Tonnage

Dry bulk vessel sizes

Published 19 August 2026 · updated 22 September 2026

Handysize, Supramax, Panamax, Capesize. The names are trade conventions, not standards, and the boundaries between them move depending on who you ask. They still decide which ships can be offered against a cargo, so it is worth knowing where the edges are and why they sit where they do.

The bands

These are the deadweight bands Neptune Atlas classifies on, with the number of hulls in each across the registered fleet. Counts are of ships that carry an IMO number.

Class	Deadweight	Hulls	What she does
Coaster	under 10,000 mt	44,475	Short sea and river work. The largest group in the register by a wide margin, and almost never what a dry cargo broker is quoting.
Handysize	10,000 to 39,999 mt	11,987	Geared, so she can work cargo at berths with no shore cranes. That is the whole commercial argument for the size.
Supramax	40,000 to 64,999 mt	7,694	Geared and larger. The workhorse of the minor bulks: grain, steels, cement, fertiliser.
Panamax	65,000 to 99,999 mt	5,112	Usually gearless. Coal and grain on routes with proper terminals at both ends.
Capesize	100,000 mt and above	6,328	Iron ore and coal, on a handful of long-haul routes between deepwater terminals.

The boundaries are conventions, and the trade uses finer ones

Four bands is a simplification and it is worth naming the parts it flattens. Inside what is called Supramax here, the trade separates Handymax at around 40,000 to 50,000, Supramax proper at 50,000 to 60,000, and Ultramax at roughly 60,000 to 65,000. Inside Panamax sit Kamsarmax at about 82,000, named for the maximum length that can berth at Kamsar in Guinea, and Post-Panamax above it. Above Capesize are Newcastlemax, sized to the berth at Newcastle in New South Wales, and VLOC ore carriers past 200,000 tonnes.

Notice what those names have in common. Kamsarmax, Newcastlemax and Panamax are not descriptions of a ship, they are descriptions of a place: the largest hull a particular berth, lock or channel will take. Panamax was set by the old Panama Canal locks and their 32.31 metre beam; the locks that opened in 2016 take considerably more, which is why the older term now describes a ship that is smaller than the canal it is named after.

Why the edge of a band matters

A cargo does not care what a ship is called. It cares whether she lifts the quantity, fits the berth, and can work her own cargo. The band names are shorthand for those three questions, and the shorthand fails at the edges:

Gear. The single most consequential difference in the middle of the range. A geared Supramax can load at a berth with no cranes; a gearless Panamax of nearly twice the deadweight cannot go there at all.
Draught, not deadweight. A ship is excluded by the water she draws, and many load ports and rivers restrict on draught long before deadweight becomes the limit. A hull inside the band on paper can still be unfixable for the berth.
Overlap is normal. A 64,000 tonne ship and a 66,000 tonne ship are commercially near-identical and sit in different bands here. Searching one band alone is how a broker misses the ship that would have worked.

26,254

Hulls in the register that carry an IMO number and no deadweight at all. They belong to no size class, which means a search by deadweight cannot return them. Most are newbuildings and small craft that arrived over AIS with no particulars attached.

That gap is worth stating rather than hiding. A tonnage search that quietly drops a fifth of the register and reports a confident total is worse than one that says what it could not evaluate. Every fleet database carries this hole; the question is whether the software admits to it.

Reading a size class off a position

Circulated positions rarely name a class. They give a name, a deadweight and a place: MV SEACON HAMBURG 85,000 dwt open Singapore 18-21. The class is inferred from the deadweight, which is why the bands matter at all: they are the vocabulary a broker uses to describe tonnage they have not yet looked up.

The bands are how the market talks, so they are how a tonnage search ought to filter. Chartering software for a dry bulk desk sets out how a position, an enquiry and a fixture carry the band through from the first circular to the recap.

References

UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport 2025, 2025. unctad.org
Panama Canal Authority, OP Notice to Shipping No. N-1-2024: Vessel Requirements, 2024. pancanal.com
IMO, International Convention on Load Lines, 1966. imo.org
IMO, Bulk Carrier Safety. imo.org

Position list vs AIS vs port line-upThree things routinely confused in chartering: where a ship is, when she is free next, and what the port authority expects at the berth. Who owns a shipA hull has up to five companies behind it and they are not interchangeable. Only one of them answers a chartering e-mail. Matching a cargo to a shipOne cargo, five open ships and one real candidate. Which constraints are arithmetic, which are somebody's opinion, and why the shortlist is short.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas holds the world merchant fleet with deadweight, size class, type and age, and searches it against the positions a desk has on file. The gaps above are stated on every result rather than left out of the count. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.

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