The Strait of Hormuz Shipping-Cost Index, 2026

When operators running $10 million to $150 million ecommerce brands ask us about the Strait of Hormuz, they're usually a few weeks behind the actual timeline. The strait has been in a state of intermittent closure since February 28, 2026, well before the renewed US strikes on Iran on July 12 that this post is keyed to. That matters because the freight and fuel-surcharge increases tied to this conflict aren't hypothetical anymore. They're already on invoices. VLCC tanker rates have already spiked roughly 4x, marine war-risk insurance has already climbed to as high as ~1% of hull value per transit, and even Maersk's Ocean unit has already swung to a nine-figure quarterly operating loss as freight rates fell. What we're watching next is whether the July 12 strikes are a genuine third escalation or another flare that fades within weeks, and whether the $16-per-barrel Hormuz transit fee the Trump administration proposed on July 13 actually gets implemented.

What happened

The current phase traces back to February 28, 2026, when US and Israeli strikes on Iran (reported as "Operation Epic Fury") triggered an effective closure of the strait to commercial traffic. All five major container lines, Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, and ONE, imposed Hormuz war-risk surcharges within days, and Maersk suspended bookings to most Upper Gulf ports outright.

March 2026 was the acute phase. Oil shipping costs hit all-time highs, VLCC Middle East-China spot rates jumped from around $100,000/day to over $424,000/day, and Brent traded into a roughly $100-118/bbl range depending on the exact week and source. On June 18, 2026, the US and Iran reportedly signed an MOU ending the conflict and reopening the strait, and oil began unwinding, WTI fell from over $110/bbl in mid-May to under $70 by early July, per the FRED series in the chart below. But reporting from late June describes a further near-standstill, with roughly 6,000 seafarers stranded and only 12-20 tankers a day crossing, suggesting the ceasefire didn't fully hold before tensions flared again.

Then, on July 12, 2026, came the renewed US strikes on Iran that this post is keyed to, per the Financial Times, a third escalation on top of an already-turbulent year. The next day, the Trump administration proposed a Strait of Hormuz transit fee of roughly $16 per barrel on oil moving through the strait. As of this writing, that fee is a proposal, not policy, confirm its status before you build it into a model.

Treat the exact sequencing above as the best available reconstruction, not a certainty. Different outlets cite peak Brent anywhere from $103 to $118/bbl depending on the exact week and methodology, which is normal for a fast-moving, multi-phase crisis, not a reporting error. Where figures conflict, we've cited the specific source rather than forcing false precision.

How big is the Strait of Hormuz, and who's actually exposed

The Strait of Hormuz carries about 20.9 million barrels of oil a day, roughly 26% of all seaborne oil trade, plus about 20% of global LNG trade, almost entirely Qatari LNG bound for China, India, and South Korea. That scale is why a closure threat moves prices well outside the Gulf.

Exposure isn't evenly distributed. Tanker owners, refiners buying Gulf crude, and Asian LNG importers feel it first and hardest. Ocean carriers on Asia-to-Europe and Asia-to-US lanes feel it through rerouting costs and war-risk surcharges even when they never sail through the strait themselves. Brands with fixed-rate ocean contracts negotiated before the crisis, or with limited exposure to fuel-surcharge pass-through clauses, are more insulated, at least until their contract renews. If you don't know which category you're in, that's the first thing to check this week, not the oil price.

What this has already cost, in hard numbers

This is the section that separates this crisis from generic "oil prices might rise" coverage: it's already measured, not speculative.

VLCC tanker rates on the Middle East-China route spiked from about $100,000/day to a $423,736/day all-time high on March 2, 2026, up 94% and roughly 4x normal (per the EIA's Today in Energy, CNBC, and Lloyd's List), before falling back to around $287,000/day by late June as cargo volumes actually stalled, the classic pattern of an initial panic spike followed by partial normalization once flows genuinely drop. Marine war-risk insurance for Gulf transits rose from a roughly 0.125% of hull value baseline before the crisis to as high as ~1% of hull value per transit during the 2026 hostilities, a rough 4-8x jump (Reuters and Euronews reported a war-risk premium surge of around 300% for the highest-risk vessels), in line with the roughly 1% peak insurers charged during the 2024 Red Sea crisis.

