The state of the world fleet

The world merchant fleet is one of the largest pieces of industrial infrastructure on the planet, and it is almost invisible. According to UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2024, there are about 109,000 ships of 100 gross tons and above in commercial service, with a combined carrying capacity of roughly 2.44 billion deadweight tonnes. Between them they move around four-fifths of world trade by volume — the steel, grain, fuel and finished goods that everything else depends on.

Those two figures, the headcount and the capacity, answer different questions, and it is worth being precise about both before reading anything into them. The headcount tells you how many distinct hulls exist; the capacity tells you how much cargo those hulls can lift between them. A single very large vessel and a fleet of small coasters can carry the same deadweight while counting very differently in ship numbers — which is why analysts almost always reach for the capacity figure when they want to describe the real shape of the fleet.

How the fleet is counted

UNCTAD's 109,000 figure counts self-propelled seagoing merchant ships of 100 gross tons and above. The 100 GT threshold is what keeps the number from ballooning into the millions: it excludes the vast population of small craft, fishing boats, tugs and pleasure vessels that never carry international cargo. What is left is the commercial fleet that actually does the work of global trade.

Capacity is measured separately, in deadweight tonnes (DWT). DWT is the standard measure of a fleet's cargo-carrying ability — the total weight of cargo, fuel, stores and crew a ship can safely carry. It is not the same as gross tonnage, which measures enclosed volume and is used for the 100 GT counting threshold. A fleet can grow in DWT faster than in ship numbers simply by building bigger vessels, which is exactly what has happened over the past two decades.

The headline numbers

So the two numbers to hold in mind, both from UNCTAD 2024, are these: about 109,000 ships and about 2.44 billion DWT of capacity. Divide one by the other and the average merchant ship carries a little over 22,000 deadweight tonnes — but that average hides an enormous spread, from coastal feeders of a few thousand tonnes to ore carriers of 400,000.

A fleet of around 109,000 ships, carrying 2.44 billion deadweight tonnes, quietly moves the great majority of world trade — and most of that capacity sits in just two ship types. UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport 2024

That concentration is the most interesting part of the picture, and it is where the deadweight measure earns its keep.

What the fleet is made of

By share of deadweight capacity, the fleet is dominated by two segments. Bulk carriers account for 42.7% of world deadweight capacity and oil tankers for 28.3% (UNCTAD, 2024). Together that is over seventy per cent of the world's seaborne cargo capacity in two ship types. The remainder is spread across container ships, gas carriers, general cargo vessels and other types.

Segment	Share of world DWT (UNCTAD, 2024)
Bulk carriers	42.7%
Oil tankers	28.3%
Container, gas, general cargo & other	remainder

Why these two? Because DWT measures weight, and bulkers and tankers move the heaviest, lowest-value commodities there are — iron ore, coal and grain in the holds of bulk carriers, crude oil and refined products in the tanks of tankers. These are cargoes where the freight cost has to be tiny relative to the volume shipped, so the ships are built enormous and the deadweight stacks up fast. Container ships, by contrast, carry far higher-value goods and dominate by trade value rather than by weight, so their share of deadweight capacity looks modest beside the bulkers. Reading a fleet by DWT, in other words, is reading it by what is heaviest, not by what is most valuable.

The fleet on the record in Marifest

Against UNCTAD's global count of about 109,000 ships, Marifest's registry indexes 97,000+ vessels. The two figures are not the same thing and should not be conflated: 109,000 is UNCTAD's estimate of the world merchant fleet of 100 GT and above, while 97,000+ is the number of individual vessel files Marifest currently holds on the record — a large and growing slice of that fleet, not a competing tally of it.

What the registry adds is the ability to take these aggregate shares apart. You can explore the fleet by sector in the Marifest registry, filtering by ship type to see the bulkers and tankers that make up the bulk of world capacity — or narrow straight to a single segment, such as the tanker fleet, and read each vessel's specs, flag and ownership. Every term used here, from deadweight to gross tonnage to the segment names, is defined in the maritime glossary. The headline numbers tell you how big the fleet is; the registry tells you which ship is which.

That is the gap an open registry is built to close. A statistic like "42.7% is bulk carriers" is true and useful, but it is an average over tens of thousands of hulls; it cannot tell you what a particular ship is, where it was built, or whose tonnage it represents. Working from the same ship-type categories and tonnage measures that UNCTAD's totals are assembled from, Marifest lets you walk in the other direction — from the global aggregate down to the individual vessel — so the structure of the world fleet stops being an abstraction and becomes something you can actually look up.