Direct answer
What are VLCC, Suezmax, and Aframax? Market size classes by deadweight tonnage, not AIS codes. Industry explainers commonly band Aframax around 80,000–120,000 DWT, Suezmax around 120,000–200,000 DWT, and VLCC around 200,000–320,000 DWT.12 The edges overlap across sources. ULCC sits above the VLCC band.
Deadweight tonnage (DWT) is the weight a ship can carry — cargo, fuel, water, stores — not the weight of the steel. Tanker desks still talk in a short ladder of nicknames that grew out of canals, ports, and an old freight-assessment scale. Those nicknames are useful when you read a Kpler or Reuters line about a VLCC rounding the Cape. They are useless as a drop-down on OilRoutes, because AIS does not send DWT class.
The mismatch is easy to miss if you learned the fleet from freight reports. A fixtures desk cares which hull can lift a parcel into a named port. A public AIS map cares which transponder is talking. One is a commercial object; the other is a radio object. This page exists so those two vocabularies do not get welded together in a citation.
See every broadcasting tanker, unclassed, on the live map →
The size ladder, with attributed ranges
Treat every band below as a cited range, not a shipyard certificate. Marine Insight’s tanker-classification table and Fairway’s size explainer agree on the three headline crude cuts; they disagree, as all such tables do, on how cleanly LR2 overlaps Aframax and where a “typical” Suezmax sits inside its band.12 ShipCalculators’ public wiki uses the same three crude bands and is explicit that the names encode constraints, not a single IMO rule.3
| Class | Cited DWT band | What the name is pointing at |
|---|---|---|
| Aframax | about 80,000–120,000 | Largest AFRA crude band; regional ports |
| Suezmax | about 120,000–200,000 | Historically the largest laden Suez transit |
| VLCC | about 200,000–320,000 | Very large crude carrier; long-haul workhorse |
| ULCC | above about 320,000 | Ultra-large; few ports, few hulls |
Those four are the crude conversation. Product tankers use a parallel AFRA vocabulary — MR, LR1, LR2 — that can share a hull size with Aframax while carrying clean products in coated tanks.13 Marine Insight’s table, for example, lets LR2 / Panamax run 80,000–159,999 DWT while Aframax occupies 80,000–120,000 DWT. That overlap is the point: the same steel can be discussed as a product LR2 or a dirty Aframax depending on tanks and trade, and no AIS type code will tell you which conversation you are in.
This page does not invent barrel capacities. When a source says “about two million barrels” for a VLCC or “about one million” for a Suezmax, that is their approximation, not a measurement from this map.2 Length, beam, and draught figures in those explainers are likewise typicals. A specific hull’s particulars belong on its certificate, not in an OilRoutes sentence.
The map will not apply this table as a filter →
Aframax: the regional crude hull
Aframax is a freight-history word. AFRA — Average Freight Rate Assessment — is a mid-20th-century scale for grouping tankers; “Aframax” is the largest of those crude bands, not a canal dimension.23 Marine Insight puts the class at 80,000–120,000 DWT and stresses port access: the hull is large enough to move meaningful crude parcels and still small enough for a long list of regional terminals.1
That is why Aframaxes show up in Mediterranean, North Sea, Caribbean, and other short-sea crude stories. They are not “the small tanker.” They are the flexible crude tanker. On a public AIS map they look like any other type-80-family ship. If a route note says “Aframax,” believe the reporter’s fixtures file, not the glyph color.
Venezuela’s 2026 destination shift, written up on this site from Reuters shipping data, is an Aframax-and-VLCC kind of story in the trade press — short Caribbean/Gulf runs versus a thinner India lane — but the Venezuela note does not sort AIS icons by class, and neither does the map. Use the monthly prints for volumes. Use the map for where broadcasting hulls are today.