Company	Metric	Period	Figure
Maersk	Ocean segment EBIT	Q1 2025 → Q1 2026	+$743M → -$192M loss (volumes +9.3% YoY, avg loaded freight rate -14%)
FedEx	Fuel surcharge (export/import)	Week of Jun 22, 2026	34.5% / 38.75%
UPS	Fuel surcharge (air/ground)	Week of Jul 14, 2026	32.0% / 33.5%
Amazon	Worldwide shipping cost	Q1 2026	$25.7B (+14% YoY, not Hormuz-specific)

Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd both imposed a "Middle East Emergency Surcharge" around June 26, 2026, reported at roughly 10x the equivalent 2023 Red Sea surcharge. But the surcharges haven't insulated the carriers from the wider rate environment. Maersk's Ocean unit posted a $192 million operating loss in Q1 2026, down from a $743 million profit a year earlier, as its average loaded freight rate fell 14% even though container volumes rose 9.3% year-over-year, per the carrier's own interim report. If even the largest carrier's Ocean segment can swing to a loss when rates fall, a smaller importer without that pricing power is even more exposed, which is exactly why we track this as an ocean freight surge tied to landed cost issue and not just a shipping-news story.

Container freight is a smaller move than the tanker market, and still below its own prior peak. Drewry's composite World Container Index was $4,639 on July 9 (+2% week-over-week), with the Shanghai-Rotterdam lane at $4,682 (+7% week-over-week and still rising as of this writing). For scale, the 2024 Red Sea crisis peaked at $8,399/FEU on the same lane, meaning the 2026 Hormuz-driven container rate, even after months of disruption, remains materially below the worst Red Sea print. Container shipping still has the overcapacity cushion built up since 2022-2023 that tanker shipping doesn't.

What history says about how long this lasts

Three chokepoint and oil-shock precedents give a rough sense of what "temporary" actually means in practice.

Event	Trigger	Peak market move	Time to fade/normalize	What ended it
Sept 2019 Abqaiq/Khurais attack	Drone/missile strike on Saudi oil facilities (a production shock, not a Hormuz transit closure)	Brent +15% in one day	~1 month	Saudi production restored faster than expected
Nov 2023-2025 Red Sea/Houthi crisis	Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping; carriers rerouted via Cape of Good Hope	Drewry Shanghai-Rotterdam index peaked at $8,399/FEU (Jul 2024); war-risk insurance up ~20x	~12-18 months	Global vessel overcapacity absorbed the extra transit days
Feb-Jul 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis	US/Israel strikes on Iran (Feb 28); renewed strikes (Jul 12); Hormuz transit fee proposed (Jul 13)	VLCC rates to ~$424,000/day (~4x); war-risk insurance to ~1% of hull value per transit (~4-8x)	Still resolving as of this writing	Not yet determined; the June 18 MOU didn't fully hold

The 2019 Abqaiq attack is the closest thing to good news in this table: it was a production shock, an attack on Saudi facilities, not a transit closure, and it faded within a month once output was restored. That's a genuinely different mechanism from a Hormuz closure threat, even though both moved oil prices. The 2024 Red Sea crisis is the closer analogy for a sustained chokepoint disruption: both Matson and C.H. Robinson's public filings describe how the freight-rate effects of Red Sea rerouting normalized through 2025 despite carriers continuing to avoid the Suez Canal, because there was enough spare vessel capacity elsewhere to absorb the extra days. Hormuz in 2026 sits somewhere between those two: a genuine transit disruption (like Red Sea) hitting a market with far less spare capacity (tankers, unlike containers). The honest read is that sustained disruption doesn't automatically mean sustained cost pass-through if there's slack capacity somewhere in the system, and right now that slack exists in container shipping but not in tankers.

What this means for your landed cost, with a worked example

Take a representative $50 DTC SKU with a $12 ex-factory cost, a $2.50 baseline inbound freight and handling cost, and $1.50 in other landed costs (duty, brokerage, inland), for a $16 baseline landed cost and a 68% gross margin.

Under a Hormuz-driven shock, a 40-foot container that cost $2,200 pre-crisis can run $6,200-$12,000 all-in; call it $8,000 as a mid-case, roughly +264%. Spread across a 10,000-unit container, that's about $0.58 more per unit in ocean freight alone, plus another roughly $0.20 per unit from higher domestic fuel surcharges on the inland leg. That alone takes landed cost from $16 to about $16.78 and gross margin from 68% to 66.4%, a 1.6-point hit before you even account for the delay.

Rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope adds 10-14 days to transit, sometimes 3-4 weeks on the worst-affected lanes. To maintain service levels, that typically means carrying roughly 20% more inventory days. On a $3 million average inventory position at an 18%-a-year carrying cost, that's an incremental $108,000 a year, or about $0.36 per unit spread across 300,000 units a year. Stack it together, $0.58 ocean freight, $0.20 fuel surcharge, and $0.36 inventory carrying cost, and a representative brand is looking at roughly $1.14 in combined added cost per unit, compressing gross margin by about 2 points (68% down to roughly 65.7%) if it holds price. On 300,000 units a year, that's about $340,000 of annual gross profit at stake, before any decision to raise price or shift mix. Treat this as an illustrative worked example built from separately-sourced rate inputs, not one specific company's disclosed P&L, and re-run it with your own container count, transit days, and carrying-cost rate before you act on it.

