Oresund Strait
One of the Baltic gates, quietly a fifth down.
Below normal −24% 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 | 40 | −22% |
| September 2026 | 38 | −26% |
| August 2026 | 41 | −20% |
| July 2026 | 40 | −23% |
| June 2026 | 41 | −20% |
| May 2026 | 43 | −16% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 42 | −19% |
| March 2026 | 43 | −16% |
| February 2026 | 42 | −19% |
| January 2026 | 44 | −15% |
| December 2025 | 47 | −8% |
| November 2025 | 48 | −6% |
| October 2025 | 45 | −11% |
| September 2025 | 48 | −7% |
| August 2025 | 48 | −6% |
| July 2025 | 47 | −8% |
| June 2025 | 46 | −10% |
| May 2025 | 48 | −7% |
| April 2025 | 46 | −10% |
| March 2025 | 50 | −2% |
| February 2025 | 46 | −11% |
| January 2025 | 45 | −11% |
| December 2024 | 43 | −15% |
| November 2024 | 48 | −7% |
Record high 63.7/day (May 2020), record low 37.8/day (October 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.
A long, undramatic decline
The Oresund is one of the Danish straits connecting the Baltic to the North Sea. Its traffic peaked in May 2020 and has drifted down more or less continuously since — no step, no closure, just a lower number most months than the one before.
It now sits about a fifth below its 2019–2023 baseline, close to its record low.
Why this route is easy to miss
Nothing here is dramatic enough to report on any given day, which is exactly why a page like this exists. A quarter of the routes on this board are within a few percent of normal and stay there; the Oresund is not one of them, but it has fallen slowly enough to never look like news.
What we are not claiming
Baltic shipping has been the subject of sustained attention for several years, and it would be easy to attach a cause to this line. This page does not. A transit count records that fewer vessels passed, not why, and any explanation offered here would be a guess wearing a number’s clothes.