Open the map; you will not see an Aframax toggle →
Suezmax: named for a waterway, not a guarantee
Suezmax means “sized as the largest tanker that could transit the Suez Canal fully laden” under the canal’s working envelope at the time the class name stuck. Marine Insight and Fairway both use 120,000–200,000 DWT.12 The canal has been deepened and widened since the name was coined. Fairway notes that permitted draught is now a beam-and-draught table, so some ships in the old “Suezmax” conversation transit part-laden or sit near the new limit rather than the 1950s one.2
The class still matters for West Africa–Europe, Black Sea, and Red Sea–Mediterranean crude, and for any story that uses Suez or SUMED as a workaround when Hormuz or Bab-el-Mandeb is constrained. The 2026 Cape reroutes note records a VLCC that could not take a full load through Suez and completed the voyage via SUMED and the Cape — a reminder that canal physics and class nicknames are related, not identical. OilRoutes’ Suez rectangle counts broadcasting hulls in a box; it does not certify that a hull is Suezmax. Chokepoint geography is the box note.
Fly to the Suez box on the live map →
VLCC: the long-haul crude workhorse
Very Large Crude Carrier is a capacity name. The cited band is 200,000–319,999 DWT in Marine Insight’s table and 200,000–320,000 DWT in Fairway and ShipCalculators.123 That is the usual Middle East Gulf–Asia crude hull in market copy: too deep, when fully laden, for a casual Suez transit, which is why VLCCs and Cape of Good Hope stories travel together when the short routes fail.
ULCC — Ultra Large Crude Carrier — sits above that band, often written as above ~320,000 DWT, historically much larger. Few ports can take them. Do not upgrade every large tanker on the map to ULCC because the glyph is big. The glyph size on OilRoutes is a marker, not a DWT scale.
The Hormuz 2026 note mentions VLCCs only where Kpler or Reuters named them. This page will not add a VLCC count of its own.
Watch long-haul hulls without guessing their DWT →
Honesty: OilRoutes does not filter by DWT class
Direct answer
Does OilRoutes filter by VLCC, Suezmax, or Aframax? No. The client keeps AIS types 80–89 and military type 35. It does not receive deadweight. A VLCC and a coastal product tanker can look the same if both broadcast in the tanker band.
AIS ship type 80 means “tanker.” Subcodes 81–84 add hazardous-cargo categories; 85–89 stay in the tanker family.4 That is a cargo-and-hazard flag, not a size flag. How to read live AIS walks the fields. How the map works is the stack note. If a popup says “Tanker – Hazardous A,” it is repeating an AIS type, not announcing an Aframax.
So what can you do with the size ladder on this site? Use it when a sourced article names a class. Use it to understand why a laden VLCC and an Aframax choose different ports. Do not derive a class from icon color, SOG, or which chokepoint box the ship sits in. A hull in the Cape box is in the Cape box. It is not, by that fact, a VLCC.
The same honesty applies to “dark” hulls. A VLCC that went silent off a load port is still a VLCC in the fixtures file; it is absent here. AIS literacy is the undercount note. Combining “I cannot see it” with “therefore it is not a VLCC” is a category error this page is written to block.
Filter Tankers / Military / Both — never DWT →
Glossary
Direct answer
What does a tanker type mean on the map? On OilRoutes, “type” is the AIS ship-type number (80–89) and the English label in the popup. It is not DWT, not barrel capacity, and not a Worldscale route. Use VLCC / Suezmax / Aframax only as market language when a sourced note uses those words.
| Term | On OilRoutes | In the market |
|---|---|---|
| AIS type 80–89 | The tanker filter. Kept. | ITU ship-type band for tankers |
| AIS type 35 | Military flag pin. Optional. | Military operations |
| DWT | Not a field. Not a filter. | Deadweight; basis of size classes |
| Aframax | Not selectable | ~80–120k DWT crude class (cited) |
| Suezmax | Not selectable | ~120–200k DWT; Suez-related name |
| VLCC | Not selectable | ~200–320k DWT long-haul crude |
| ULCC | Not selectable | Above ~320k DWT |
| MR / LR1 / LR2 | Not selectable | Product-tanker AFRA bands |
| Chokepoint count | Hulls in a box now | Not class mix, not throughput |
If you came here from a Cape or Hormuz sentence that named a VLCC, go back to that sentence and its source. The map will show the hull only if it is broadcasting and passed the type filter.