On 29 April 2026, real-time vessel tracking through the Strait of Hormuz showed three to eight transits in a rolling twenty-four-hour window. The pre-crisis baseline at the same waterway, averaged across 2023 and 2024, was approximately sixty vessels per day. The current state is around five per cent of normal. The figures are circulated by Windward, MarineTraffic, Kpler, and the publicly accessible AIS feeds; there is no audited daily count published by any chokepoint authority because there is no chokepoint authority.<\/p>\n
Five per cent is a number it is easy to look at without quite seeing. This post tries to put the number into ordinary terms, walk through what is and is not still moving, and end with the institutional question that the number raises.<\/p>\n
At a sixty-vessel daily baseline, Hormuz is roughly the busiest oil chokepoint in the global system, handling about thirty-five per cent of all seaborne crude. A normal day in 2024 looked like a queue of tankers approaching the strait from both directions, with northbound and southbound transits separated into Traffic Separation Scheme lanes, and a working harbourmaster posture distributed between Iranian, Omani, and Emirati pilot and tug services. The waterway moved on a published rhythm that operators could plan around to within an hour.<\/p>\n
Five per cent of that, on a typical day in late April 2026, is three vessels in twenty-four hours. The gap between transits is now measured in hours rather than minutes. On some twenty-four-hour windows the count climbs to seven or eight; on others it falls to two. The CNN reporting from 29 April, drawing on the same trackers, characterised the strait as “operating at a trickle”. The Al-Monitor reporting from earlier in the week used the same word.<\/p>\n
The vessels still moving are a mixture of Iranian-government-cleared crude tankers travelling under permits negotiated through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s transit-fee arrangement, a small handful of vessels with flag-state and insurance configurations specifically tailored for the current war-risk environment, and the occasional successful transit by a major-flag VLCC that has chosen to take the risk. The cost-stack analysis from 23 April<\/a> set out what each of those vessels is paying, in aggregate, to make the transit happen.<\/p>\n The fleet that has stopped is, in commercial terms, the bulk of the global tanker book. Major-flag VLCCs operating under standard war-risk insurance arrangements are not transiting. Suezmax and Aframax tankers chartered by major oil companies have largely been held outside the strait or rerouted around it where rerouting is geographically possible. LNG carriers serving Qatari export from Ras Laffan are moving on a substantially reduced cadence. Container ships and dry-bulk carriers, which use the strait less frequently in any case, are largely deferring or rerouting. The seafarer figures from the earlier post on the twenty thousand crew stranded in the Gulf<\/a> are the human-cost reading of the same throughput floor.<\/p>\n The cargoes that the global market is therefore not receiving on schedule include a substantial fraction of Iraqi, Iranian, Kuwaiti, Saudi-eastern, Bahraini, Qatari, and Emirati crude and refined-product flows. The Asian refining belt that takes the bulk of those flows, from Singapore through coastal China to Korea and Japan, is drawing down inventory faster than usual. The European refining belt that takes a smaller fraction of the same flows is doing the same. Replacement supply from non-Hormuz origins, including West African crude into Asian refiners and Atlantic-basin refined product into the Gulf, has shifted but has not closed the gap.<\/p>\n The Suez Canal Authority publishes a monthly statistical bulletin that includes daily and monthly vessel transits, tonnage, by-type breakdowns, and revenue. The Panama Canal Authority publishes equivalent figures in its annual report and in interim updates when conditions change materially, as during the 2024 drought. The bulletins are administrative documents, not commentary; they are how the world knows, on the public record, what a chokepoint did in a given month.<\/p>\n If a Hormuz transit authority of the kind the site has been arguing for were operating today, the April 2026 bulletin would record this throughput floor at the level of named convoy windows, by-type vessel breakdowns, tonnage moved, fees collected, and disbursements made. The statistical record would be the institutional memory of the disruption, and it would be available to operators, governments, journalists, seafarer unions, insurance underwriters, and ratings agencies as a single audited source.<\/p>\n The current arrangement produces no such record. The five-per-cent figure circulating today is reconstructed from commercial AIS feeds, refinery and port data, and the analytic work of half a dozen private firms whose business models depend on selling proprietary access. The figure is reasonably accurate. It is not, in the institutional sense, public. The world reads the chokepoint through the lens of private trackers because no public lens exists.<\/p>\n It would be straightforward to read the five-per-cent number as a military fact. The United States blockade of Iranian ports is in place. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is exercising selective transit clearance. The mining and seizure activity earlier in April raised insurance premiums to levels at which most fleets cannot operate. All of that is true. None of it explains why the disruption is arrested at five per cent rather than at fifteen, or twenty-five, or fifty.<\/p>\n The disruption is arrested at five per cent because there is no institutional channel through which a vessel operator, a flag state, an insurance underwriter, or a chartering desk can negotiate the conditions under which traffic could lift. At Suez, even during the 2021 Ever Given incident, the disruption was bounded because the Canal Authority was running the response. At Panama during the 2024 drought, the throughput reduction was managed through published auction mechanisms and authority bulletins. Operators knew what to do because there was an authority to talk to.<\/p>\n At Hormuz, there is no such party. The IMO is reportedly working on a safe-passage mechanism, mentioned in early-April reporting and analysed in the stranded-seafarers post<\/a> from earlier today. The mechanism, if it lands, would do some of the work an authority would do. It would not, by itself, be an authority. The throughput floor is the operating reality of an institutional vacuum, not the operating reality of a war alone.<\/p>\n The four-to-six hundred thousand US dollar fee priced by the site’s rate schedule<\/a> for a fully loaded VLCC presumes a chokepoint authority running on the Suez and Panama model. It does not presume that the strait is open today. It presumes that the strait could be open under an institutional configuration that does not currently exist. Run a transit through the calculator<\/a> and the figure it returns is the institutional baseline. The figure the strait is currently producing, at five per cent of throughput and a six-to-ten million US dollar cost stack per VLCC, is what the absence of that institutional configuration costs.<\/p>\nWhat is not moving<\/h2>\n
What a treaty-backed bulletin would say about this<\/h2>\n
Why the throughput floor is institutional, not military<\/h2>\n
What the number tells the calculator<\/h2>\n