Is the Strait of Hormuz open right now?
Short answer · as of Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:00:55 UTC
The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Almost no ships are transiting, about 5 a day, against a pre-crisis norm of roughly 95.
The war has widened: on July 20, 2026 the Houthis threatened to close Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea gate. The dashboard tracks its transit count live alongside Hormuz.
Landfall reads this live, so you don’t have to guess from headlines. The single most direct signal is how many ships are actually moving: a chokepoint is open as long as tankers keep transiting, even at reduced volumes, and only truly closed if that traffic collapses toward zero. Right now the count is what the answer above is based on, updated every 15 minutes from IMF PortWatch satellite data.
The live gauges
Landfall boils the situation down to plain 0–100 reads. Chokepoint Pressure is currently 85, severe, meaning the strait itself is at crisis levels. The transmission score, which watches whether that stress has reached markets and wallets, is 22, calm, meaning the shock is not yet showing up in markets and prices. The live dashboard headlines these alongside Early Warning (is market stress actually arriving?) and Market Fragility (if a shock lands, how hard does it hit?), with every underlying indicator.
What “open but disrupted” actually means
A disruption is not a closure, and a closure is not instant pain. Tankers already at sea keep arriving, and stockpiles on land keep refineries running for weeks, which is why oil prices can move on the news long before a single barrel actually goes missing. If you want the deeper version, the field guide covers what happens if Hormuz closes and how much oil actually flows through it.
Common questions
- Is the Strait of Hormuz open right now?
- Landfall tracks this live from satellite ship-tracking. The strait counts as open as long as ships keep transiting, even at reduced volumes; it is only “closed” if traffic collapses toward zero. Landfall shows the current read, open, disrupted, or effectively closed, and updates it every 15 minutes.
- Has the Strait of Hormuz been closed?
- A full closure means ships stop transiting entirely. Landfall measures the daily ship count against the pre-crisis norm of roughly 95 a day, so a genuine closure shows up as the count collapsing toward zero, not as a headline.
- How many ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz?
- In normal times roughly 95 ships a day transit the Strait of Hormuz, the artery for about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. Landfall shows the current 7-day average against that norm.
- Does a Strait of Hormuz disruption raise gas prices?
- Not automatically. A disruption at the strait can push up oil prices, but whether that reaches pumps and markets depends on stockpiles, spare capacity, and how long it lasts. Landfall tracks whether it is actually reaching the wider economy yet, pump prices and inflation on one side and market stress on the other, separately from the disruption itself.
This is a descriptive read of public data ( sources, methodology), not financial advice or a forecast. Snapshot as of Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:00:55 UTC; see the dated record for a citable version.