About 13,400 ships and 489 million tons of cargo cross the Panama Canal each year
In fiscal year 2025 (the year ended September 30, 2025), 13,404 vessels transited the Panama Canal — roughly 36 ships a day — carrying 489.1 million PC/UMS tons of cargo capacity, according to the Panama Canal Authority (ACP). That traffic is worth about $270 billion in cargo a year and accounts for close to 6% of global maritime trade by volume.
For U.S. shippers the more useful number is narrower: in excess of 40% of U.S. container traffic moves through this waterway, per the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission (2025). The canal is, first and foremost, an American trade route: about three-quarters of the cargo crossing it has a U.S. origin or destination.
- 13,404 ship transits crossed the canal in FY2025 — about 36 a day (ACP, year ended Sept 2025)
- 489.1 million PC/UMS tons of cargo capacity in FY2025; the pre-drought peak was 518.2 million in FY2022 (ACP)
- ~40% of U.S. container traffic, worth roughly $270 billion a year, touches the canal (FMC, 2025)
- Containers are the largest segment at 37.8% of tonnage, ahead of dry bulk, LPG, and vehicle carriers (ACP data, FY2023)
- ~73–76% of canal cargo has a U.S. origin or destination (Port Economics, 2024)
- The Neopanamax locks carry ~half the tonnage on a quarter of the transits (ACP, FY2025)
- At the 2023–24 drought's worst, daily transits fell from ~36 to 24 a day, and one carrier paid a record $4 million for a single slot (ACP; Maritime Executive, Nov 2023)
Why the transit numbers you see rarely agree
Ask "how many ships cross the Panama Canal" and you will get different answers from equally credible sources. That is a methodology gap, not an error, and it is worth understanding before you cite a figure.
The Panama Canal Authority publishes the official record: audited counts of tolled, ocean-going transits over its October–September fiscal year, plus tonnage in PC/UMS net tons that reconciles to its financial statements. It is authoritative but arrives on a fiscal-year lag. IMF PortWatch takes the opposite trade-off: it estimates daily transit calls from satellite AIS signals off roughly 90,000 ships across 28 maritime chokepoints, updated every week. It is fast and current, but it counts detected passages through a geographic box (a different universe than ACP's billed transits), and it remains a preliminary estimate rather than an audited total.
| Approach | What it counts | Typical figure |
|---|---|---|
| ACP fiscal-year statistics | Audited, tolled ocean-going transits, Oct–Sep | 13,404 transits in FY2025 (~36/day) |
| ACP operational dailies | Vessels transited on a given day | 31–34/day through 2024–25, varies monthly |
| IMF PortWatch (AIS) | Satellite-detected vessel passages, weekly | Mid-30s per day pre-drought; best for timely tracking |
The practical rule: use PortWatch when you need to know what the canal is doing this week, and ACP when you need the number that will hold up in a report a year from now. For an evergreen figure, "about 13,000–14,000 transits and roughly 500 million PC/UMS tons in a normal year" is the defensible range.
The drought that cut the canal by a third — and the recovery
Through 2023 an El Niño drought pushed Gatún Lake, the rainfall-fed reservoir that fills the locks, to its lowest level since at least 1965 (U.S. EIA). Because every transit spills tens of millions of gallons of freshwater to the sea, the ACP had to ration crossings. Slots were cut step by step, reaching 24 transits a day by early 2024, down from a normal cadence of about 36 — a roughly one-third reduction. A deeper cut toward 18 a day was scheduled for February 2024 but never fully landed, as the rains returned first.
The squeeze produced its own economics. With fewer slots than ships wanting them, carriers bid for priority in the ACP's auction: a reservation that normally cost well under $1 million sold for $2.85 million on October 30, 2023, and then a record $3.98 million (nearly $4 million) on November 8, 2023, paid by the LPG carrier Sunny Bright (Maritime Executive). ACP revenue actually rose during the drought, to about $5.0 billion in FY2024, because higher tolls and auction premiums more than offset the drop in traffic.
Rain returned in mid-2024. The ACP raised daily slots back to 35 in June 2024, and by the second half of the year the canal was operating near its normal ~36 a day, with La Niña conditions holding water levels through 2025. By June 2025 the canal was running about 31.4 transits a day against 36 available slots — and, tellingly, the shortfall was now demand-driven, not water-driven: containership volumes softened on U.S. tariff disruption and LNG carriers kept favoring the Cape of Good Hope on weak freight rates (Kuehne+Nagel).
