This is background information, not a data page — it isn’t regenerated by our daily job the way the estimate and its history are. The quarterly figures below are current as of the same EIA release our model uses (see sources & methodology for the live release date); if that page shows a newer release than “12 August 2026”, this page may lag until we update it by hand. Figures last checked against that page: 2026-10-01.
The Strait of Hormuz connects the Gulf — the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran, called the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf depending on who you ask — to the Gulf of Oman and, beyond that, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. It runs between Iran’s southern coast to the north and the Musandam Peninsula, the northern tip of Oman, to the south, with the United Arab Emirates further along the same southern shore.
At its narrowest, the strait is only about 21 nautical miles (roughly 39 kilometres) wide, and the channel deep and safe enough for laden oil tankers is narrower still. Ships heading into the Gulf and ships heading out use separate shipping lanes, each about 2 nautical miles wide, divided by a 2-nautical-mile buffer — so in practice, essentially all inbound and outbound tanker traffic funnels through a corridor just a few miles across, passing through Iranian and Omani territorial waters.
These are geographic facts about the strait’s location and layout, not something we measure or model — unlike the figures further down this page, they don’t change quarter to quarter.
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar sit on the Gulf, and seaborne exports from all of them have to pass through this one strait to reach open ocean — there is no other sea route out. A limited amount of crude can move overland by pipeline instead, bypassing the strait entirely; that is one reason Gulf oil production and the volume actually transiting Hormuz don’t move in perfect lockstep, which matters for how our own estimate is built (see sources & methodology). But most of what these producers pump has nowhere else to go by sea, which is the basic reason a disruption here is felt well beyond the region.
In the four quarters before the 2026 disruption (January 2025 through December 2025), EIA’s own published figures for everything moving through the strait — crude oil, condensate and refined products together — ran close to 21 million barrels a day: 20.9, then 21.0, then 21.3, then 21.6 million barrels a day, quarter by quarter. Around seventy percent of that was crude oil and condensate (14.8–15.9 million barrels a day across those same quarters), and the rest was refined products (5.7–6.3 million barrels a day).
The same EIA release also reports liquefied natural gas moving through the strait, tracked separately from oil: about 11 billion cubic feet a day in those calm quarters, falling in step with the oil figures through 2026 to under 1 billion cubic feet a day by the second quarter of the year. LNG isn’t part of our own daily oil-flow estimate, which is why it doesn’t appear on the home page or in our published figures — but it comes from the same cleared EIA table, so we note it here for context rather than leave it out.
All of this fell fast and hard through the first half of 2026 — total oil down to 14.9 million barrels a day in the first quarter and 4.9 in the second. See today’s estimate and the estimate history page for the full chart and our own daily figures since; see sources & methodology for exactly where the quarterly numbers above come from.
The same EIA release that reports Hormuz also reports a handful of the world’s other maritime oil corridors, in the same table our regime detector uses as a control group (see sources & methodology). In those same four calm 2025 quarters, Hormuz carried roughly four to five times as much oil as the Bab el-Mandeb strait and about seven to eight times as much as the Panama Canal — while the Strait of Malacca, further downstream and fed by trade from a wider set of regions and not only the Gulf, carried somewhat more than Hormuz did. So we won’t claim, from our own data, that Hormuz is the single highest-volume oil chokepoint on raw barrel count — it isn’t, by this measure, against Malacca.
EIA itself has called Hormuz “the world’s most important oil chokepoint,” in a 2019 analysis using 2018 figures — attributed here as EIA’s own claim, not verified or restated as our own, since it draws on data outside our cleared Table 4 series. Their case for “most important” isn’t about raw volume against any one other strait: EIA put Hormuz’s 2018 flow at about a third of all global seaborne-traded oil and said over a quarter of global LNG trade also passed through it that year, while noting only Saudi Arabia and the UAE had meaningful pipeline capacity to bypass it at all. The “limited alternative route” half of that claim is one we can independently confirm from our own cleared data: nearly all the Gulf’s seaborne oil has nowhere else to go, which is why a disruption here behaves differently from one at, say, the Panama Canal. The global-trade-share figures are EIA’s own and dated to 2018 — we haven’t re-derived them and don’t know today’s equivalent share, so we cite them as EIA’s claim rather than ours.
Nobody publishes a daily figure for oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz that is free to republish. Commercial tanker-tracking services exist and some are reported on daily, but their underlying data is licensed, not open, and we checked and rejected the ones we could find terms for (see sources & methodology for exactly which, and why). The public, freely republishable record — the EIA figures this page draws on — arrives a quarter at a time, months after the fact.
So the number on our home page is our own model’s estimate, not a measurement: built from that quarterly record plus a monthly production signal, published with an honest uncertainty range, and suppressed entirely once it runs past the horizon we’ve actually tested. The full method, including what it gets wrong and by how much, is on the sources & methodology page; see terms for how we describe the limits of relying on any of it.