Shippers Pay Sailors $25,000 a Trip for a Sneak Run Through Hormuz

That’s more than a year’s pay for a round trip that takes under a week.

$25,000 Per Round Trip Is the New Going Rate

The Wall Street Journal reports Sailors Get Up to $25,000 a Trip to Sneak Oil Out of the Gulf.

Oil is pouring out of the Persian Gulf at the fastest rate since the start of the Iran war, even as a recent uptick in attacks threatens the flow. The cost of getting it out is eye-watering: up to $40 million for a multiday trip.

For Gulf oil producers, it is worth it. Leaving the oil stranded is still economically worse than taking on the freight cost and selling oil at thinner margins.

So producers inside the Gulf have turned to hiring very large crude carriers, known as VLCCs, to complete a perilous journey known as a “shuttle run.” Carriers enter the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz, load at ports there, exit from the strait, then transfer the oil to another vessel waiting just outside of the waterway.

These are the new economics of the strait, where a wartime gold rush has pushed producers to swallow record freight costs just to keep crude moving; shipowners are reaping some of the best returns the industry has seen in decades; and the sailors who make the dangerous crossing are being paid like never before.

Shuttle runs weren’t necessary before the war. But when Tehran started hitting commercial vessels in the strait, buyers in Asia and elsewhere became reluctant to send their own ships to pick up oil from inside the Gulf. Now oil producers are shelling out between $30 million and $40 million for a round trip in and out of Hormuz—or $15 to $20 a barrel excluding insurance, according to shipbrokers.

“For many shipowners, the current market is generating revenues at levels rarely seen in the industry’s recent history,” said Dimitris Maniatis, founder and chief executive of maritime-risk company Marisks.

Ferrying oil directly from the Persian Gulf to global markets is also more expensive than ever, contributing to the appeal of shuttle runs. The cost of hiring an oil supertanker to sail from the Persian Gulf to China topped $1.2 million a day in late September. On the eve of the war, that cost was about $231,400 a day, according to maritime data provider Clarksons Research. In early January, it cost less than $40,000 a day.

The shuttle-run bonanza is trickling down to individual sailors. Those willing to perform the war-zone trips—many from India, the Philippines and China—are being lured with payouts worth two or three times their typical monthly salary. One Shandong-based ship-staffing company is even offering as much as $25,000 for a round trip as reward, according to seafarers and recruitment advertisements seen by The Wall Street Journal.

“Given the millions being made at the moment, that’s absolutely nothing to the shipowners,” said Richard Matthews, director of consulting and research at shipbroker E.A. Gibson.

Dangerous journey

Two seafarers on two different VLCCs shared their recent experience with the Journal. One of them, the first mate on a shuttle tanker, said he had been in and out of Hormuz twice in the past month. Both trips were at night—with the windows shut and lights turned off.

During each transit, his vessel lost GPS signal for hours and navigated using old-school methods such as using radar signals to calculate the angle and distance relative to islands and headlands to determine the vessel’s position.

He said half of the crew quit after completing just one round trip, but the ship management company had no problem replacing them after promising extra pay. He was paid three times his monthly salary for the days transiting in the conflict zone, he said.

How Big Is the Risk?

The International Maritime Organization’s tally as of 5 October 2026 is 91 confirmed incidents in and around the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Middle East since the war started on 28 February, with 24 seafarers killed. That is roughly one confirmed incident every two to three days over seven months, though the hits come in clusters rather than evenly.

UK maritime authorities logged another string of tanker strikes on 2–4 October, and the Wall Street Journal noted seven ships hit since 28 September after a quieter stretch.

The Joint Maritime Information Center still rates the threat as severe and deliberate attack as highly likely. Most of those incidents damage the ship and do not kill anyone. Fatalities are the tail: on the order of one death for every few hits, not every transit.

Pre-war traffic was about 138 ships a day. Wartime transits are far lower — on the order of 1,500 or so commercial passages over long stretches of the conflict, many of them U.S.-facilitated — so a crude incidents-per-transit figure is a few percent, not a coin flip.

Dark shuttle tankers doing the in-and-out Gulf runs are the ones owners are paying up for, and they are a subset of that traffic, so their hit rate is higher than the average transit.

War-risk insurance has also been quoted as high as about 10% of hull value for a Hormuz transit, which is the market’s way of saying the loss risk is real even if any single sailor almost always comes back.

How Big Is the Reward?

Owners are clearing millions on freight that has run past $1 million a day, so the crew bonus is cheap next to the charter.

For a junior rating or cadet earning around $1,500 a month, $25,000 for a few days is more than a year of normal wages, in a week or less.

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