More seafarers were left without wages, supplies or a way home in 2025 than in any year since the joint IMO/ILO database opened in 2004. In 185 of those cases, the insurance that international law has required since 2017 simply was not there.
What the figures show
The IMO Legal Committee met for its 113th session in London from 13 to 17 April 2026. It was told that 409 new cases of abandonment were recorded during 2025, affecting 6,264 seafarers across 364 vessels. That is the highest annual total on record.
The trend is not a spike. It is a curve that has been steepening for five years:
| Year | New cases reported |
|---|---|
| 2011–2016 (per year) | 12–19 |
| 2020 | 85 |
| 2021 | 95 |
| 2022 | 109 |
| 2023 | 142 |
| 2024 | 310 |
| 2025 | 409 |
Set against the first half of the last decade, when the database recorded fewer than twenty cases in a typical year, 2025 is roughly twenty times worse. The single largest jump came in 2024, when cases rose by 118 per cent in twelve months.
The Committee was also told that 103 further cases had already been recorded in the first quarter of 2026, putting this year on course to exceed the record again. It expressed particular concern about ships operating under fraudulent or unknown flags, and about the growing number sailing without a valid financial security certificate.
The ITF, whose inspectors file the great majority of these reports, counts 410 cases for 2025 rather than 409, and says it reported 400 of them itself — about 98 per cent. The gap between the two totals is trivial; what it shows is not. Almost every case in the official record exists because a union inspector put it there.
What abandonment means in law
Abandonment is not a loose description. Under the IMO definition it covers three situations: the shipowner fails to cover the cost of repatriation; leaves the seafarer without necessary maintenance and support; or unilaterally severs ties, including failing to pay contractual wages for at least two months.
Since the 2014 amendments to the Maritime Labour Convention came into force on 18 January 2017, shipowners have been required to carry financial security covering exactly this: repatriation, and up to four months of outstanding wages. In 2025, 185 of the 409 cases involved ships that did not have it. In other words, in nearly half of all recorded cases, the mechanism designed to make abandonment survivable was absent at the moment it was needed.
Nor was that a single bad year. In 2024, of the 310 cases reported, 144 involved no obligatory financial guarantee — the same proportion, near enough, two years running. Whatever is failing here is not an accident of one season.
Guidelines on handling these cases were agreed jointly by the ILO and IMO in 2022. At its April session the Legal Committee again urged member states to ratify the convention including its 2014 amendments, to apply those guidelines, and asked the joint tripartite working group to draw up a clear step-by-step procedure for the database.
What that looks like from the quayside
In 2024 — itself a record year, with 310 cases — a partner organisation in Turkey watched one of them at close quarters. A ship with an Indonesian crew lay alongside under detention. Within a month, everyone with an obligation to those men had stopped answering. For the two months that followed, volunteers from a seafarers’ mission brought them water and cigarettes.
No entry in the database records who did that, or what it cost them to do it.
Who it happens to
Indian seafarers were the worst affected national group in 2025, as in 2024, with 1,125 individuals abandoned. In September 2025 India’s Directorate General of Shipping announced action against 86 vessels linked to repeat abandonment, instructing recruitment agencies to stop supplying Indian crew to them.
Resolution is slow and often incomplete. Of the 310 cases recorded in 2024, 125 were still unresolved and a further 41 were classed as disputed — meaning the crew had been repatriated but wages remained unpaid.
What the numbers do not say
Three things are missing from the public record, and their absence matters.
- There is no published breakdown of cases by port or region, so it is not possible to say from the official data how many of these ships were sitting in European, Baltic or Black Sea ports.
- There is no total figure for unpaid wages. The count is of ships and people, not of money owed.
- There is no published average time from a case being logged to the crew getting home.
The secretariats also note that the database records only officially reported incidents, and that the real number is likely higher.
The figure that should concern this sector is not 409. It is 185. And it is not an anomaly — a year earlier it was 144 out of 310. Nearly half, two years running, of ships that went on operating without the one protection international law had already made compulsory.
A case where that security exists is a bad month, but a survivable one: the crew is fed, the wages are eventually paid, somebody goes home. A case where it does not exist is something else entirely, and it lands on whoever happens to be nearest. In practice that means the port welfare centre, the mission, the volunteers — whoever was standing closest when the ship went quiet.
That is work nobody budgets for. It is not funded, it is recorded nowhere, and it is a growing share of what these centres actually do. Our own centre has twice taken in seafarers who had missed their ship, a fortnight each time. Nobody reimbursed what it cost.
The absence of regional data compounds all of it. Nobody can say today what share of this burden falls on the Baltic, the Mediterranean or the Black Sea — which means nobody can fund it properly. So we propose something simple: publish, in the joint database, a breakdown of cases by port and by region. It would cost the database very little. It would show welfare organisations, and the people who fund them, the true scale of work they are already doing. Without it, international institutions will go on addressing consequences while the first line of port infrastructure carries the load at its own expense.
Sources
- IMO — Legal Committee, 113th session, 13–17 April 2026 — imo.org
- IMO — Legal Committee, 111th session (figures for 2020–2023) — imo.org
- IMO — Seafarer abandonment (definition and background) — imo.org
- ITF — Seafarer abandonment crisis: thousands left behind in shipping’s worst year on record — itfseafarers.org
- IMO Secretary-General — LEG 113 opening remarks — imo.org
- ILO and IMO Secretariats — Report on the IMO/ILO joint database of abandonment of seafarers, submitted to LEG 112 (2024 figures) — imo.org
Every figure above is taken from the sources listed. If you find an error, tell us — corrections are made openly and recorded at the foot of the article. See how we work.