Gibraltar Strait
The Mediterranean's western door, holding level.
Normal +3% against its 2019–2023 baseline
Reading for — 6 days ago. Figures are a 30-day mean, so one quiet day does not move them.
Two years of daily transits
Month by month
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | 135 | +4% |
| September 2026 | 133 | +3% |
| August 2026 | 129 | −1% |
| July 2026 | 128 | −1% |
| June 2026 | 133 | +2% |
| May 2026 | 135 | +4% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 132 | +1% |
| March 2026 | 137 | +5% |
| February 2026 | 141 | +9% |
| January 2026 | 123 | −5% |
| December 2025 | 139 | +7% |
| November 2025 | 137 | +5% |
| October 2025 | 135 | +4% |
| September 2025 | 137 | +6% |
| August 2025 | 132 | +2% |
| July 2025 | 136 | +5% |
| June 2025 | 134 | +3% |
| May 2025 | 137 | +5% |
| April 2025 | 136 | +5% |
| March 2025 | 137 | +6% |
| February 2025 | 139 | +7% |
| January 2025 | 125 | −3% |
| December 2024 | 131 | +1% |
| November 2024 | 129 | −1% |
Record high 153.3/day (December 2023), record low 100.9/day (February 2019), on the 30-day mean since January 2019.
Source
Daily transit counts derived from satellite AIS positions by IMF PortWatch, covering 2841 days from 1 January 2019.
Source: IMF PortWatch, https://portwatch.imf.org. PortWatch is published under IMF terms rather than CC BY 4.0, unlike the rest of the data on this site: the figures here are derived and transformed, and the underlying series is not republished.
Level, despite what happened east of it
Gibraltar is the Atlantic entrance to the Mediterranean, and it runs within a percent of its 2019–2023 baseline. That is more interesting than it sounds. The Suez Canal, at the other end of the same sea, is down by roughly a third.
A ship that would have entered the Mediterranean at Gibraltar and left through Suez now often does neither. That Gibraltar has not fallen in step says the Mediterranean’s own traffic — the trade that begins or ends there — is largely intact, and it is the through-route that changed.
Its record is unusually flat
The high is December 2023, the low February 2019, and the whole range sits inside a fairly narrow band. The largest single-month move in the record is February 2026, from 124 to 141 — recovered within two months.
What the count includes
Every vessel transiting the strait, in either direction, regardless of where it came from or is going. It cannot distinguish a ship bound for Suez from one calling at a Mediterranean port, which is exactly why the comparison with Suez above is suggestive rather than conclusive.