Tonnage

Dry bulk vessel sizes

Published 19 August 2026 · updated 4 November 2026

Handysize, Supramax, Panamax and Capesize are trade conventions, not formal standards, and different sources put the boundaries in different places. They still decide which ships can be offered for 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 uses, with the number of ships in each across the registered fleet. Deadweight is the total weight a ship can carry, including cargo, fuel and stores. The counts include only ships that have an IMO number.

Class	Deadweight	Hulls	What it does
Coaster	under 10,000 mt	44,475	Short sea and river work. By far the largest group in the register, and almost never what a dry cargo broker is quoting.
Handysize	10,000 to 39,999 mt	11,987	Has its own cranes (it is "geared"), so it can load and unload at berths without shore cranes. That is the main commercial reason for this size.
Supramax	40,000 to 64,999 mt	7,694	Geared and larger. The main carrier of the minor bulk cargoes: grain, steel, cement and fertiliser.
Panamax	65,000 to 99,999 mt	5,112	Usually has no cranes of its own. Carries coal and grain on routes with proper terminals at both ends.
Capesize	100,000 mt and above	6,328	Carries iron ore and coal on a small number of long routes between deep-water terminals.

The boundaries are conventions, and the trade uses finer ones

Four bands are a simplification, and it helps to name what they leave out. Within what is called Supramax here, the trade separates Handymax at around 40,000 to 50,000, Supramax itself at 50,000 to 60,000, and Ultramax at roughly 60,000 to 65,000. Within Panamax there is Kamsarmax at about 82,000, named after the longest ship that can berth at Kamsar in Guinea, and Post-Panamax above it. Two pages take these finer classes one at a time: Handysize vs Handymax vs Supramax vs Ultramax and Kamsarmax vs Panamax. Above Capesize there are Newcastlemax ships, sized to fit the berth at Newcastle in New South Wales, and VLOC ore carriers (very large ore carriers) of more than 200,000 tonnes.

These names have something in common. Kamsarmax, Newcastlemax and Panamax do not describe a ship; they describe a place, meaning the largest ship a particular berth, lock or channel can take. The old Panama Canal locks, with their limit of 32.31 metres of beam (width), set the Panamax size. The new locks that opened in 2016 take much larger ships, so the older term now describes a ship that is smaller than the canal it is named after.

Why the edge of a band matters

For a cargo, the class name itself does not matter. What matters is whether the ship can carry the quantity, fit the berth and handle its own cargo. The band names are a short way of answering those three questions, and the short answer is often wrong near the edges of a band:

Gear. This is the most important difference in the middle of the range. A geared Supramax can load at a berth with no cranes, while a gearless Panamax of nearly twice the deadweight cannot use that berth at all.
Draught, not deadweight. What usually keeps a ship out of a port is its draught, the depth it sits in the water. Many load ports and rivers limit draught long before deadweight becomes the problem, so a ship that fits the band on paper can still be impossible to fix for the berth.
Overlap is normal. A ship of 64,000 tonnes and a ship of 66,000 tonnes are almost the same commercially, yet they fall into different bands here. Searching only one band is how a broker misses the ship that would have worked.

26,304

Ships in the register that have an IMO number but no deadweight at all. They belong to no size class, so a search by deadweight cannot find them. Most are new ships and small craft that came in through AIS (the ships' position signal) without any details attached.

This gap should be stated, not hidden. A ship search that silently leaves out a fifth of the register and reports a confident total is worse than one that says what it could not check. Every fleet database has this gap; what differs is whether the software admits it.

Reading a size class off a position

Positions sent out by brokers rarely name a size class. They give a name, a deadweight and a place, as in MV SEACON HAMBURG 85,000 dwt open Singapore 18-21. The class is worked out from the deadweight, and that is why the bands matter: they are the words a broker uses to describe ships before looking them up.

Because the market talks in bands, a ship search should filter by them. Dry bulk chartering software shows how a position, an enquiry and a fixture carry the band from the first circular through 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

Kamsarmax vs PanamaxSame beam (width), longer hull, deeper draft. Where the two names come from, what each ship can carry, and which limits still bind. Handysize vs Handymax vs Supramax vs UltramaxThe four geared bulk carrier classes side by side: deadweight, cranes, draft and trades, and why the limits between them keep changing. Position list vs AIS vs port line-upThree things people often mix up in chartering: where a ship is, when it is free next, and what the port authority expects at the berth. Who owns a shipA ship has up to five companies behind it, and they are not the same. Only one of them answers a chartering e-mail. Matching a cargo to a shipOne cargo, five open ships and one real candidate. Which checks are simple arithmetic, which are judgement, and why the shortlist is short. Ship types and what they carryThe physical state of the cargo decides the type of ship, and a register’s type field hides most of the differences a broker needs.

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. Every result states the gaps described above instead of leaving them 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.

Try 7 days free Ship chartering software for brokers What each plan includes