How Much Freight Goes Through the Strait of Hormuz in 2026?

The Strait of Hormuz saw 31,218 ship transits in 2025, about 85 a day

IMF PortWatch, the International Monetary Fund’s ship-tracking platform, logged 31,218 transits through the Strait of Hormuz in 2025. That is 85.5 a day, or about 2,600 a month. Tankers made 17,585 of the crossings. The other 13,633, or 44%, were container ships, dry bulk carriers, general cargo ships and ro-ro vessels serving the ports of the Persian Gulf.

Counted in barrels, energy dominates. The IEA’s Strait of Hormuz factsheet puts 2025 oil flows at 19.87 million barrels a day, around 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade. Just over 112 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas made the same trip, 19% of global LNG trade.

How PortWatch, UNCTAD and Lloyd’s List count Hormuz traffic

3 kinds of number circulate for this strait, and each measures something different. Ship counts come from trackers that read the AIS position signals ships broadcast as they cross. Oil and gas flows come from energy agencies that follow cargoes in barrels and cubic meters. Trade shares set those flows against a world total.

The ship counts disagree with each other. The Congressional Research Service, citing UNCTAD, put the average before February 28, 2026 at about 130 ships a day. PortWatch’s series gives 84.8 a day for the 12 months to February 2026 and 79.1 a day for February 1 to 27. During the closure, Lloyd’s List Intelligence logged 78 transits from August 3 to 9, while PortWatch’s daily figures for the same 7 days add up to 39.

Who counts	What it counts	Period	Figure
IMF PortWatch	Tanker, container, dry bulk, general cargo and ro-ro transits, from AIS	2025	85.5 a day; 31,218 in the year
IMF PortWatch	The same 5 ship types	February 1 to 27, 2026	79.1 a day
UNCTAD, cited by CRS	Ships from all countries transiting	Before February 28, 2026	About 130 a day
Lloyd’s List Intelligence	Cargo-carrying ships over 10,000 deadweight tons, preliminary	August 3 to 9, 2026	78 in the week
IMF PortWatch	The same 5 ship types	August 3 to 9, 2026	39 in the week
IEA	Crude, condensate and refined products	2025	19.87 million barrels a day
EIA	Oil flow through the strait	2024	20 million barrels a day

A transit is not a ship, either. A feeder shuttling boxes out of Jebel Ali is counted on every crossing, so the 31,218 transits of 2025 were made by far fewer distinct cargo ships. PortWatch applies the same method at other chokepoints, among them the Panama Canal, so its Hormuz figures can sit beside theirs on 1 footing.

Strait of Hormuz transits by ship type, 2025

Tankers made 56% of the crossings and carried 70% of PortWatch’s tonnage estimate. Container ships ran second by count, at 6,037 transits, but third by tonnage behind dry bulk carriers. General cargo ships and ro-ro vessels carried 0.9% of the tonnage between them, yet they move the vehicles and the loads too large or awkward for a container.

Ship type	Transits	Share of transits	Per day	Tonnage, million metric tons	Share of tonnage
Tanker	17,585	56.3%	48.2	822.2	70.0%
Container ship	6,037	19.3%	16.5	153.4	13.1%
Dry bulk carrier	4,790	15.3%	13.1	188.7	16.1%
General cargo ship	1,707	5.5%	4.7	8.0	0.7%
Ro-ro, including car carriers	1,099	3.5%	3.0	2.3	0.2%
All ship types	31,218	100%	85.5	1,174.7	100%

Strait of Hormuz transits by ship type, 2025

• Tanker17,585
• Container ship6,037
• Dry bulk carrier4,790
• General cargo ship1,707
• Ro-ro1,099

Source: IMF PortWatch, Daily Chokepoints Data, Strait of Hormuz, 2025

Per crossing, PortWatch’s tonnage works out to about 46,800 metric tons per tanker transit, 39,400 per dry bulk transit and 25,400 per container ship transit, against about 4,700 for general cargo ships, which is why 5.5% of the crossings add up to 0.7% of the tonnage.

Hormuz ship traffic by year, 2019 to 2025

Year	Transits	Per day	Tanker transits	Container ship transits	Non-tanker share
2019	25,220	69.1	15,325	3,760	39.2%
2020	26,936	73.6	16,460	4,130	38.9%
2021	29,496	80.8	18,229	4,487	38.2%
2022	34,138	93.5	21,070	5,320	38.3%
2023	33,699	92.3	20,249	5,742	39.9%
2024	33,345	91.1	19,478	5,961	41.6%
2025	31,218	85.5	17,585	6,037	43.7%

Strait of Hormuz ship transits per year

• 201925,220
• 202026,936
• 202129,496
• 202234,138
• 202333,699
• 202433,345
• 202531,218

Source: IMF PortWatch, Daily Chokepoints Data, Strait of Hormuz, 2019 to 2025

Traffic peaked in 2022 at 34,138 transits, 93.5 a day, and fell 8.6% over the next 3 years. The whole drop came from tankers: their crossings fell 16.5%, from 21,070 to 17,585, while the rest of the traffic grew from 13,068 to 13,633 transits. The EIA recorded crude and condensate flows through the strait falling by 1.6 million barrels a day between 2022 and 2024, which matches the tanker line.

