Suez Canal Ship Transits (Daily)

## What this measures

The number of ships that passed through the Suez Canal each day: container ships, dry bulk carriers, general cargo, roll-on/roll-off and tankers. Daily from 1 January 2019.

## Why it matters

The shortest sea route between Asia and Europe, and a large source of Egypt's foreign currency.

## How to read it

A count of ships, not cargo: a supertanker and a small cargo ship each count once. Daily counts are noisy; read the 7-day average for the trend. It averaged about 74 transits a day in 2023 and about 40 a day in 2024 and 2025, as ships avoiding the Red Sea went around the Cape of Good Hope.

## What it does not say

PortWatch depends on ships broadcasting AIS. Ships that switch it off, or whose signals are jammed or spoofed, are missed, which matters most in conflict areas. Counts are revised as more AIS data arrives, and the IMF may change its method. It counts ships, not where they came from or where they are going.

## Source

IMF PortWatch (portwatch.imf.org), daily chokepoint transit calls, read from the IMF's public PortWatch data service. PortWatch counts a transit when a ship crosses the chokepoint boundary, using Automatic Identification System (AIS) positions; a ship is counted again only after 48 hours. Method: Arslanalp, Koepke and Verschuur, "Tracking Trade from Space", IMF Working Paper WP/21/225. Source: International Monetary Fund, PortWatch. The data is available free of charge from the IMF. Read daily by /api/cron/portwatch-sync; PortWatch updates weekly, so the newest days arrive about a week late.