The Strait of Hormuz is the world's most important oil chokepoint: the narrow passage between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula carries roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids and around a quarter of seaborne liquefied natural gas trade. This tracker follows daily commercial ship transits of the strait from AIS-derived transit calls compiled by the IMF's PortWatch platform, with data reaching back to January 2019. About this tracker ↓
22 commercial ship transits of the Strait of Hormuz were reported in the seven days through September 20, 2026 — against an all-time weekly median of 573 (127 over the past twelve months). That places the current week in the 1st percentile of every week since January 2019.
Levels are percentiles of the rolling seven-day total across the whole record: severely disrupted below the 10th, disrupted below the 25th, normal to the 90th, above normal beyond it. For this series lower is worse — incidents suppress traffic rather than drive it.
What does normal look like? From 2019 to 2025 the strait carried 25,000 to 34,000 commercial transits a year, tanker war and seizures included, which is what makes the 2026 collapse legible. Each year opens its monthly totals, its quietest and busiest stretches and the incidents that moved them.
This tracker is updated daily. Get the week's activity, losses, deliveries and inventory changes in one email every Monday. 2,065 updates logged in the last 30 days.
| Phase | Daily average | Peak day | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. The tanker war Jan 2019 – Dec 2019 Daily average 69.1 · peak day 103 (Jul 6, 2019) · 25,220 total Limpet mines damage four tankers off Fujairah in May 2019 and two more ships are attacked in the Gulf of Oman in June; after the UK detains an Iranian tanker off Gibraltar, Iran seizes the British-flagged Stena Impero in the strait itself. Gulf shipping becomes the pressure point of the US-Iran confrontation. | Jul 6, 2019 | 25,220 | |
| 2. Grey-zone pressure Jan 2020 – Mar 2023 Daily average 82.7 · peak day 131 (Feb 16, 2023) · 98,073 total Seizures and attacks continue below the threshold of open conflict — the tanker Hankuk Chemi is held for months in 2021, and a drone strike kills two crew members aboard the Mercer Street that July — yet transit traffic through the strait keeps rising through the period. | Feb 16, 2023 | 98,073 | |
| 3. The seizure wave Apr 2023 – Feb 2026 Daily average 89.0 · peak day 133 (Jun 9, 2025) · 94,706 total Iran seizes the Advantage Sweet and the Niovi within a week in spring 2023, prompting a US naval reinforcement of the strait; the St Nikolas and MSC Aries follow in 2024 as the Red Sea crisis spreads the confrontation across the region's chokepoints. | Jun 9, 2025 | 94,706 | |
| 4. The 2026 collapse Feb 2026 – present Daily average 6.9 · peak day 57 (Feb 28, 2026) · 1,420 total The opening strikes of Operation Epic Fury sink much of Iran's fleet at Bandar Abbas and commercial transits collapse by more than ninety percent within days. A partial recovery under the June ceasefire reverses when the Islamabad Memorandum framework collapses in July. | Feb 28, 2026 | 1,420 |
| Date | Transits | Tankers | Cargo ships | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 9, 2025 | 133 | 69 | 64 | — |
| Feb 16, 2023 | 131 | 73 | 58 | — |
| Oct 12, 2023 | 131 | 79 | 52 | — |
| Jul 2, 2024 | 131 | 78 | 53 | — |
| Aug 28, 2024 | 131 | 81 | 50 | — |
The 2026 Iran war has its own losses tracker. Aircraft and warship losses of the US–Iran war that began in February 2026 are tracked separately. This page follows the strait itself — a series that predates the war by seven years and will outlive it.
IMF PortWatch data published on GMN's Strait of Hormuz tracker shows commercial ship transits averaging 3.17 a day over 1-6 September 2026, against 85.5 a day in 2025; other counters read higher, but every independent count is a small fraction of the pre-war norm.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on 8 September 2026 it had recovered a US Navy Anduril Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz; US Central Command said the vehicle had malfunctioned more than a day earlier, and Anduril confirmed the loss.
The United States decommissioned its four Bahrain-based Avenger-class mine hunters in September 2025 and shipped the hulls home in January 2026. When Iran began mining the Strait of Hormuz two months later, according to CENTCOM, the Navy had to sail two of its last four minesweepers from Japan.
The Strait of Hormuz is the world's most important oil chokepoint: the narrow passage between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula carries roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids and around a quarter of seaborne liquefied natural gas trade.
This tracker follows daily commercial ship transits of the strait from AIS-derived transit calls compiled by the IMF's PortWatch platform, with data reaching back to January 2019. PortWatch classifies every transit as either a tanker or a cargo ship (container, dry bulk, general cargo, ro-ro), so the two categories sum to the total; warships, fishing vessels and ships sailing with their transponders off are not counted. Alongside the traffic series, it logs the discrete incidents that have made the strait a flashpoint: the limpet-mine attacks and tanker seizures of the 2019 tanker war, the grey-zone boardings and drone attacks of the following years, and the escalation that accompanied the 2026 Iran war, when transits collapsed to a fraction of their pre-war level after the opening strikes of Operation Epic Fury. Each incident carries its date, location and public source citations; the transit series is updated as PortWatch publishes, typically weekly with a lag of about ten days, and occasionally revised.
Detailed statistics: Strait of Hormuz Ship Transits — Statistics by Year and Month
Over the seven days through September 20, 2026, 22 were reported — below the all-time weekly median of 573, which puts the current week in the 1st percentile of every week on record and rates traffic as severely disrupted.
Over the 30 days through September 20, 2026, 121 were recorded, down from 140 in the previous 30 days. The single-day record is 133 on June 9, 2025.
The Strait of Hormuz, between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, is the world's most important oil chokepoint: roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids and about a quarter of seaborne liquefied natural gas pass through it. It is the only sea route out of the Persian Gulf, so any disruption moves world energy markets within hours.
Commercial traffic has collapsed to a fraction of its usual level, though it has not stopped entirely: over the 30 days through September 20, 2026, an average of 4.0 ship transits per day was recorded, against an average of 83.4 per day across the years before February 2026 — 95% lower.
Across the whole series since January 2019, an average of 77.8 transits per day was recorded, with a single-day record of 133 on June 9, 2025. The current 30-day average is 4.0 per day.
Transit counts are AIS-derived estimates compiled by IMF PortWatch from satellite ship-tracking data (sources: Kpler; UN Global Platform; IMF PortWatch, portwatch.imf.org). PortWatch publishes roughly weekly with a lag of about ten days, so the newest days appear here once published — and already-published days are occasionally revised. The series counts commercial vessels only. Incidents are logged individually with a date and a public source link.
Daily monitoring covers 2,820 days since January 2019, with 219,419 transits recorded by the primary series over that span.