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Strait of Hormuz Live Ship Tracker
 

Eight Months of Hormuz Shipping Data

By the hormuz.data-tracking.net editors · Last updated 21 October 2026 · Data through 21 October 2026

This tracker has been polling AIS positions across the Strait of Hormuz every 30 minutes since 8 March 2026, detecting each vessel that completes a crossing between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. That gives us an unusual dataset: a continuous, independently measured record of how shipping through the world's most important oil chokepoint behaved through a war. This page walks through it month by month — including the honest caveats about what changed in our own measurement along the way.

Read this first: every number below is an AIS-derived lower bound. Ships that transit with transponders off, or whose signals are lost to GPS/AIS jamming, are not counted. Month-to-month changes mix three things: real traffic shifts, reporting quality, and two marked upgrades to our own detection rules. We flag the methodology changes explicitly below.

The monthly record

MonthCompleted crossings Detected outbound oil≈ per day
March 2026 (from Mar 8)157 23.7 M bbl1.0 M
April 2026406 37.9 M bbl1.3 M
May 2026409 41.6 M bbl1.3 M
June 2026713 98.9 M bbl3.3 M
July 2026791 149.2 M bbl4.8 M
August 2026648 90.6 M bbl2.9 M
September 2026633 40.7 M bbl1.4 M
October 2026 (to Oct 21)453 25.4 M bbl1.2 M

This table, every figure quoted in the commentary below and the attack list further down are generated from the live database each time the page is served, exactly as the monthly statistics are. The wording of the commentary is editorial.

Oil volume is estimated per outbound crude/product/chemical tanker crossing as deadweight × 95% load factor × 7.33 barrels per tonne — the method is described on the methodology page. Full breakdowns by vessel type, flag and tanker are in the monthly statistics archive.

March–May: baseline building

The first three months establish the floor. Detection rules were young (March is also a partial month), and coverage of smaller traffic — dhows, tugs, service vessels — improved steadily. Detected oil flow settled around 1.3 M bbl/day over April and May: already a fraction of the ~20 M bbl/day that transited before the war, consistent with a strait operating far below its pre-war norm, with much of the remaining trade carried by vessels that do not advertise themselves on AIS.

June–July: the detected peak

June and July show the highest measured activity of the year: 713 and 791 completed crossings, with detected outbound oil peaking at 149.2 M bbl in July — about 4.8 M bbl/day, still only 24% of pre-war seaborne flow. Two caveats belong to this period. First, our fleet-data enrichment matured in late May, so more tankers carried the deadweight figures needed to count toward volume. Second, from 12 July our upstream AIS source largely stopped serving positions in the western strait (the traffic lanes and Bandar Abbas anchorages) — raw crossing detections collapsed for two weeks until we shipped compensating detection rules on 27 July and backfilled 194 crossings that the gap had hidden. July's total is honest, but it is a reconstruction of a badly jammed month, not clean data.

Mid-July onward: jamming becomes the story

Widespread GPS/AIS interference linked to the conflict has degraded position reporting across the strait since mid-July: vessels appear misplaced, delayed, or vanish mid-transit. Our detection compensates by inferring transits from zone transitions and anchorage behaviour rather than requiring a clean track, and the drop in detected traffic from July to August partly reflects reporting quality, not only real flows. The jamming guide explains the mechanics and what spoofed tracks look like.

August onward: settling lower

August recorded 648 crossings and 90.6 M bbl detected outbound (~2.9 M bbl/day), and October to date runs at 1.2 M bbl/day. Against the ~20 M bbl/day pre-war baseline that is a decline of –93% to –94% (the dashboard's headline comparison uses a rolling seven-day average, so it moves around the same range). Whether the true figure is quite that stark is unknowable from AIS alone — dark tankers move unknown volumes — but the direction and rough magnitude of the collapse are corroborated by the pattern across every vessel class we track. For scale, outbound LNG carriers numbered 9 in June, 5 in July, 2 in August, 12 in September and 5 in October to date.

Latest reported attacks

Attack reports from UKMTO over the last 30 days, newest first. Each is marked where it was reported on the live map and the 24-hour replay. UKMTO names no vessel, so none of these can be tied to a ship in our records.

Source: UKMTO (ukmto.org), Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0.

What this dataset is good for

See also: Monthly statistics archive · Can oil bypass the strait? · GPS & AIS jamming explained · FAQ