Live status
Is the Strait of Hormuz open?
No
Transits have collapsed to 4% of normal. Whatever the official statements say, the boats have stopped — the strait is effectively shut.
PortWatch derives transit counts from satellite tracking on a ~4-day lag and refreshes weekly (Tuesdays), so “data as of” trails today by design — it’s the freshest reliable figure available, not a stale page.
How we decide
Three states, one honest rule
We take the 7-day average number of vessels transiting the strait and compare it to its normal baseline of about 96 crossings a day. Then it’s just arithmetic.
Traffic is at or near normal. Tankers are sailing, insurers are calm, the world’s oil is moving.
≥ 70% of baseline
Ships are still moving but well below normal. Rerouting, convoys, spiking war-risk premiums — open in theory, tense in practice.
30% – 70% of baseline
Transits have collapsed to near-zero. Whatever the official statements say, the water tells the story.
< 30% of baseline
The short version
Why this needs a whole website
The Strait of Hormuz is a 33-kilometre gap between Iran and Oman that roughly a fifth of the world’s oil squeezes through every day. So every few months, when tensions flare, someone announces it’s closed, someone else insists it’s open, oil futures do a little dance, and the rest of us are left refreshing the news trying to figure out which.
This page exists to answer the only question that matters — can ships actually get through right now? — without the geopolitics, the hot takes, or the paywall. We don’t take Tehran’s word or Washington’s. We count the boats.
Right now the answer is genuinely in the middle. After the July 2026 ceasefire between the US and Iran wobbled and renewed strikes followed, tanker owners got nervous and traffic dropped hard — but it never went to zero. Iran has re-declared the strait closed; US Central Command says it has escorted hundreds of vessels through. Both can be “true” at once, which is exactly why the big word above says it’s complicated.
Latest developments
In the news
Recent Strait of Hormuz coverage from major outlets, refreshed daily. Headlines link straight to the original reporting.
- Iran’s foreign minister calls threat of new US economic sanctions ‘desperate’
- Trump threatens Iran’s trade partners, as military strikes make way for economic pressure
- Trump threatens to bomb Oman if it ‘gets in the way’ of Iran deal as Kushner meets Netanyahu – as it happened
- Why Iran is risking so much over the Strait of Hormuz
Sources & caveats
Where the number comes from
The transit count is from IMF PortWatch, an open platform that estimates daily vessel crossings at 28 major maritime chokepoints using satellite AIS positioning. The Strait of Hormuz is chokepoint6 in their dataset. The baseline of ~96 transits/day is PortWatch’s 2024 average for the strait.
Two honest caveats. First, the data has a processing lag of a few days, so “data as of” will always trail today’s date — we show both. Second, during conflict there are documented reports of GPS jamming and AIS spoofing, so vessel counts are a strong signal, not gospel. When Tehran and Washington disagree, so can the satellites.
- Transit data: IMF PortWatch — Daily Chokepoint Transit Calls (chokepoint6).
- Chokepoint background: U.S. Energy Information Administration — ~20 million barrels/day, ~20% of global oil.
Good questions
Things people actually ask about the strait
Can Iran actually close the Strait of Hormuz?
Iran has threatened to many times and has the means to disrupt traffic — naval mines, anti-ship missiles and fast attack boats — but sealing a 33 km-wide international waterway is far harder to sustain, and the US Fifth Fleet is based next door in Bahrain to keep it open. A full closure would also strangle Iran’s own oil exports, which sail through the same strait, so analysts generally read the threat as leverage rather than a lasting act.
Has the Strait of Hormuz ever been fully closed?
No. Even during the 1980s “Tanker War,” when hundreds of ships were attacked by Iran and Iraq, the strait was never completely shut and oil kept moving. Traffic has been sharply reduced in crises — as the live figure at the top of this page shows — but a total, sustained closure has never happened.
Can the oil just go around the strait instead?
Only partly. Saudi Arabia’s East–West (Petroline) pipeline to the Red Sea and the UAE’s Habshan–Fujairah pipeline to the Gulf of Oman can bypass Hormuz, but their combined spare capacity is roughly 3.5–5.5 million barrels a day — a fraction of the ~20 million barrels that normally transit the strait (U.S. EIA). There is no route that fully replaces it.
If it does get disrupted, how long would that last?
Nobody knows for certain, but most analysts expect any serious disruption to be measured in days or weeks rather than months — both because of the international naval presence and because Iran depends on the strait for its own exports. Rather than guess, this page just tells you what the ships are doing, day by day.