When we talk to founders running a brand this size, the question that actually matters isn't "should I raise price," it's whether to absorb the cost, split it with the customer, or pass it through in full, the same three-way decision tree operators use for a tariff hit. One operator we've worked with modeled it as a straight scenario comparison: absorb it all, split it 50/50, or pass it through, and picked the split based on what the category could bear, not a reflexive full pass-through. The pattern we see again and again is that a fast, transparent surcharge explanation gets absorbed by customers better than founders expect. One brand bumped shipping from $35 to $45 as an emergency band-aid and, watching closely for two days, said "we haven't had a peep." That doesn't mean every brand can pass through the full hit, but it's a data point worth having before you assume customers will revolt.

Your logistics cost base was already elevated before any of this

Cost layer	2019 index	Latest (2026)	% change
Deep-sea freight (ocean)	118.5	171.5	+45% to +52%*
General freight trucking	147.1	191.9	+31%
Warehousing & storage	109.4	161.8	+48%
Consumer goods import price (the product itself)	107.0	109.9 (2025)	+2.7%

This is the finding that most operators miss, and it has nothing to do with any single crisis. Deep-sea (ocean) freight producer prices are up 45-52% since 2019, and trucking and warehousing aren't far behind at +31% and +48% respectively. The import price index for the actual consumer goods being shipped, the products themselves, is up only about 2.7% over the same stretch. Whatever your landed cost problem is right now, it's overwhelmingly a logistics-cost problem, not a product-cost problem, and that was true before the Hormuz crisis even started. An operator we've talked to who had already reduced dependency on a single sourcing country or shipping lane, a lesson several took from the 2021-2022 disruptions, described materially less scrambling during this year's freight shocks than founders still fully dependent on one route. Diversification doesn't prevent a Hormuz-scale event, but it changes how much of it lands on you specifically.

What to do this week, and what we're watching next

Three things worth doing this week, regardless of how the July 12 strikes resolve. First, pull your current freight contract and check whether it has a war-risk or bunker-adjustment clause, and if so, what triggers it. Second, re-run your landed cost per unit at current rates, not your annual assumption, the air-versus-sea freight decision framework is the right lens if you're weighing whether to expedite anything right now. Third, model the absorb/split/pass-through decision explicitly for your top SKUs rather than waiting to react to whatever the invoice says; our DTC tariff exposure index walks through the same three-way framework for a tariff shock, and the logic transfers directly.

What we're not recommending: rushing to rebook air freight or lock in a long-term surcharge rate off this week's headline. The pattern across the 2019 Abqaiq spike and the 2024 Red Sea disruption is that operators who waited for the actual surcharge to hit an invoice before repricing or rush-ordering came out ahead of the ones who reacted to the scariest version of the story.

The headline says "world's most important oil chokepoint under attack." The invoice says something more specific: 2-4 points of gross margin on a representative SKU, if you hold price and do nothing. The gap between those two framings is where a CFO earns their keep.

This index refreshes quarterly, or sooner on a material escalation or de-escalation. Each refresh re-pulls WTI, the Drewry World Container Index, and FedEx/UPS fuel-surcharge tables, and checks whether the proposed $16/bbl Hormuz transit fee has moved from proposal to policy. If you're building a 2026 stress case and want a second set of eyes on the assumptions, that's a conversation worth having with a fractional CFO before you lock in next quarter's pricing.

Sources and methodology

Government energy and trade data anchor the scale of the disruption. The Strait of Hormuz's ~26% share of seaborne oil trade and ~20% share of global LNG trade come from the US Energy Information Administration's chokepoint analysis. Daily WTI crude prices are pulled directly from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED database, series DCOILWTICO, which lags real-time by several days; the latest available print at the time of writing was six days behind the July 12 event, so treat any WTI level cited here as a floor, not the current price.

Producer price data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Deep-sea freight, general freight trucking, and warehousing and storage producer price indices are published monthly by the BLS Producer Price Index program; 2026 figures reflect the latest available prints, generally through May.

