On the first of September, two American officials told CNN that forty commercial ships had crossed the Strait of Hormuz under US military escort in a single day. It was, they said, a wartime record. On the same day, Kpler, the commodity-tracking firm whose numbers traders pay for, counted eleven.
Neither side had to be lying for both numbers to exist. That is the uncomfortable part. Forty and eleven are not two estimates of one thing. They are two counts of two different things, published under the same name, and nobody in the system is required to say which one is the strait.
Seven months into the 2026 crisis, the most watched waterway on earth has no agreed traffic figure. It has four ways of counting, each built on a different definition of what a crossing is and each published on a different clock, and one coordinating body that does not count at all. The four numbers are quoted as if they were the same number. This essay lays them side by side.
Four counts and a silence
Start with what each source actually measures, because the disagreement begins there and not in anyone's arithmetic.
Kpler counts confirmed crossings: vessels whose passage through its monitored Hormuz zone it can verify. Its own methodology note calls its figures "confirmed floors" that "revise upward as confirmations land." A Kpler number for yesterday is a minimum, published knowing it will grow.
Lloyd's List Intelligence counts non-Iranian-linked cargo ships over 10,000 deadweight tonnes, in weekly blocks from Monday to Sunday. Small vessels are excluded by design. Its weekly briefs say the latest figures are likely to rise "as more dark transits are confirmed," and on the first of September it warned that its own daily average might be incomplete "due to a lag in identifying dark transits."
IMF PortWatch, the most widely cited free source, builds its counts from AIS, the automatic identification signal ships broadcast. Al Jazeera, comparing sources in early September, found that PortWatch showed an average of seven vessels a day since March.
The US government counts escorts and assisted passages. Reports of the CNN account described the forty of the first of September variously as commercial vessels, ships and tankers, all moving under military protection. They published no list and no definition, and Lloyd's noted that an official count may include smaller vessels or ships not carrying cargo, which its own threshold excludes. That is a possibility, not a finding; without the list, nobody outside the operation can check it.
The Joint Maritime Information Center, the naval coordination body that issues the advisories ship operators actually read, publishes no vessel count at all. Its advisory of the first of September said only that traffic remained "far below baseline," with the threat level at severe.
Four counts. One advisory that does not count. One word: transits.
How each source counts Hormuz traffic
The ships that are there and not there
The single largest reason the counts diverge has a name in the trade: dark transits.
Before the war, fewer than one percent of Hormuz crossings were classified as dark, according to Kpler. In Kpler's usage the word means a crossing whose route cannot be confirmed from tracking data, whatever the cause: a transponder switched off, a signal jammed or spoofed, a gap in satellite coverage. Since the eighth of July, the firm has classified about two thirds of them that way. During the sixty days of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, which expired on the seventeenth of August, the share of crossings whose route Kpler could only mark as dark or unknown never fell below 44 percent, and it ended the period above 80. On Sunday the twelfth of July, preliminary Kpler data analysed by Bloomberg showed six ships crossing. All six had their transponders off.
Dark does not mean invisible, and it does not mean illicit. Not every dark crossing is a decision on the bridge; some are interference, some are gaps in reception, some are routes a tracker cannot reconstruct. A tanker that switches off its transponder can still be placed by satellite imagery, by the cargo it discharges, by the port records it eventually leaves behind. What it removes is the cheap, automatic, same-day layer of the picture. The ship is found, but later, and by more expensive means.
That changes what a daily number is. An AIS-based count on the day of crossing measures the ships that chose to be seen. A confirmed-crossings count measures the ships that have been found so far. A weekly count published ten days after the week closes has had more time to find them. None of these is wrong. They are photographs of the same water taken at different exposures.
Turning off a transponder does not make a tanker disappear. It makes the tanker harder to turn into an agreed number before the political use of that number has expired.
Barrels back, ships not
The counts diverge a second time when the unit changes from ships to oil.
On the first of October, Kpler reported that crude exports from the Middle East Gulf were running around their pre-conflict level of about 18.5 million barrels a day. The ship counts tell a different story, and the fair comparison is a source against itself. On Kpler's own measure of all vessel types, the strait handled more than 130 crossings a day before the war; in mid-August, its five-day average was about ten, as reported by CNBC. Lloyd's, counting only non-Iranian cargo ships over 10,000 tonnes, recorded 117 such transits in the week of 14 to 20 September, roughly seventeen a day on that narrower definition.
Both can be true, and the reason is in the small print. Kpler labels its chart as Hormuz clearance including the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea, and states that diverted volumes from Saudi Arabia's west coast and the UAE's east coast are included: oil that travels through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea, and through the Emirati route to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman. Those barrels leave the Gulf. They do not cross Hormuz. The ship count measures the strait; the barrel count measures the system that grew up to avoid it.
So a headline that says Hormuz oil is back to normal, and a headline that says Hormuz traffic is a fraction of normal, can both be sourced, both be correct, and describe different objects. A reader who sees only one of them has been told something true and left with something false.
Forty and eleven
Return to the first of September. Trump had said the day before that the US Navy was helping some thirty ships a night through the strait. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put flows at "at least 10 million barrels" a day, with fifteen to seventeen million on the Monday. Kpler counted five vessels that Monday and eleven on the Tuesday. Lloyd's counted about twelve a day for the week to the first of September, and said that number might rise.
The easy reading is that the officials exaggerated. The more accurate one is narrower. An escort count includes the vessels the operation moved, by a definition it does not publish. A commodity tracker counts only the ships it can confirm, and only the ones carrying commodities. A single day's figure, real or not, was released in the week a reopening was being argued, and it was widely read as the condition of the strait. The question is not whether forty ships moved. It is whether forty describes the ordinary state of the waterway in the weeks that matter, and no published count says it does.
