{"id":14,"date":"2026-04-15T07:35:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T07:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/?p=14"},"modified":"2026-04-15T07:35:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T07:35:54","slug":"trump-says-the-us-should-charge-hormuz-tolls-the-real-question-is-who-collects-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/2026\/04\/15\/trump-says-the-us-should-charge-hormuz-tolls-the-real-question-is-who-collects-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Says the US Should Charge Hormuz Tolls. The Real Question Is Who Collects Them."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Monday, 6 April 2026, US President Donald Trump told reporters something no sitting American president has ever said in public: <strong>he wants the United States to charge tolls for transit through the Strait of Hormuz.<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&ldquo;What about us charging tolls? I&rsquo;d rather do that than let them have them.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; President Donald Trump, 6 April 2026, responding to a reporter&rsquo;s question about Iran collecting fees from vessels using the strait. <em>(Al Jazeera, 6 April 2026)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>He added: &ldquo;We have a concept where we&rsquo;ll charge tolls,&rdquo; and &mdash; in the same exchange &mdash; &ldquo;We&rsquo;re the winner. We won.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>For a site whose sole reason for existing is to model exactly this kind of toll system, the moment is impossible to ignore. The President of the United States has now publicly endorsed the idea that the world&rsquo;s most important maritime chokepoint should be tolled. The question is no longer <em>whether<\/em> Hormuz transit gets priced &mdash; Iran has already started doing it, charging permitted vessels reportedly over $1 million per passage. The question is <em>by whom, under what governance, and on what published rate schedule.<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>Three reactions to Trump&rsquo;s &ldquo;concept&rdquo;<\/h2>\n<p>The reaction from Tehran was immediate. Iran&rsquo;s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared: <em>&ldquo;The Strait of Hormuz situation won&rsquo;t return to its pre-war status.&rdquo;<\/em> Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called for <em>&ldquo;new arrangements,&rdquo;<\/em> proposing that <em>&ldquo;after the war, the first step should be drafting a new protocol for the Strait of Hormuz&rdquo;<\/em> &mdash; pointedly insisting that any such protocol should be negotiated <em>only between countries bordering the waterway<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>That last clause is the heart of the disagreement. Trump frames the toll as a unilateral US prerogative (&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather do that than let them have them&rdquo;). Tehran frames it as a regional sovereignty matter, exclusively for littoral states. Both positions, taken alone, are structurally unworkable for the global shipping industry that actually uses the strait.<\/p>\n<h2>Why neither unilateral model survives contact with shipping reality<\/h2>\n<p>Consider the asymmetric problem each version creates:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>A US-collected Hormuz toll<\/strong> would be vetoed in practice by every flag state and operator routing through the Gulf to non-US destinations. Chinese-flagged tankers carrying Iranian crude to Shandong refineries are not going to remit tolls to the US Treasury. Russian, Indian, Pakistani, and Qatari operators face the same incentive. The US would collect from cooperative parties only, which is to say a fraction of actual traffic, while the rest divert, evade, or simply default. Revenue collection at chokepoints requires near-universal compliance. Unilateral collection guarantees the opposite.<\/li>\n<li><strong>An Iran-collected Hormuz toll<\/strong>, currently being improvised at $1M+ per ship, faces the inverse problem. Western operators, US-allied flag states, and US-sanctioned hulls cannot legally remit fees to Tehran. The current ad-hoc Iranian fees are creating a two-tier transit system &mdash; Chinese, Russian, and select sanctioned tonnage paying and clearing; everyone else stranded or evading. That is not a toll regime. That is a partial blockade with a price tag.<\/li>\n<li><strong>A genuinely useful Hormuz toll<\/strong> would have to be flag-blind, non-discriminatory, published, audited, and operated by an institution that no single party can capture. In other words, it would have to look structurally like the Suez Canal Authority or the Panama Canal Authority &mdash; independent legal entities with multilateral legitimacy, transparent rate schedules, and revenue allocations published in audited annual reports.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The Suez and Panama precedents Trump didn&rsquo;t cite (but should have)<\/h2>\n<p>The Suez Canal Authority, founded in 1956, collected $9.4 billion in transit dues in 2023. The Panama Canal Authority, established in 1997, collected $4.97 billion in fiscal year 2023. Both authorities operate under a model that took a century to develop and which contains four critical features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Legal independence<\/strong> from the territorial state&rsquo;s daily political agenda. Even though both authorities are housed in their host countries, they are constituted as separate legal entities with independent boards and ring-fenced revenues.