of 0.7 is 1.4% of the 52.3 tankers that passed on a normal day before the war.

PortWatch publishes with a lag of roughly ten days; this page was built on 5 November 2026 with data to 25 Oct 2026. The daily chart starts on 1 Oct 2025 so that the normal autumn of 2025 sits next to the collapse at the end of February 2026.

The grey line is the raw daily count, the orange line the tanker count and the blue line the seven-day average, which removes weekday patterns and single-day AIS noise. The table lists the last fourteen days with the split between tankers and cargo ships, so that each value can be checked against the PortWatch download.

Last 14 days of the PortWatch series (published with a lag of about ten days).

3. What does PortWatch count, and why do other sources report different numbers?

The 2 transits that PortWatch shows for 25 Oct 2026 are transit calls: a ship is recorded once when its AIS position signals show it crossing a defined line across the strait, so every figure on this page since 1 Jan 2019 is an AIS-based count of ships, not of barrels, and not of ships that passed without transmitting. The Automatic Identification System is the transponder that most merchant vessels carry; PortWatch turns the raw signals into daily counts by vessel type (tanker, container, dry bulk, general cargo, roll-on/roll-off) for the world's main chokepoints. The data fields we use are the total, the tanker count and the cargo count, as documented in the World Bank's methodology notes on the same dataset.

Three limits follow from the method. First, a ship that switches off or spoofs its transponder is not counted; an IMF working paper from 2019 on AIS-based trade tracking lists low coverage and vessels switching off AIS among the reasons a call can go unrecorded and stresses that AIS indicators complement rather than replace official statistics. In a war zone the share of dark transits is unknown and may have risen. Second, a transit is a transit regardless of size or cargo: a small product tanker and a laden supertanker count the same, and tankers may be empty. Third, the ten-day lag means this page never shows the current week.

Other trackers measure other things. Maritime security centres report incidents and vessels in contact with them; commercial AIS analytics firms apply their own geofences, classifications and dark-ship estimates; cargo trackers estimate barrels rather than hulls; governments that organise escorted convoys count the ships in those convoys. None of these is wrong and none equals the PortWatch count, so figures from different sources should not be compared without checking the definition. GOS uses PortWatch because it is public, daily, consistent since 2019 and reproducible from the raw download; this page quotes no other counts. Which countries depend on the strait, and by how much, is on the Hormuz exposure index.

5. What do the transit counts mean for oil supply and fuel prices in the US and UK?

A tanker count of 0.6 a day in October 2026, against 52.3 before the war, means that recorded tanker traffic on the seaborne route for most Gulf crude, products and LNG has been running at a few percent of its normal level for eight months; the price consequences are visible in Brent, in the diesel crack and in the premium of seaborne over inland crude. For the United States the direct exposure is smaller, because Gulf crude is a minor share of US imports, but Asian and European buyers who lost Gulf barrels have bid for Atlantic basin crude and US products, which is why the record US crude export week and the widest Brent–WTI weekly gap on record both date from 2026. For the United Kingdom, which imports much of its diesel and jet fuel, the squeeze arrives through product prices; see UK petrol and diesel prices.

Three series put the count in context: the diesel crack spread shows what the loss of Gulf middle distillates has done to refining margins, oil imports by country shows which importers depend most on the strait, and Hormuz reopening: what happens to fuel prices works through the scenarios if traffic returns, without predicting when. In inflation-adjusted terms the 2026 shock still ranks below 2008 and 1980 (inflation-adjusted oil price).

Two cautions. The counts are AIS transit calls and nothing more: a rise would show that more transponding ships are crossing, not necessarily that more oil is flowing. And this page does not forecast; it records how many ships PortWatch has seen every day since 1 Jan 2019, and the CSV contains every one of those days for all four chokepoints.

Download all values as CSV (UTF-8, raw values and calculation per row, stable URL; CC BY 4.0 for our calculation, raw data under the source's terms)

How to cite: Global Oil Shock (Jörg Dässler), “Strait of Hormuz Ship Transits 2019–2026: Daily AIS Counts from IMF PortWatch”, as of 5 Nov 2026, https://globaloilshock.com/en/data/strait-of-hormuz-ship-transits/