What actually moves through the canal
The Panama Canal is often pictured as an oil route; it is not. Containers are the single largest segment at 37.8% of tonnage, and they are the canal's top revenue driver. Gas (LPG plus LNG) is the next big story at roughly a fifth of tonnage combined, reflecting a decade of surging U.S. Gulf Coast energy exports to Asia.
| Segment | Share of tonnage (FY2023) | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Containers | 37.8% | Manufactured goods, retail freight, the Asia–U.S. East Coast lane |
| Dry bulk | 14.6% | Grain, coal, minerals |
| LPG | 12.7% | Propane and butane, largely U.S. Gulf exports to Asia |
| Vehicle carriers | 9.8% | RoRo, finished automobiles |
| Chemical tankers | 9.6% | Bulk chemicals |
| LNG | 7.3% | Liquefied natural gas |
| Refined products | 3.1% | Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel |
| Other | 5.2% | Remaining traffic |
Source: Panama Canal Authority data via Visual Capitalist, FY2023. Shares are of PC/UMS tonnage.
Two sets of locks, and why the bigger ones matter more
The canal runs two lock systems. The original Panamax locks, open since 1914, cap vessels at roughly 5,000 TEU. The Neopanamax locks, added in the 2016 expansion, take ships up to about 14,000–15,000 TEU — the class that made the all-water Asia–to–U.S. East Coast route economic at scale.
The split tells the whole story of why the expansion paid off. In FY2025 the Neopanamax locks handled just 3,342 transits, about a quarter of all crossings, yet moved 253.6 million PC/UMS tons — roughly half the canal's tonnage. The Panamax locks did the other 10,062 transits and 235.5 million tons. Fewer, bigger ships now carry the freight.
| Lock system | Opened | Max vessel | FY2025 transits | FY2025 tonnage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Panamax | 1914 | ~5,000 TEU | 10,062 | 235.5M PC/UMS tons |
| Neopanamax | 2016 | ~14,000–15,000 TEU | 3,342 | 253.6M PC/UMS tons |
Source: Panama Canal Authority, FY2025.
Why this is really a U.S. trade story
No country relies on the Panama Canal like the United States. Beyond the ~40% of U.S. container traffic the FMC cites, roughly 73–76% of all cargo crossing the canal has a U.S. origin or destination (Port Economics, 2024). The Asia–U.S. East Coast lane is the single largest route through the canal at about 42–48% of tonnage, depending on the source and basis.
That exposure concentrates at a handful of ports. The all-water route from Asia lands containers at the East and Gulf Coast gateways — New York/New Jersey, Savannah, Houston, and Charleston chief among them — which is why a Panama disruption shows up as congestion and surcharges at those docks rather than on the West Coast.
| U.S. relevance | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Share of U.S. container traffic touching the canal | in excess of 40% | FMC, 2025 |
| Canal cargo with U.S. origin or destination | ~73–76% | Port Economics, 2024 |
| Largest single route (Asia–U.S. East Coast) | ~42–48% of tonnage | Port Economics / Northern Trust |
| Annual U.S. cargo value through the canal | ~$270 billion | FMC / Northern Trust, 2025 |
What a crossing costs, and what the canal earns
Tolls scale with vessel size and cargo, and for a large Neopanamax containership the all-in cost of a booked transit runs well into six or seven figures. A useful blended benchmark: ACP's FY2025 revenue of about $5.7 billion across 13,404 transits works out to roughly $426,000 per transit on average, with the biggest container and gas carriers paying materially more. Net profit that year was about $4.1 billion, most of which flows to the Panamanian treasury.
The slot auction sits on top of the published tariff, and it is where scarcity gets priced. Baseline auction slots ran about $135,000–$140,000 before the 2023 crisis; they spiked to the $3–4 million records during the drought, and touched $4 million again in May 2026 — this time driven by vessels rerouting around Middle East conflict rather than by low water (Splash247).
Common questions about Panama Canal cargo
How many ships pass through the Panama Canal per year?
