MW Here's how much money Iran can make charging tolls on one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil

By Myra P. Saefong and Isabel Wang

It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars - monthly

Around 20% of the world's seaborne oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began on Feb. 28.

With traffic through the Strait of Hormuz still nearly at a standstill, Iran currently wouldn't make much money by charging a toll on crude-oil tankers seeking passage through the waterway.

But if the transit of oil tankers and other shipping vessels through the strait is restored to normal, the country stands to rake in billions in Chinese yuan, or hundreds of millions in U.S. dollars per month.

During its conflict with the U.S. and Israel, Iran has charged select vessels a fee to cross the Strait of Hormuz, which would normally handle around 20%, or one-fifth, of the world's seaborne oil. If the tolls survive the end of hostilities between the sides, they would become a valued source of new revenue for the Iranian regime - and would also be costly for the global oil market.

"A toll structure effectively puts a straightjacket on flows," said Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth. "If transit is funneled through a smaller, controlled portion of the strait, you're not stopping barrels, but you are constraining them - creating friction and likely reducing overall throughput."

'A toll structure effectively puts a straightjacket on flows.'Rebecca Babin, CIBC Private Wealth

Iran told mediators it would limit the number of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz to around a dozen a day and charge tolls under the temporary cease-fire deal it reached with the U.S. this week, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Ships that are allowed to pass through the strait sail a corridor between Iran's Qeshm and Larak islands; some reports say that's to avoid mines placed in the water by Iran.

Citing ship brokers, the Journal reported that vessels carrying Iranian oil or goods have been passing through freely, while ships from friendly countries are paying a "sort of toll" of $1 million or more, and ships from unfriendly countries are blocked altogether.

Various news reports say Iran is collecting $2 million per tanker; others say it's charging $1 per barrel of oil - with tolls collected in the form of Chinese yuan (USDCNY) or cryptocurrency. One dollar is equivalent to about 6.83 yuan. It's not clear if non-crude-oil vessels are being monetized in this way, said Babin.

Doing the math

A very large tanker can carry around 1.9 million to 2.2 million barrels of oil, according to the Energy Information Administration. With oil prices (CL00) (BRN00) trading north of $95 a barrel on Thursday, a 2-million-barrel crude cargo would be worth $190 million in oil, and could pay a $2 million toll.

Right now, with Strait of Hormuz traffic near zero, Iran may be making roughly $5 million a day in tolls, or about $150 million a month, said Louis LaValle, co-founder and CEO at Frontier Investments.

Shipping tracker MarineTraffic reported that a non-Iranian tanker, loaded with 7,000 metric tons of Emirati fuel oil, transited through the strait on Thursday for the first time since the April 7 cease-fire. That cargo is equal to just over 51,000 barrels of oil.

Read: Only a handful of ships have passed through Hormuz, further testing fragile truce

"If traffic normalizes, it gets more meaningful," said LaValle.

In the Strait of Hormuz, 53 tankers arrived on Feb. 27 carrying roughly 3 million metric tons of oil on the day before the start of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, according to PortWatch, a platform developed by the International Monetary Fund in partnership with Oxford University. One metric ton is equal to about 7.15 barrels, so that was close to 21.5 million barrels in total.

The number of tankers arriving in the Strait of Hormuz dropped to seven on March 1, from 53 on Feb. 27, according to data from PortWatch.

Based on those levels, if there was a $1-per-barrel toll, that would equal $21.5 million daily, or around $645 million per month, or $7.74 billion a year.

Toll revenue would be "meaningful" under that scenario but still well below Iran's oil export revenue, which has totaled roughly $50 billion to $55 billion per year in recent years, according to CIBC's Babin.

She pointed out, however, that this is unlikely to be "an either/or situation." Iran would likely continue selling crude into the market, potentially at a tighter discount if sanctions ease, and toll revenue would be "additive on top of that, not a replacement."

Overall, it's "hard to model precisely" how much Iran would collect, LaValle said. But "even at the low end, it is real money being collected outside of the dollar system," he noted.

"This is not end of the dollar," LaValle added, but it does matter at the margin - and the dollar's reserve share has been falling for years, with Saudi Arabia ending its exclusive petrodollar arrangement two years ago and Russian settling energy in yuan since 2022.

"Taken together, that tells you an alternative settlement architecture now exists," LaValle said. "Hormuz may be the first place it has been publicly stress-tested in a real geopolitical crisis."

Read: 'They essentially have a blackmail card up their sleeve': A look at Iran's plan to charge tankers to use the Strait of Hormuz

Obstacles

Political and legal obstacles still remain for Iran to gain more control over a critical shipping route like the Strait of Hormuz, said Max Meizlish, senior research analyst for the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank with ties to the U.S. and Israeli national-security establishments.

"I don't think that the United States is going to be willing to accept significant Iranian control in the form of a toll system," Meizlish told MarketWatch. "Underlying all of this is the fact that U.S. sanctions, both from an executive-order perspective and also from a statutory perspective, would seemingly prohibit this type of arrangement."

There's also the question of whether Iran can legally charge a transit toll.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, treaty establishing a framework for governing all aspects of the sea, maritime traffic in transit cannot be subject to any customs duties, taxes or other charges except for charges for services rendered.

A fee charge for transiting vessels might not matter greatly for the U.S., which imports relatively little from the Gulf states via sea, but it would be a huge issue for Persian Gulf states, wrote analysts led by Nick Redman at Oxford Analytica, a geopolitical risk-analysis and advisory service owned by MarketWatch parent company Dow Jones.

The notion of having to seek permission or paying to use an international waterway that they previously used for free and without condition will stretch those states' tolerance, Oxford Analytica said.

-Myra P. Saefong -Isabel Wang

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April 09, 2026 17:11 ET (21:11 GMT)

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