Fleet Intelligence

Fleet Analytics

Composition, age and tonnage of the world merchant fleet.

Of the 45,126 vessels with a known build year, more than a quarter — 27% — are 25 years or older, the single largest age band, against 9% under five years old. Yearly deliveries peaked near 2,000 hulls in 2011 and have stayed below half that in each of the nine years since 2017.

73,307

vessels analyzed

All analytics

Total Vessels

73,307

Total DWT

1.4B

deadweight tonnes

Total GT

877.6M

gross tonnes

Average Age

21.0

years

Vessel Type Distribution

Top 15 vessel types by fleet count

The 15 types shown cover 58,524 of 73,307 vessels; the remainder sit in smaller type classes or carry no recorded type.

Flag State Distribution

Top 20 flag states by registered fleet

The 20 registries shown cover 30,973 of 73,307 vessels; the remainder are spread across smaller registries or carry no recorded flag.

Age Distribution

Fleet segmented by vessel age groups

Covers only the vessels carrying a recorded build year. Band edges are inclusive at both ends, so a ship built exactly on a boundary appears in the two adjacent bands and the bars sum slightly above that population.

Year Built Trend

Vessels built per year over the last 30 years

Only vessels carrying a recorded build year appear, and the window is the last 30 years — older tonnage sits outside the chart, not outside the fleet.

DWT Distribution

Share of vessels in each deadweight class, set against the share of total deadweight the class carries

Sorted by number the fleet looks small-ship-heavy, but the 3,058 vessels of 100,000 DWT or more — 9% of those with a measured deadweight — carry at least 29% of it.

34,053 of 73,307 vessels carry a recorded deadweight; the rest are excluded from these buckets. The deadweight bars are floors — each class is credited only its lower band edge (the open-ended 200K+ class just 200,000 t a hull), so the heavy classes carry more than shown and the count-vs-tonnage divergence is sharper than drawn.

Method & caveats

The headline count is every catalogued vessel. Each panel below plots only the ships carrying the attribute it segments by, so no panel adds up to it — each states its own covered population instead of implying it covers the whole fleet.
Total DWT sums the 34,053 vessels with a recorded deadweight, and Total GT the vessels with a recorded gross tonnage. Both are floors for the fleet’s real tonnage, not estimates of it.
Average age is the mean over vessels with a recorded build year; a ship with no recorded year neither raises nor lowers it.

Fleet Analytics

Composition, age and tonnage of the world merchant fleet.

DWT Distribution

Share of vessels in each deadweight class, set against the share of total deadweight the class carries

Sorted by number the fleet looks small-ship-heavy, but the 3,058 vessels of 100,000 DWT or more — 9% of those with a measured deadweight — carry at least 29% of it.