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Energy, Utilities & Critical Minerals

Malacca Strait — Daily Tanker Transits

Tankers passing through the Malacca Strait each day, counted by IMF PortWatch from ship-tracking signals. The strait between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra is the main sea route between the Indian Ocean and East Asia.

Data status: Current
Official statisticSource figures as of October 16, 2026Sources & methods
Sources
IMF PortWatch (International Monetary Fund and University of Oxford)
Period covered
Jan 1, 2019 – Oct 11, 2026
Source figures as of
October 16, 2026
Geography
Strait of Malacca, between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra
Sector
Energy, Utilities & Critical Minerals
Seasonal adjustment
Not seasonally adjusted
Transformations
Views other than the level (changes, averages, volatility) are calculated by CK Economics from these figures
Revisions
Replaced with the source’s latest figures whenever it revises them.
Data status
Current
Limitations
Seasonal swings are left in: compare a period with the same period a year earlier.

Full method · Research standards

Key figures

CK estimateShips · calculated by CK Economics from International Monetary Fund data

Latest · Oct 11, 2026
80
28-day average −13.4% vs a year earlier1
5-year change
+23.4%
28-day average, against the 28 days to Oct 11, 20212
Record high
111
Jun 9, 20223
Record low
41
Jun 1, 2019 (and 1 other period)3
Where the latest ranks
61st pct.
Higher than 61% of the other 2,840 observations since Jan 1, 20194
  1. 1Average of the latest 28 days against the average of the same 28 days a year earlier; a single day swings too much to compare.
  2. 2Average of the latest 28 days against the same 28 days five and ten years earlier. No yearly growth rate is given for daily series.
  3. 3Highest and lowest published observations across the full history shown.
  4. 4Share of the other published observations that are lower than the latest one, rounded down.

Methodology

The number of tankers that transit the Malacca Strait each day. A transit is counted when a ship passes through the chokepoint's boundary. A passage that spans several days is counted once, and the same ship is not counted again within 48 hours. IMF PortWatch builds it from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) position signals that ships broadcast, as collected by the UN Global Platform, following Arslanalp, Koepke and Verschuur, "Tracking Trade from Space" (IMF Working Paper 2021/225). The series runs daily from 1 January 2019, with days in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). PortWatch adds new days about once a week, a few days behind, and may revise recent days as late signals arrive. Single days swing with ship arrivals, so totals over a week or a month show the trend more clearly. Values are as PortWatch publishes them (n_tanker). They count ships, not barrels: one very large crude carrier and one small product tanker count the same.

How we collect, check and project every dataset →

Source

International Monetary Fund, PortWatch, Daily Chokepoints Data (Malacca Strait, chokepoint5), with the University of Oxford; AIS data from the UN Global Platform: https://portwatch.imf.org/datasets/3da2b9ca97684916b75c4013f95d18ab_0/about — figures as published on 16 October 2026.

All data

2,841 observations, newest first · Ships

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PeriodValueChange y/y
Oct 11, 202680−15.8%
Oct 10, 202669−17.9%
Oct 9, 202688+17.3%
Oct 8, 202677−7.2%
Oct 7, 202673+5.8%
Oct 6, 202679−11.2%
Oct 5, 202658−24.7%
Oct 4, 202675−13.8%
Oct 3, 202672−7.7%
Oct 2, 202668−30.6%
Oct 1, 202676+8.6%
Sep 30, 202669−24.2%
Sep 29, 202688+46.7%
Sep 28, 202666−25.0%
Sep 27, 202660−18.9%
Sep 26, 202667−31.6%
Sep 25, 202690+16.9%
Sep 24, 202667−14.1%
Sep 23, 202674−18.7%
Sep 22, 202667−26.4%
Sep 21, 202665−24.4%
Sep 20, 202678−6.0%
Sep 19, 202676−23.2%
Sep 18, 202673−14.1%

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