Strait of Hormuz, Suez & Red Sea — live ship traffic at 10 chokepoints
How many ships pass the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, Bab-el-Mandeb, Malacca, Panama, Taiwan, Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, Dover and the Cape of Good Hope each day, compared with normal. Daily counts from IMF PortWatch.
near normal (±10%)10–25% off25–50% off50%+ downwell above normal
Circle size = ships per day
// CHOKEPOINTS · 7-DAY AVERAGE VS NORMAL
// DETAIL
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7-day average
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Latest day
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2023 average
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Last 12 months
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Change
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Size
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▸ Ships per day
daily transits7-day average2023 average
▸ Ship typeslast 30 days · from the data
▸ Key facts
▸ Eventsnewest first
▸ What reshaped seaborne tradenewest first
Guide — reading the chokepoints
Every number on this page comes from IMF PortWatch. Here is how to read it.
1Read the headline
The box at the top names every chokepoint with 25% or more fewer ships than normal, and any that are far busier than usual.
2Pick what “normal” means
2023 is the year before the Red Sea crisis, good for seeing the long disruptions. Last 12 months shows what changed recently.
3Click a chokepoint
Click a circle on the map or a card. The detail panel shows the 7-day average, the latest day, both normals, the size of the strait and what happened there.
4Read the trend
Switch between 30 days, 90 days and a year. The thick line is the 7-day average, the dashed yellow line the 2023 level. Hover for a single day.
5Share or export
link copies a direct link to that chokepoint. csv saves every day of the last 400 with ship types, ready for a spreadsheet.
STATUSWhat the colours mean
The 7-day average compared with normal.
green
within 10% of normal
yellow
10–25% off
orange
25–50% fewer ships
red
more than half gone
purple
25% or more above normal, like the Cape when ships avoid the Red Sea
DATAWhat a transit is
One ship crossing the chokepoint once.
Counted
cargo ships and tankers, from satellite AIS
Types
container, dry bulk, general cargo, ro-ro, tanker
Updates
weekly, so the latest day is usually a few days old
LIMITSWhat the data misses
AIS only sees ships that broadcast.
Dark ships
ships that switch AIS off are not counted, common at Hormuz in 2026
Other ships
only cargo ships and tankers are counted, so fishing boats, warships and yachts are not
How many ships pass Hormuz, Suez and the Red Sea today?
Strait Watch shows the daily number of ships passing ten of the world's most important shipping chokepoints: the Strait of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Cape of Good Hope, the Bosphorus, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Taiwan Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Dover Strait. Each one is compared with a normal level so you can see at a glance where trade is flowing and where it is not. It is free, needs no account and works on a phone.
Where the numbers come from
The counts come from IMF PortWatch, a joint project of the International Monetary Fund and the University of Oxford. It turns satellite AIS signals (the Automatic Identification System that sea-going ships broadcast) into daily transit counts per chokepoint and per ship type. PortWatch publishes new data once a week, so the latest day here is usually a few days old. This page loads it straight from PortWatch's public service in your browser and keeps a copy, so a short outage shows the last good data with its date instead of an empty page.
“Normal” is the average from January to October 2023, the last stretch before Houthi attacks began in the Red Sea, or the average of the last 12 months, whichever you choose. An earlier version of this page filled gaps with simulated numbers and used fixed baselines typed in by hand. Both are gone. When there is no data, the page says so.
What is happening in 2026
The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since 28 February 2026, when Iran declared it shut after US and Israeli strikes. A memorandum on 17 June did not hold: Iran closed the strait again on 20 June and attacks on ships resumed in July. In the AIS data only a handful of ships a day cross, against roughly 95 a day in 2023. Some ships cross with their AIS switched off, so the true number is somewhat higher. In the Red Sea, Suez and Bab-el-Mandeb have stayed at about half their 2023 traffic since early 2024, while the Cape of Good Hope sees close to twice as many ships. After a pause from October 2025, Houthi pressure returned in July 2026 with a blockade of Saudi ports and, in September, the capture of Perim island in the strait. In August 2026 Turkey briefly stopped some ships bound for Russian and Ukrainian ports at the Bosphorus.
Why chokepoints matter
A chokepoint is a narrow passage that most ships between two seas must use. If one closes, ships wait or take a long detour, and freight rates, insurance and delivery times follow. Hormuz matters most for oil and LNG, Suez and Bab-el-Mandeb for container trade between Asia and Europe, Panama for trade between Asia and the US East Coast, and Malacca and the Taiwan Strait for almost everything that moves in East Asia. Dover is the doorway to the North Sea ports, including Antwerp-Bruges and Rotterdam.