Container ship transits rose in every year of the series, from 3,760 in 2019 to 6,037 in 2025, up 60.6%. Their share of all crossings went from 14.9% to 19.3%. Within a single year the total swings as well: April to June 2025 ran at 102 to 103 transits a day, while December 2025 averaged 55.5.

Oil and LNG through the Strait of Hormuz

The IEA’s 19.87 million barrels a day for 2025 splits into 14.95 million of crude and condensate and 4.93 million of refined products. China and India took 44% of the crude, IEA member countries about 29%, and Europe about 600,000 barrels a day, or 4%. On LNG, about 93% of Qatar’s exports and 96% of the UAE’s pass through the strait, and almost 90% of that gas goes to Asia.

The 2 energy agencies agree on the headline and differ on the detail:

Measure	IEA, 2025	EIA, 2024
Oil through the strait	19.87 million barrels a day	20 million barrels a day
Share of seaborne oil trade	Around 25%	More than 1/4
A second share	Nearly 34% of global crude trade	About 20% of world petroleum liquids consumption
Going to Asia	80% of oil flows	84% of crude and condensate
LNG	Just over 112 bcm, 19% of global trade	About 1/5 of global trade
Bypass pipeline capacity available	3.5 to 5.5 million barrels a day	About 2.6 million barrels a day

Oil is the only cargo with any way around. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline runs from Abqaiq to Yanbu on the Red Sea, rated at 5 million barrels a day and pushed to 7.0 million in 2019, and a UAE line carries up to 1.8 million barrels a day to the Fujairah terminal, per the EIA. Even the IEA’s high estimate of spare bypass capacity covers about 28% of the 2025 flow, and the EIA’s October 2026 outlook names attacks on the East-West pipeline among the reasons it raised its oil price forecast.

Containers, grain, aluminum and fertilizer: the non-oil cargo

CRS’s April 2026 report is the most detailed public account of everything else that crosses. Jebel Ali in the UAE is the region’s leading container hub and the world’s 9th largest port by containers handled, and about 65% of its container volume is transshipped onto feeder ships for other Gulf ports. For those boxes the strait crossing happens once, on the mainline ship into Jebel Ali, and the last leg to another Gulf port runs on a feeder that never leaves the Gulf.

Those containers carry what trucks carry anywhere: food, clothing, household goods and equipment and parts for factories. Dry bulk carriers bring in corn, rice, soybeans and wheat for the region’s grain mills, and CRS cites a count of 280 dry bulk ships held inside the strait shortly after the fighting began.

Cargo	Direction	How it moves	Scale
Food, clothing, household goods, factory parts	Into the Gulf	Container ships, largely via Jebel Ali	6,037 container ship transits in 2025
Corn, rice, soybeans, wheat	Into the Gulf	Dry bulk carriers	280 bulkers held inside in early March 2026
Passenger cars and trucks	Into the Gulf	Car carriers, with the UAE as distribution hub	1,099 ro-ro transits in 2025
Alumina in, aluminum out	Both	By sea in both directions	Gulf makes about 8% of world aluminum
Ammonia and urea	Out of the Gulf	LPG tankers for ammonia, dry bulk for urea	About 1/3 of world seaborne fertilizer inputs
Helium	Out of the Gulf	Insulated, pressurized containers	Qatar holds about 30% of world production capacity
Ethylene, methanol, naphtha, sulfur	Out of the Gulf	By sea from refineries and gas plants	Byproducts of oil and gas processing, the building blocks of plastics

The helium detail shows how specialized some of this freight is. CRS says it ships in containers that keep it liquid at minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 45 days, which puts a hard clock on every delayed sailing.

Hormuz traffic in 2026, month by month

The conflict started on February 28, 2026, with US and Israeli military action against Iran, and Iran has since asserted control over the strait, according to CRS. By the report’s April 10 date, the UK Maritime Trade Operations center had recorded 17 attacks on vessels since March 1, and about 1,000 ships sat in a holding pattern: 800 queued inside the Gulf to sail out and 200 queued outside to sail in. A 2-week ceasefire was announced on April 7. CRS adds that the IRGC, Iran’s military guard corps, was reported to be charging tolls and that Iran had moved the shipping lanes closer to its own coast.

PortWatch’s daily data shows the speed of it. The strait logged 57 transits on February 28, 20 on March 1 and none on March 4. Between March 1 and October 4 it recorded 13 days with no crossings at all; the busiest day in that stretch, June 24, had 51.