Freight-market figures come from published index providers and carrier disclosures. Container rate figures reference the Drewry World Container Index, Shanghai-Rotterdam lane. The VLCC Middle East-China spot rate ($423,736/day, an all-time high on March 2, 2026, up 94%) is sourced to the EIA's Today in Energy, CNBC, and Lloyd's List; the 2024 Red Sea comparison comes from dated financial press. Marine war-risk insurance premiums (roughly 0.5-1% of hull value per transit during the 2026 hostilities, up from a ~0.125% pre-crisis baseline, a rough 4-8x jump) are sourced to Reuters and Euronews reporting on the war-risk market. The Maersk Ocean-segment figures (a $192 million operating loss in Q1 2026 versus a $743 million profit in Q1 2025, with volumes up 9.3% and the average loaded freight rate down 14%) come from the carrier's own Q1 2026 interim report released May 7, 2026; note Maersk reports on Nasdaq Copenhagen, not SEC EDGAR, so these figures are sourced directly to the company's own disclosures rather than a US regulatory filing. FedEx and UPS fuel surcharge figures come from each carrier's published weekly surcharge tables.

Public-company disclosures anchor the historical comparison. Matson's FY2024 10-K and C.H. Robinson's FY2025 10-K, both filed with the SEC, describe how 2024-2025 Red Sea rerouting costs normalized through 2025 despite continued Suez avoidance, because of vessel overcapacity, the closest documented precedent for how a sustained chokepoint disruption can fade without the underlying conflict resolving.

Discipline notes. This is a fast-moving, multi-phase crisis, and different outlets don't perfectly agree on every date or figure (peak Brent is cited anywhere from $103 to $118/bbl depending on source and week; whether the June 18 ceasefire attempt fully held before a late-June flare-up is itself disputed). We've flagged these explicitly rather than forcing false precision. The worked DTC-margin example is illustrative modeling built from separately-sourced rate inputs, not one company's disclosed P&L. Amazon's Q1 2026 shipping cost figure is volume- and speed-driven per its own disclosure, not Hormuz-attributable, and is presented as context, not causation.

Update cadence. This tracker is refreshed quarterly, aligned with new BLS and EIA releases, or sooner if the conflict escalates or de-escalates materially. Next scheduled refresh: October 2026, with a check on WTI, the Drewry index, and the status of the proposed Hormuz transit fee.

Frequently asked questions

how much of the world's oil goes through the strait of hormuz?

About 20.9 million barrels a day, roughly 26% of all seaborne oil trade, plus around 20% of global LNG trade (almost entirely Qatari LNG bound for China, India, and South Korea). That is why any sustained disruption shows up in prices well beyond the Gulf.

is the strait of hormuz actually closed right now?

Not fully. Independent tracking from maritime intelligence firms shows reduced but ongoing tanker traffic, roughly 12-20 vessels a day at points in 2026 versus a much higher normal throughput, even while Iran periodically claims the strait is sealed. Treat "closed" claims as directional, not literal, and check the latest transit counts before you act on a headline.

will my shipping costs actually go up because of this?

If you ship parcel out of the US, some of it already has: FedEx and UPS fuel surcharges were running 32-39% in the weeks around the crisis, several times a typical baseline. If you ship ocean freight from Asia, the exposure depends on your carrier's routing and whether your contract has a war-risk or bunker-adjustment clause. Check the clause before you assume.

how does this compare to the 2024 red sea disruption?

The mechanism is different. Red Sea/Houthi attacks disrupted container shipping and were absorbed within 12-18 months once the industry's vessel overcapacity soaked up the extra Cape of Good Hope transit days. Hormuz is primarily a crude oil and tanker story, where insurance and charter rates react faster and harder because there's far less spare tanker capacity than container capacity.

did maersk make money through the hormuz disruption?

No. Maersk's Ocean unit posted a $192 million operating loss in Q1 2026, down from a $743 million profit a year earlier, even though container volumes rose 9.3%, because its average loaded freight rate fell about 14%. Emergency surcharges didn't offset the broader decline in rates. If the largest carrier's Ocean segment can swing to a loss, a smaller importer without pricing power is even more exposed to the same rate swings.

how much extra does a hormuz-driven shock add to my landed cost per unit?

On a representative $50 DTC SKU with a $16 baseline landed cost, a mid-case shock adds roughly $1.14 per unit in combined freight, surcharge, and inventory-carrying cost, compressing gross margin from about 68% to roughly 65.7% if you hold price. That's before any decision to pass the cost through, split it with the customer, or absorb it.

should i lock in a fuel surcharge contract now or wait?

There's no universal answer, but the pattern worth knowing is that reacting to the headline is usually the expensive move. Operators who came through the 2019 Abqaiq spike and the 2024 Red Sea disruption best were the ones who waited for the actual surcharge to hit an invoice before repricing or rush-ordering, because headline-driven spikes have historically faded faster than the panic suggested.

how often will this index get updated?

Quarterly, or sooner if the conflict materially escalates or de-escalates. Each refresh re-pulls WTI, the Drewry World Container Index, and carrier fuel-surcharge tables, and checks the status of the proposed Hormuz transit fee.