How Many Ships Pass Through the Strait of Hormuz Each Day?
On a normal day about 73 commercial vessels cross the Strait of Hormuz. Since the closure was declared at the end of February 2026 the count has run in the low single digits, roughly 1 to 5 percent of normal. Helious counts the crossings itself and publishes the number twice a day, because what happens to shipping in the Gulf ends up in the oil price, and from there in inflation, bonds and equities.
1. How many ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz each day?
Across the twelve months before the closure the strait carried a median of about 73 transits a day. That counts tankers, container ships, bulk carriers and general cargo together. Quiet months near 50 and busy months above 90 are both routine, so the level on its own tells you very little until you set it against the strait's own history.
Set the current tape against that history and it looks like a different waterway. Most days now print below 5 transits, and on several of them the tanker count has been zero. The norm is deliberately pinned to the pre-closure window rather than recalculated as it goes. A rolling average would sag toward the disruption the longer the disruption lasted, so a strait running at one percent of normal would look like it was slowly recovering while nothing at sea had changed. The live series is on the Helious Hormuz transit monitor.
2. Why does the Strait of Hormuz matter so much for oil?
The Strait of Hormuz is the only sea route out of the Persian Gulf. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and a large share of global LNG go through it, down shipping lanes only a few miles wide.
There is no spare sea lane. Cargo that cannot get through waits at anchor, squeezes into the limited overland pipelines, or does not ship at all. That is why traders read the transit count as a physical supply number, not shipping trivia.
3. How does Helious count the transits?
A transit is one commercial vessel crossing the narrows, read from satellite AIS tracks. AIS is the position signal a ship broadcasts. Every voyage between the Gulf and the open ocean has to cross the same line and there is no way around it, so the yardstick never moves.
The crossing only counts when two consecutive positions from the same ship land on opposite sides of that line. Sitting near the narrows scores nothing. Neither does queueing at anchor, or entering the approaches and turning back. Once a ship has crossed it cannot count again for 48 hours, so a slow multi-day passage is one transit rather than five. Each vessel gets classed tanker, cargo or other from the ship type it broadcasts, the crossing is marked inbound or outbound, and the day rolls up against the prior day, the 7-day average, the 30-day average and the long-run norm.
What comes out of that is a floor rather than a total. The gate can only see vessels that are broadcasting, and through mid-2026 a large share of tanker transits have crossed with transponders switched off, so more hulls move than any AIS series can count. A day with too little signal goes into the record as a gap and never as a zero, because silence is a measurement problem and not an empty strait.
One figure on the monitor is easy to mistake for the count. The live Gulf activity gauge shows vessels underway anywhere in the region right now. Those ships have not passed the strait, some never will, and none of them joins the transit count without crossing the line.
Publication runs weekly, on Tuesdays, carrying days through the preceding Sunday. So the freshest day available is somewhere between two and nine days behind, and the same figure sits there for the rest of the week. Every number we publish carries the day it measures and how old that day is, which is what stops a repeat looking like a stalled page.
The result posts to the Helious terminal feed twice a day, at 8:30am and 3:30pm ET. The full series sits on the data page.
4. What has happened to Hormuz traffic in 2026?
Traffic held at about 70 a day through February, sitting in the normal band it had kept all year. Then March, the month closure was declared, averaged 2.8 a day. The strait shut in days rather than weeks.
April and May were the deepest stretch, 5.0 then 3.2 a day. June and July looked briefly like a reopening, 10.7 then 8.4, and it did not hold. August so far is running at 4.0 a day, with several days at zero or one.
Against a 73 per day norm that is roughly 1 to 5 percent of normal, and the strait has now been shut to commercial traffic for close to six months. The 30-day chart on the monitor page covers the current stretch, and the June recovery attempt and its failure are both in the full series.
5. What do fewer tankers mean for oil prices?
Fewer tankers through Hormuz means less carried crude reaching the market. Supply that refiners and traders had already priced in simply stops arriving. Inventories draw down, buyers compete for the barrels that are left, and both spot cargoes and futures get bid up.
Ship movements show that squeeze before delivered-cargo statistics or official inventory data can, which is what makes the transit count an early physical read. You can watch crude react on the terminal's commodities board, next to the count itself.
6. What does a Hormuz supply squeeze mean for inflation?
Energy sits behind almost every other price. Fuel costs pass into freight, production and food with a lag of weeks to months, so a sustained oil squeeze holds headline inflation up and gradually seeps into core.
Traders call that sticky inflation, and they mean something narrower than one hot print. It is a floor under the price level put there by supply, and monetary policy cannot lift it quickly. It is also how a shipping count in the Gulf turns up months later in the CPI prints.
7. What does it mean for bonds and the Fed?
Sticky inflation pushes the Federal Reserve to hold rates higher for longer and puts cuts the market has already priced at risk. Both of those hit bonds. The expected policy path rises, and investors demand more inflation compensation on top of it.
Higher yields mean lower bond prices, so a persistent Hormuz squeeze is bearish for bonds. The front end, meaning the short maturities, moves most because it tracks the policy path. The rates page shows the curve reaction in basis points, and the 2s10s spread tells you whether the market is repricing the Fed or the economy.
8. What does it mean for equities?
Higher energy costs squeeze margins across most sectors, and a higher-for-longer rate path raises the discount rate on future earnings, so equities get hit from both sides at once. Energy producers can gain from the squeeze. The broad index bias under a sustained supply squeeze is still to the downside.
In practice the equity market takes its cue from how the bond market reprices the Fed, which is why the monitor sits next to the scored feed and the futures board on the terminal.
9. Where can I see the Hormuz transit data each day?
Two places, both updated daily. helious.io/data/hormuz carries the full series, with the latest count, the comparisons and the 30-day chart. The monitor card also posts into the terminal feed twice a day, at 8:30am and 3:30pm ET, alongside the live news feed, the economic calendar and the auctions hub.
10. How should a trader use the transit count day to day?
Treat it like a physical data release rather than a headline. It is measured the same way every day, so the trend and the turns carry the signal, not any single print. One day on its own is noisy, which is why the comparison worth making is today against the 7-day average rather than today against yesterday. If it is the oil read you are after, the tanker share is the line to follow: cargo ships matter for trade, tankers matter for crude.
Watch for recovery as hard as you watch for collapse. The day flow normalises is the day the inflation premium starts coming out of oil, yields and breakevens, meaning the inflation rate priced into bonds. And put the count next to the curve. If the count stays collapsed and yields keep rising, the bond market is trading the same story. If they diverge, one of them is wrong.