Month	2025 transits	2026 transits	2026 per day	2026 as share of 2025
January	2,187	1,812	58.5	82.9%
February	2,069	2,192	78.3	105.9%
March	2,597	99	3.2	3.8%
April	3,071	214	7.1	7.0%
May	3,192	122	3.9	3.8%
June	3,067	388	12.9	12.7%
July	2,952	316	10.2	10.7%
August	2,930	146	4.7	5.0%
September	2,638	109	3.6	4.1%

Strait of Hormuz transits per month, 2026

• January1,812
• February2,192
• March99
• April214
• May122
• June388
• July316
• August146
• September109

Source: IMF PortWatch, Daily Chokepoints Data, Strait of Hormuz, January to September 2026

Not every ship type pulled back equally. Car carriers almost vanished, container lines came close, and general cargo ships, the smallest by PortWatch’s tonnage, kept the largest share of their traffic.

Ship type	March to September 2025	March to September 2026	2026 as share of 2025
Tanker	11,566	566	4.9%
Container ship	4,000	131	3.3%
Dry bulk carrier	3,057	434	14.2%
General cargo ship	1,107	253	22.9%
Ro-ro	717	10	1.4%
All ship types	20,447	1,394	6.8%

The latest PortWatch week, September 28 to October 4, had 19 transits. The EIA’s October 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook assumes Middle East oil flows stay constrained through the 4th quarter, with convoys through the strait and workarounds such as ship-to-ship transfers lifting the region’s exports over the forecast. It puts Brent crude at $105 a barrel for the 4th quarter of 2026 and $84 for 2027.

US imports and exports that depend on the strait

CRS traces the strait to specific US ports using Census port-level trade data. The exposure runs both ways: industrial inputs coming in, and cars, sauces and frozen chicken going out.

Product	Direction	Gulf share	US ports CRS names
Urea fertilizer	US import	Nearly 40% of waterborne imports	New Orleans, Portland (OR), Houston, Wilmington (NC)
Aluminum	US import	About 40% of waterborne imports; almost all at New York and Houston	New York, Houston, nearly half at Baltimore
Cement	US import	About 16% of cement imports, from the UAE and Saudi Arabia	Houston, Savannah
Paraxylene	US import	About half of Charleston’s waterborne imports, from Saudi Arabia	Charleston
Passenger cars	US export	Over 20% of waterborne exports by weight, 2025; trucks 15%	New York, Savannah, Houston
Condiments and sauces	US export	Nearly 20% of exports by ship	New York, Savannah, Norfolk, New Orleans
Frozen chicken	US export	Roughly 10% of Savannah’s frozen chicken exports	Savannah
Soybeans	US export	The US is the region’s top supplier	New Orleans, Portland, San Francisco, Houston, Norfolk

On energy, the EIA counted about 0.5 million barrels a day of US crude and condensate imports through the strait in 2024, about 7% of US crude imports and 2% of US petroleum liquids consumption. To keep fuel and fertilizer moving around the US coast and soften the price effects, the administration waived the Jones Act for 60 days from March 17, 2026, through May 17, so foreign-flagged ships could carry listed products such as petroleum and fertilizer between US ports.

What the Hormuz disruption means for a brand that ships product

If you sell into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Qatar, ocean freight is the part that broke. Container ship crossings from March to September 2026 ran at 3.3% of the year before, and there is no second sea lane: a closure of the Suez Canal leaves ships the long way around Africa, while a port inside the Persian Gulf can only be reached through the strait. CRS calls trucking around it severely constrained and expensive, and air freight economical only for goods with a high value for their weight.

That splits a catalog in 2. Skincare, supplements and phone accessories can carry an air freight bill; sauces, drinks and furniture cannot. The CRS finding that nearly 20% of US sauce and condiment exports by ship go to the Gulf shows how many food brands sit on the wrong side of that line.

Stock bought for Gulf customers is better kept in your US warehouse than shipped toward a sailing that may not leave. Unshipped, it stays available to sell through other channels. On 1 of the 200 ships CRS counted waiting outside the strait to sail in during April, it earns nothing for months and still counts against your working capital.

The import side reaches brands that never ship to the Middle East. The Gulf supplies about 40% of US waterborne aluminum imports, almost all of the aluminum New York and Houston take in by ship, and about half of Charleston’s waterborne paraxylene, a chemical used to make plastic containers. A beverage or personal care brand that buys cans, aerosol bottles or plastic packaging should ask its suppliers where the metal and resin come from, and lengthen packaging lead times before it touches finished goods.

Fuel is the cost every shipper pays. The EIA expects Brent at $105 a barrel in the 4th quarter of 2026, and parcel, LTL and ocean carriers pass fuel through as surcharges that move with it, so budget fourth-quarter and January shipping at that fuel level rather than at last year’s rate card.

Plan on no reopening date. Monthly traffic climbed to 388 transits in June, then fell back to 146 in August and 109 in September. Reorder points for anything with Gulf exposure, a Gulf customer or a Gulf-made input, belong on the lead time you can see today.