Chartering an oil tanker to haul crude out of the Persian Gulf has topped $1 million a day for the first time on record, according to Baltic Exchange data, as the seventh month of the Iran war leaves too few vessels willing to run the Strait of Hormuz to collect cargoes.

The benchmark route — a very large crude carrier sailing from the Gulf to China — was fixed at $1.035 million a day this week, according to Bloomberg, up from a pre-war norm of roughly $208,000 a day — a fivefold jump. War-risk insurance premiums on ships transiting the strait have climbed to about 10% of a vessel's value, from 0.5%-1% before the conflict, according to Fortune. Crude has climbed back above $100 a barrel, and diesel prices have topped $6, roughly 60% above pre-war levels.

Fewer Ships, Higher Stakes

Commercial traffic through the chokepoint — which normally carries roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil — has continued to shrink as owners route around it where possible, shuttling barrels to tankers waiting just outside the strait rather than sending ships through it directly. Even that workaround route, moving crude to China from the Gulf of Oman without transiting Hormuz, now costs about $644,000 a day, gCaptain reports. The result is a severe squeeze on available tonnage that has turned shipowners into the conflict's unlikely financial winners even as refiners eat compressed margins.

"IT'S ALL ABOUT RISK. EVERY TIME THERE'S MORE GEOPOLITICAL INSTABILITY THAT CREATES TRADING INEFFICIENCIES, IT'S THE SHIPPING PLAYERS THAT ACTUALLY BENEFIT."

That's Ioannis Papadimitriou, principal freight analyst at commodity intelligence firm Vortexa, describing the dynamic to Fortune. Shipbroker Clarksons has reported operating profit up 55% year-over-year, and the Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF is up roughly 3,600% since the start of the year, a measure of how dramatically the trade has reordered fortunes across the tanker industry.

The pain is flowing downstream to consumers and refiners alike: elevated freight costs are baked directly into the landed price of crude, compounding an oil market already strained by wartime supply disruption. Analysts note the current spike echoes past chokepoint crises but at a scale not seen on this specific Gulf-to-China route, where seven figures a day was, until this week, unheard of.

With no resolution to the Iran war in sight, traders and shipowners expect rates to stay elevated or climb further heading into the fourth quarter, when seasonal demand for crude and refined products typically picks up. For now, every tanker captain willing to make the run through Hormuz is, in effect, printing money for a single day's work — compensation for a risk that, war-risk underwriters' pricing suggests, is now taken exceptionally seriously.