Luzon Strait
A step change in May 2026, still holding.
Far above normal +36% 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 | 98 | +41% |
| September 2026 | 93 | +33% |
| August 2026 | 89 | +28% |
| July 2026 | 94 | +35% |
| June 2026 | 86 | +23% |
| May 2026 | 86 | +24% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 63 | −10% |
| March 2026 | 63 | −10% |
| February 2026 | 67 | −4% |
| January 2026 | 68 | −3% |
| December 2025 | 57 | −18% |
| November 2025 | 65 | −6% |
| October 2025 | 73 | +5% |
| September 2025 | 68 | −2% |
| August 2025 | 65 | −7% |
| July 2025 | 66 | −5% |
| June 2025 | 71 | +2% |
| May 2025 | 62 | −11% |
| April 2025 | 69 | −1% |
| March 2025 | 65 | −7% |
| February 2025 | 61 | −12% |
| January 2025 | 73 | +5% |
| December 2024 | 78 | +12% |
| November 2024 | 69 | −1% |
Record high 97.9/day (August 2026), record low 53.3/day (April 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.
The date is unusually clean
Luzon Strait ran close to its long-run average for years. In May 2026 the daily count went from 62 to 86 inside a month and has stayed near that level since, reaching its highest readings in two years.
Step changes this abrupt are rare on this board. Most routes drift. This one did not.
It did not happen alone
Mindoro Strait, on the other side of the Philippine archipelago, stepped up in the same month — from 32 a day to 52 — and is now well above its own baseline. Balabac is up against last year too.
Three neighbouring routes moving together in one month is worth more than any one of them moving alone. What it does not do is explain itself: a coincidence in timing across nearby waters is a pattern, not a cause, and this page stops where the data stops.
Reading the two baselines
Against 2019–2023 and against last year, Luzon reads about the same — roughly a third up on both. That is the signature of a recent change rather than a long-standing one: when a route has been elevated for years, the two figures diverge, as they do at the Cape of Good Hope.