That is selection, not fabrication. It is also unanswerable from public data, because the escort figures come with no published definition and no list of vessels.
Who is supposed to reconcile this
Here the factcheck ends and the more interesting question begins. If four counts disagree, whose job is it to say which describes the strait? Two claims need to be kept apart. The first is documented: no agreed, public reference count exists. The second is what the published remits suggest, and it is a narrower claim than it may sound: none of the bodies involved describes certifying traffic as part of its job.
Not the trackers. Kpler, Lloyd's and the others sell their data and publish what they can confirm under their own definitions. They are rewarded for being accurate about their own category, not for reconciling it with anyone else's.
Not PortWatch. It is an open research tool, built on the signal that the crisis has degraded most.
Not the US government. Its counts are operational and political at once, released when they are useful and without the definitions that would let anyone audit them.
Not JMIC, the one body that sits between navies and shipping. It advises on risk and routes and publishes no count.
And not the International Maritime Organization, which sets the rules of navigation but does not certify traffic.
It is possible that a mandate exists that is not public, or that a government body keeps a reconciled figure it does not release. The question for JMIC is simple: why is there no standardised, publicly checkable count of Hormuz transits, and whose job would it be? Any answer, including that the job belongs to no one, would tell readers something they do not know now.
The strait has a threat level. It has insurance premiums, which price risk every day whether or not anyone agrees on the traffic. It has escort operations, a blockade and a memorandum that expired. What it does not have is an institution required to publish one reconciled count, with a definition, a window and a revision history. In a crisis where the reopening of the strait is itself the political prize, the number that would say whether it has reopened has no owner.
Who gains from the gap is a harder question, and the answer here is hypothesis, not finding. A government running an escort operation is rewarded for showing it works. A data company is rewarded for the precision of its own definition. Insurers can price on whichever signal they trust. None of this requires anyone to want confusion. It only requires that nobody is rewarded for ending it.
The strongest case against this reading
The fairest objection is that this is how all fast data works. Shipping intelligence has always been revised; trade statistics are restated for months; nobody expects a single authoritative daily figure for the Malacca Strait either. Professionals know the definitions, the argument goes, and only careless headlines treat the numbers as interchangeable.
Part of that is right. The counts are not broken, and the professionals who buy them do know what they measure. But the objection assumes the numbers stay among professionals. In this crisis they do not. Escort figures are announced from podiums, tracker figures are quoted in the same news cycle, and decisions about blockades, ceasefires and insurance are argued in public using whichever number fits. The gap between definitions stops being a technical footnote at the moment a single day's figure is used to declare a strait open. That is the point at which the absence of a reconciled count stops being a data problem and becomes a political one.
What would change it
None of this requires new technology. A reconciled count would need three things that already exist in pieces: a published definition of a transit, including vessel size and whether dark crossings are included once confirmed; a fixed measurement window with the revision history kept public; and a body willing to put its name to the result. JMIC is the nearest candidate in function. Whether any of the governments behind it want a number they cannot choose is a different question, and the record of the past seven months suggests the answer.
Until then, every reader has to ask four things of any Hormuz traffic figure: who counted, what they counted, when they counted, and whether the number has finished growing. That is the real finding. The questions are simple. What is missing is anyone obliged to answer them for everyone.
Questions readers ask
How many ships are crossing the Strait of Hormuz now?
It depends on the source and the definition. Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 117 non-Iranian cargo transits in the week of 14 to 20 September 2026, roughly seventeen a day. Kpler's confirmed crossings in early September averaged about thirteen a day over ten days. On Kpler's measure of all vessel types, more than 130 crossed daily before the war.
Why do Hormuz ship counts disagree?
Because each source counts something different: confirmed crossings, cargo ships above a size threshold, AIS signals, or escorted passages. Dark transits are confirmed late, so recent figures from most trackers are minimums that rise over time.
What is a dark transit?
A crossing whose route cannot be confirmed in real time from tracking data, because a transponder is off, a signal is jammed or spoofed, or coverage has a gap. The ship can often still be placed later by satellite imagery or cargo records. Dark does not mean illegal.
Is Hormuz oil back to pre-war levels?
Kpler reported Middle East Gulf crude exports around pre-conflict levels of about 18.5 million barrels a day in early October 2026, but that figure includes oil diverted around the strait through Yanbu and Fujairah. The number of ships crossing Hormuz itself remains far below pre-war levels.
Evidence Map
Core claim. The Strait of Hormuz has no agreed traffic figure: four sources count different objects under the same word, the coordinating naval body publishes no count, and no published remit assigns anyone to reconcile them.
Evidence level. Documented: the definitions and figures of Kpler, Lloyd's List Intelligence, PortWatch, US officials and JMIC as published or reported, including dark-transit shares and the 1 September comparison. Inference: that no institution holds the task of reconciling them, which rests on published remits and could change if a body states otherwise; and that the gap persists because no one is rewarded for closing it.
What would confirm this. Continued divergence between official escort figures and tracker counts on the same days, and continued upward revisions of tracker figures as dark crossings are confirmed.
What would disprove this. JMIC, the IMO or another body beginning to publish a defined, windowed transit count that trackers and governments adopt as the reference figure.
Watchlist. The dark share in Kpler data, Lloyd's weekly revisions, any change in JMIC's reporting, and whether US escort statements begin to carry definitions and windows.
Jerry van der Laan is an independent analyst and the author of The Manifest Archive.
