Port State Control 2025: what the latest numbers show

Both major port state control regimes have now published their 2025 annual reports. The Tokyo MoU released its report in May 2026, the Paris MoU on 1 July 2026. Read together they show an industry being inspected more than ever, with the two regions moving in different directions on detention.

Paris MoU: detentions and bans rising

• 16,474 inspections carried out across the region.
• 51,797 deficiencies recorded in total.
• 9,879 ships, just under 60% of those inspected, were found with at least one deficiency.
• 4,744 deficiencies were serious enough to warrant detention action.
• 688 ships detained, a detention rate of 4.18%, up from 4.03% in 2024.
• 19 refusals of access, a rise after several years of low figures.

Fire safety was the largest single category of deficiency. The report notes no significant shift toward non-compliance in any one convention, which matters: the pressure is broad rather than concentrated in a single regime you could staff around.

Tokyo MoU: a record year for inspections

• 35,546 inspections, the highest in the organisation's history.
• 19,980 individual ships covered.
• 23,230 inspections found deficiencies, roughly two in every three.
• 1,255 ships detained, across 73 flags.
• Detention rate of 3.53%, continuing a downward trend but still above pre-pandemic levels.

The 2025 Concentrated Inspection Campaign focused on ballast water management, and the result is worth noting on its own: BWM deficiencies came in three times higher than the previous year. Deficiencies in structural condition, watertight and weathertight integrity, emergency systems, and propulsion and auxiliary machinery have all risen continuously over recent years.

Two regions, two directions

The headline divergence is detention rate: Paris up to 4.18%, Tokyo down to 3.53%. It would be easy to read that as one region tightening and the other relaxing. The more useful reading is that inspection intensity is high in both, and that where you trade now materially changes the probability and the consequence of a finding.

The ballast water result is the clearest warning in either report. A concentrated campaign produced three times the usual deficiency count, which suggests the gap was already there and had simply not been looked at closely. Any regime can become the next campaign.

What it means in practice

Nearly 52,000 deficiencies in one region and a record inspection count in the other point at the same operational reality. Inspections are frequent, findings are common, and the difference between a routine visit and a detention is usually whether the evidence was ready when it was asked for.

That is the part inside your control. The rules are published and the campaigns are announced in advance. What decides the outcome is whether the proof sits alongside the rule, or has to be assembled once a surveyor is already on board.

Our earlier piece on what the SOLAS safety numbers really say sets out the longer trend. If you want to see what this costs your own operation, the readiness worksheet puts a number on it.

Sources

Paris MoU Annual Report 2025, published 1 July 2026

Tokyo MoU Annual Report on Port State Control in the Asia-Pacific Region 2025, published May 2026

Figures are as reported by each Memorandum of Understanding.