About 13,400 ocean-going vessels transited in fiscal year 2025 (ended September 2025), or roughly 36 a day, according to the Panama Canal Authority. In a normal year the figure sits between about 13,000 and 14,000 transits; the 2023–24 drought cut FY2024 to 11,240.
How much cargo goes through the Panama Canal?
The canal handled 489.1 million PC/UMS tons of cargo capacity in FY2025, and a pre-drought peak of 518.2 million in FY2022. Measured as actual goods weight, that is a little over half as much — roughly 290 million long tons of cargo in a strong year. It represents close to 6% of global maritime trade by volume.
What percentage of U.S. trade goes through the Panama Canal?
In excess of 40% of U.S. container traffic moves through the canal, worth about $270 billion a year, according to the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission (2025). The figure is specific to containerized traffic, not all U.S. trade, and it reflects the all-water Asia–to–U.S. East Coast route.
How many ships per day cross the canal, and did the drought change that?
The normal cadence is about 36 transits a day. During the 2023–24 El Niño drought the ACP cut that to a floor of 24 a day by early 2024. Slots were restored to 35 in June 2024, and the canal has since run in the low-to-mid 30s per day, with the current shortfall driven by soft demand rather than water.
What is the difference between Panamax and Neopanamax?
Panamax vessels (up to ~5,000 TEU) fit the original 1914 locks; Neopanamax vessels (up to ~14,000–15,000 TEU) fit the larger locks added in the 2016 expansion. Neopanamax ships are about a quarter of transits but carry roughly half the canal's tonnage.
How much does it cost to transit the Panama Canal?
Published tolls scale with ship size and cargo; the blended average works out to about $426,000 per transit, and large container and gas carriers pay well above that. During shortages, carriers also bid in an auction for priority — slots that normally cost six figures hit a record $4 million in November 2023 and again in May 2026.
How does the Panama Canal compare to the Strait of Hormuz?
They are different kinds of chokepoint: the Panama Canal is a container-and-gas trade route dominated by U.S. freight, while the Strait of Hormuz is an oil-and-gas artery for the Persian Gulf. For the non-oil freight picture at Hormuz, see our companion analysis of how much freight goes through the Strait of Hormuz.
What the number actually tells you
If you need one figure, use about 13,000–14,000 transits and roughly 500 million PC/UMS tons a year — and say which year and which source, because the drought makes single-year numbers misleading. The more important insight for a U.S. shipper is structural: this is an American container route with a weather dependency. Nearly half of U.S. container traffic and three-quarters of the canal's cargo tie back to the United States, and the whole system rests on rainfall into one lake.
The 2023–24 drought was a live demonstration of what that means: a one-third capacity cut and $4 million slot auctions inside a single season. With El Niño odds rising again for 2026, the East Coast supply chains that depend on Panama should treat canal water levels as a line item to watch, not a background condition.
How we built this
Figures come from the Panama Canal Authority's fiscal-year statistics and financial releases (the authoritative, audited record), cross-checked against IMF PortWatch's satellite-AIS transit estimates for timeliness, U.S. Federal Maritime Commission testimony for the U.S.-container-share figure, and Port Economics and Northern Trust for route and share breakdowns. The commodity mix uses ACP data as compiled by Visual Capitalist for FY2023. Where the tolling unit (PC/UMS tons) and actual cargo weight (long tons) differ, both are labeled. Where sources disagree — notably the exact daily transit count and the Asia–U.S. East Coast route share — the range is stated rather than a false single figure. Last reviewed July 2026.
- Panama Canal Authority — FY2025 operational and financial results (2025)
- IMF PortWatch — data and methodology (2026)
- U.S. Federal Maritime Commission — Chairman Sola Senate statement on the Panama Canal (2025)
- Visual Capitalist — Panama Canal traffic by shipment category and tonnage (2024)
- Port Economics, Management and Policy — main trade routes of the Panama Canal (2024)
- U.S. EIA — Panama Canal drought and transit reductions (2024)
- Maritime Executive — record $4M Panama Canal slot auction (2023)
- Kuehne+Nagel — Panama Canal has plenty of water but transits below pre-drought levels (2025)
- Splash247 — Panama Canal slot auctions hit record $4M (2026)
- Northern Trust — the importance of the Panama Canal (2025)
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