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Published, formula-based rate schedules.<\/strong> Vessels know in advance what they will pay. Rates are reviewed annually with industry consultation, not announced in press conferences.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Non-discriminatory application.<\/strong> A US-flagged supertanker, a Chinese-owned VLCC, and an Iranian-flagged product tanker pay the same rate per ton. The toll is on the vessel, not the politics.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Audited revenue use tied to the waterway itself.<\/strong> Toll revenues fund pilotage, dredging, navigational aids, security, and emergency response &mdash; the actual cost base of keeping the chokepoint open. Surplus goes to host-country general revenue, but the operating obligation comes first.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Strip any one of these out and the system stops working. A toll without independent governance becomes a tax. A toll without a published schedule becomes a bribe. A toll without non-discriminatory application becomes a sanction. A toll without audited revenue use becomes a slush fund. <strong>What Trump described on April 6 contains none of the four. What Iran is currently improvising contains none of the four either.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>What a structured Hormuz toll would actually look like<\/h2>\n<p>This site exists to demonstrate the alternative. The <a href=\"\/..\/index.php\">Hormuz Toll Calculator<\/a> implements a working model with all four governance features. Vessel type, size class, capacity, and operational parameters drive a deterministic fee. The <a href=\"\/..\/rates.html\">Rate Schedule<\/a> publishes every component openly &mdash; $3.25 per SCNT for crude tankers, $2.10 per m&sup3; for LNG carriers, $0.80 per DWT for dry bulk, fixed transit fees by size class, and surcharges for war-risk, dangerous cargo, priority slot, and escort tug. The <a href=\"\/..\/faq.html\">FAQ<\/a> explains the calculation order, the discount logic, and the rationale for each component.<\/p>\n<p>None of this is hypothetical. The model is built directly on the Suez and Panama experience, adapted to the Hormuz traffic mix and risk profile. A 300,000 DWT VLCC under elevated-threat conditions pays roughly $630,000 in our model &mdash; a transparent, predictable figure that includes funded escort capacity and security operations. Compare that with the current Iranian ad-hoc fee of $1 million-plus, paid to no audited account, funding no published security capability. Or compare it with a notional US toll, collectible only from a fraction of traffic. The structured model wins on every dimension that matters: cost, predictability, compliance, and effectiveness.<\/p>\n<h2>What April 6 changed<\/h2>\n<p>Before Monday, the proposition that Hormuz should have a formal toll authority was an academic argument. After Monday, it is a presidential policy proposal &mdash; underspecified, unilaterally framed, but on the table. That changes the conversation in two ways.<\/p>\n<p>First, it makes the <em>governance question<\/em> the urgent one. The world is now debating not whether to charge tolls, but who collects them and under what rules. That is a much narrower and more tractable question than the previous &ldquo;should there be tolls at all.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Second, it creates a window for serious institutional design. Foreign Minister Araghchi&rsquo;s call for &ldquo;a new protocol for the Strait of Hormuz&rdquo; is, stripped of its territorial framing, an invitation to negotiate exactly the kind of multilateral chokepoint authority the strait has lacked for fifty years. The US is asking for the same thing in different words. Both sides have, for the first time, publicly endorsed the principle. The disagreement is now about the institution.<\/p>\n<p>It is the right disagreement to have. And it is one for which there is a working model already on the public record, freely available, with the math worked out and the rate schedule published. <a href=\"\/..\/index.php\">It is here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>References: Trump remarks reported by Al Jazeera, 6 April 2026 (&ldquo;Trump says US could charge for Strait of Hormuz passage amid Iran war&rdquo;). Suez Canal Authority and Panama Canal Authority annual revenue figures from their published 2023 financial reports.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 6 April 2026, President Trump publicly endorsed the idea of charging tolls for Hormuz transit \u2014 the first sitting US president to do so. Iran is already improvising fees of $1M+ per ship. Both versions are unworkable. The Suez and Panama models show what a real chokepoint authority looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[5,26,6,24,27,25,8,4,7],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","category-toll-system","tag-2026-crisis","tag-araghchi","tag-chokepoint-governance","tag-donald-trump","tag-ghalibaf","tag-iran","tag-panama-canal","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-suez-canal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}