Strait of Hormuz

The data dates the closure without being told about it

Transits ran at ordinary levels through late February 2026 — 152 vessels on the 22nd. They fell through the final days of the month, dropped below ten on 2 March, and reached zero on 13 and 14 March.

It happened once more, on 27 April. Those three days are the only ones in the whole record, back to January 2019, on which no vessel transited at all. The April stop matters because of when it came: seven weeks after the first, with nothing resembling a recovery in between. Across those 43 days the strait averaged under eight transits a day and stayed in single digits on 33 of them. Its busiest day in the window carried 22 vessels — a quarter of what this route handled routinely before.

Nothing in this pipeline knows about the war that began on 28 February. The series is a count of ships derived from satellite positions, and it locates the event on its own.

The London market’s Joint War Committee — Lloyd’s and IUA underwriters, working from entirely different information — revised its listed areas over the same period, adding Gulf states to the schedule that governs hull war cover. Its current circular, JWLA-034 of 29 July 2026, amends the Persian/Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman area again.

The committee publishes these as numbered circulars rather than as a dated feed, and we have verified only the current one directly, so the exact date of the March revision is not stated here. The point stands without it: underwriters and satellites moved on the same waters in the same period, from unrelated information.

Four months on

Traffic has partially returned but remains far below the level this route carried for the five years before. The monthly table below shows the shape: a near-total stop in March, a slow partial recovery through the summer, and nothing resembling the pre-2026 baseline.

What a transit count can and cannot tell you

It counts vessels that passed. It does not measure cargo value, tanker tonnage, insurance cost, or the volume of oil that reached buyers by other routes. A page that claimed otherwise would be reading more into a ship count than a ship count contains.