Oil tanker rates are soaring this year, picking up where they left off 2025—multi-year highs amid growing supply, longer routes, and disruptions due to sanctions and altered shipping lanes.

At the end of 2025, the global supertanker market tightened as crude supply from the OPEC+ group and the Americas rose, and vessels were making increasingly longer trips. So much the market tightened that several new-built very large crude carriers (VLCC) made empty maiden voyages from yards in Asia to pick up supply from producing countries in the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa, instead of loading fuels made in Asia on their first journey.

Usually, supertankers travel with gasoline cargoes on these first trips, but apparently the market shortage prompted owners to forego this loading and rush to send the tankers on load crude as daily rates soared.

Strong 2025 Tanker Rates

The daily rates for chartering a vessel to transport commodities surged in 2025, with oil tanker rates skyrocketing by 467%, as shippers of growing commodity supply were grappling with a series of route disruptions and sanctions.

Rates reached multi-year highs last year and continued to rally this year, too.

Shipbrokers and analysts expect oil freight rates to remain elevated this year as new geopolitical developments are upending crude flows and tanker markets.

Despite the typically weaker commodity demand period toward the end of each year, the last weeks of 2025 didn’t show any weakness in the vessel rates for transporting crude oil.

Supertanker rates on the route between the Middle East and China hit their highest in five years as traders sought alternatives to Russian crude after the U.S. sanctioned Russia’s biggest oil producers and exporters, Rosneft and Lukoil. Rates for smaller tankers also shot up as traders turned to all available vessels to transport crude.

Stronger 2026 So Far

This year, rates have increased further, as the sanctions on Russia and Venezuela have raised volumes of oil in floating storage held in tankers.

In addition, the new oil order in Venezuela imposed by the Trump Administration prompted the world’s top traders to charter more legit vessels to ship and sell Venezuela’s crude to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast or in Europe and Asia.

In the second half of 2025, the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index – a measure of freight rates on several key global routes for crude – jumped by about 30%. Less than a month into 2026, the index has surged by another 30%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

As two of the world’s top commodity traders, Vitol and Trafigura, are back trading Venezuela’s oil, with the authorization by the U.S. Administration, more tankers will be needed to transport crude out of the world’s biggest oil reserves holder.

A week after the ousting of Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuela trade turned from illicit under-the-radar shipments to China on shadow fleet tankers to flows to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast on legit vessels chartered by traders authorized by the Trump Administration.

Vitol and Trafigura have also started offering Venezuelan crude to refiners in China and India for March delivery, which will tie up more tankers on longer-haul routes.

“Potential redirection of Venezuelan crude oil exports could boost already high tanker rates in the near to medium term due to a shift to the mainstream fleet from shadow tankers,” Fitch Ratings said in a note last week.

“Volatility linked to geopolitical flashpoints, including in Venezuela and Iran, will likely lead to oil buyers diversifying their sources, further supporting tonne-miles and the earnings of tanker owners and operators,” the credit rating agency added.

The supertanker markets, the ones for very large crude carriers (VLCC) capable of shipping up to 2 million barrels of crude, remained firm last week despite a slight weakness from the previous week, the Baltic Exchange said in a weekly report on Friday.

The daily rates for a supertanker remained above $100,000, at $112,394 for the standard Baltic VLCC, according to the Baltic Exchange.

A return to Suez Canal trips has the potential to slash high tanker rates, but any resumption of oil shipments on the shortest route from Europe to Asia remains a distant prospect.

Container shipping giant Maersk tentatively returned, sending vessels on the trans-Suez route connecting the Middle East and India with the U.S. East Coast.

The company earlier this month said it would continue to monitor the security situation in the Middle East region very closely, and that “any alteration to the MECL service will remain dependent on the ongoing stability in the Red Sea area and the absence of any escalation in conflicts in the region.”

Oil tanker shippers haven’t started using the Suez Canal route yet amid persistent security concerns, the unrest in Iran, and the latest U.S.-Iran rhetoric.

“Most containership operators that ceased transits are being cautious and shifting back only gradually,” Fitch said, referring to the Suez route.

“For tanker shipping, normalisation of these transits could more than offset any benefit from the redirection of Venezuelan oil,” the credit rating agency noted.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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