Is the Strait of Hormuz Open?

What this means

The headline verdict is anchored to IMF PortWatch, which counts commercial ship arrivals in and out of the Strait of Hormuz from satellite AIS. Before the 2026 crisis the strait handled roughly 74 commercial transits a day and about 20 million barrels of oil — close to a fifth of world petroleum supply. Today PortWatch is seeing about 12 arrivals a day, roughly 16% of that baseline — which is why the status reads severely restricted rather than a clean open/closed.

We deliberately lead with PortWatch rather than our own AIS tanker count. AIS is self-reported, and vessels transiting near Iranian waters routinely switch off their transponders — “going dark” — so a raw AIS oil-exit count is a lower bound that can read zero during an outage even while some traffic is still moving. PortWatch’s satellite-based arrival counts are the more reliable benchmark, which is why the verdict is pinned to them.

The crisis-pressure index (83/100, extreme)rolls four independent signals into one 0-100 score: how far transit has fallen below baseline, the Lloyd’s war-risk insurance multiple, the volume of crisis news, and the Brent oil premium. It moves faster than the transit count alone, so it is a useful early read on whether the situation is escalating or easing. One caveat on cadence: PortWatch publishes on a roughly weekly rhythm, so the transit figure can lag a live shooting incident by a few days — the news and insurance components of the index tend to react first.