Korea Strait
A record low in January, most of the way back by July.
Normal −6% 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 | 211 | −9% |
| September 2026 | 218 | −6% |
| August 2026 | 212 | −9% |
| July 2026 | 218 | −6% |
| June 2026 | 225 | −3% |
| May 2026 | 214 | −8% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 202 | −13% |
| March 2026 | 204 | −12% |
| February 2026 | 192 | −17% |
| January 2026 | 184 | −20% |
| December 2025 | 204 | −12% |
| November 2025 | 210 | −9% |
| October 2025 | 215 | −7% |
| September 2025 | 225 | −3% |
| August 2025 | 216 | −7% |
| July 2025 | 226 | −3% |
| June 2025 | 228 | −2% |
| May 2025 | 227 | −2% |
| April 2025 | 227 | −2% |
| March 2025 | 227 | −2% |
| February 2025 | 211 | −9% |
| January 2025 | 217 | −6% |
| December 2024 | 220 | −5% |
| November 2024 | 226 | −3% |
Record high 258.9/day (June 2023), record low 181.2/day (January 2026), 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.
Down, then back
The Korea Strait, between the Korean peninsula and Japan, set its record low in January 2026 at 186 transits a day. It has risen in four of the six months since, reaching 214 in July, and now sits within a few percent of its long-run baseline and slightly above where it was a year ago.
The climb was not uninterrupted — April and July each came in below the month before — but the direction across the half-year is unambiguous. A route that falls and returns is unusual on this board, where most that fall stay fallen.
Why the two baselines both read “normal”
Against 2019–2023 this route is marginally below normal; against the last twelve months it is marginally above. Those two facts together say the January dip was real but temporary, and that the route has returned to its own long-run range rather than settling at a new level. Compare the Suez Canal, where the same pair of figures says the opposite.
Scale
This is one of the higher-volume routes in the set, which makes its percentages more reliable than those of the small passages elsewhere on this board — a swing of ten vessels a day is noise here and would be a third of the traffic at Mona Passage.