Strait of Hormuz transits are down 60% versus their one-year norm

Quantamentry — reading chokepoint stress from vessel-transit data.

What the data shows

As of the July 24, 2026 snapshot, the Strait of Hormuz is running 60.6% below its one-year transit norm. Over the trailing 30 days an average of roughly 6 to 17 vessels a day have transited the strait, against a trailing-365-day baseline of about 58 vessels a day. That is the single largest chokepoint dislocation on our board, and it is not subtle: on the thinnest recent days, traffic through the world's most important oil artery has fallen to under a third of what it was a day earlier in the year.

Hormuz matters more than any other passage because roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne crude and a large share of LNG move through it. When its transit count collapses, the question every energy and macro desk is asking is how far, and since when — and that is exactly what a daily transit series answers before the tanker-rate and physical-cargo data catch up.

To put the magnitude in perspective: a −60.6% deviation is not the kind of number that shows up in a normal month of seasonal ebb and flow. Chokepoint traffic drifts a few points either side of its baseline as weather, holidays, and demand cycles come and go. A pullback of this size means the trailing-30-day average has fallen to roughly 39% of what a full year of transits would lead you to expect — a step-change, not a wobble. When a passage that carries a fifth of the world's seaborne oil runs at under two-fifths of its normal throughput, it is the sort of reading that flows straight into tanker rates, war-risk insurance premia, and the physical price of crude within days.

The number to anchor on: −60.6%, trailing-30-day mean versus the trailing-365-day baseline, dated to the July 24, 2026 snapshot. Everything below is how we get it and what it does and does not mean.

How do we measure chokepoint stress?

Chokepoint stress is a single percentage: the trailing-30-day mean of daily vessel transits divided by the trailing-365-day mean, minus one. A reading of 0% means traffic is running exactly at its recent-year norm; −60.6% means it is running at roughly 39% of that norm.

The underlying transit counts come from Kpler AIS vessel data surfaced through IMF PortWatch. AIS — the Automatic Identification System — is the transponder signal that ships broadcast for collision avoidance; aggregating it at a passage gives a clean daily count of how many vessels actually went through. The series updates daily with about a four-day lag, so the July 24 snapshot reflects transits through roughly July 20.

We deliberately compare a 30-day window to a 365-day window rather than day-to-day. A single quiet day is noise. A 30-day mean that has fallen well below the full-year baseline is a regime, and regimes are what move freight rates, insurance premia, and the terms of trade for import-dependent economies. The same formula runs on all five chokepoints we track, so the numbers are directly comparable across passages.

The choice of a 365-day baseline is also what makes the signal robust to seasonality. Traffic at every passage has an annual rhythm, and a shorter reference window — say, comparing this week to last week — would confuse a predictable seasonal dip with genuine stress. A full trailing year as the denominator averages the seasonal cycle out, so the deviation you read is closer to "abnormal versus normal" rather than "quiet season versus busy season." It is a blunt instrument by design: one number per passage, updated daily, that you can glance at and trust to mean the same thing every day.

The other four chokepoints right now

Hormuz is the outlier. The other four passages we track are all within a few points of their one-year norm as of the July 24, 2026 snapshot:

This is the useful contrast. Bab el-Mandeb — the southern approach to Suez, and the passage most associated with shipping disruption over the last two years — is currently running slightly above its norm at +1.6%. Panama, which spent much of 2023–24 constrained by drought-driven draft limits, is +4.2%. The stress right now is concentrated in one passage, not smeared across the map, and the board makes that legible at a glance instead of leaving you to infer it from scattered headlines.

That concentration is itself the signal. A disruption that shows up at Hormuz but not at Suez, Bab el-Mandeb, or Malacca points to something specific to the Gulf oil route rather than a broad seizure of global trade — because if the world's trade plumbing were seizing up generally, you would expect the deviation to appear across several passages at once. One passage severely stressed while the other four sit near normal is a very different picture from four passages all sagging together, and reading them side by side is the only way to tell those two stories apart. The composite view is what turns five separate transit counts into a diagnosis.

What this is not

A few boundaries matter, because a transit count is easy to over-read.

1. We report AIS transit counts, not geopolitics. The series tells you how many vessels passed a point. It does not tell you why the count moved — rerouting, conflict risk, insurance withdrawal, a demand slump, or some combination. We publish the measurement and leave the causal narrative to the reader and the newswire.
2. AIS has gaps. Transponders can be switched off, spoofed, or lost to satellite-coverage holes, and vessels sometimes "go dark" precisely in stressed waters. That behavior can depress a transit count independent of the true number of hulls moving through. A falling count is a strong signal, but it is a signal about observed transits.
3. There is a ~4-day lag. This is a fast macro series by the standards of trade data, but it is not real-time. Treat the snapshot date, not today's date, as the reference point.
4. It is not investment advice. A chokepoint reading is one input into a wider picture — commodity prices, freight rates, the affected countries' external balances — not a trade on its own.

Watch it live

The chokepoint board updates every day alongside the volatility, financial-conditions, commodity and inflation-expectation gauges that sit behind our country credibility scores. You can watch all five passages, snapshot-dated, at quantamentry.com/global.

If you want to track how a disruption like this feeds through to specific economies — the Gulf oil exporters, the import-dependent EMs whose terms of trade swing with a Hormuz shock — Create a free account — watch 3 countries and pin the ones you care about.

Sources: Kpler; UN Global Platform; IMF PortWatch (portwatch.imf.org)

— Quantamentry, July 24, 2026