How many companies does this rule actually reach?
The Coast Guard publishes a monthly file of every documented US vessel, including the managing owner. Rolled up to the company level, it answers a question nobody else has published: who is actually on the hook for the July 16, 2027 deadline, and how small are they.
1,179 companies, and most of them are tiny
The median towing company in the United States operates two boats. Forty-two percent operate exactly one. That single fact reframes the entire compliance conversation: this is a regulation written in the language of enterprise security programs, landing on companies that do not have an IT department, a compliance department, or in many cases a second office employee.
The Coast Guard's own regulatory analysis put roughly 3,400 unique entities in scope across vessels and facilities. This analysis looks only at the towing side, from the vessel registry up.
The distribution nobody publishes
| Fleet size | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| One towing vessel | 497 | 42% |
| Two to four | 396 | 34% |
| Five to fifty | 272 | 23% |
| More than fifty | 14 | 1% |
The 272 companies in the five-to-fifty band are the ones with real operational complexity and no dedicated security function — enough vessels to carry meaningful IT and OT, too few to justify a full-time compliance officer. 181 companies own tank barges of their own, which changes what a transportation security incident looks like for them.
Fourteen companies operate more than fifty towing vessels. They will handle this with in-house staff and the large consultancies. The other 1,165 will not.
Where they are
| Coastal-Atlantic | 333 |
| Gulf Intracoastal | 254 |
| Lower Mississippi | 161 |
| Coastal-Pacific | 146 |
| Ohio Valley | 116 |
| Upper Mississippi | 99 |
| Great Lakes | 63 |
| Other | 7 |
| Louisiana | 237 |
| Florida | 93 |
| Texas | 80 |
| New York | 55 |
| Illinois | 47 |
| Washington | 44 |
| Massachusetts | 39 |
| Virginia | 36 |
| California | 36 |
| Alaska | 34 |
Louisiana holds one company in five, which matches the industry's own sense of itself. What surprises people is that the Atlantic coast holds more companies than the Gulf Intracoastal — the Gulf has the larger fleets, the Atlantic has more of them. Region is inferred from the owner's mailing address with city overrides where a state straddles two systems, so treat it as a routing hint rather than a fact about where the boats work.
How this was built, so you can check it
Source: the US Coast Guard's Merchant Vessels of the United States file (vesdoc), July 2026 release — a public monthly extract of every vessel holding a Certificate of Documentation, including vessel service and the managing owner's name and mailing address.
Filters: vessel service of Towing Vessel or Tank Barge; a vessel counts as active when its documentation status is Valid or Case Pending. Organisations only — the Coast Guard already replaces individual owners' names and addresses with the literal word Privacy, and those records, along with estate trusts, are dropped. No personal name or home address appears in this analysis.
Rollup: vessels are grouped to companies by a normalised name key, then merged where distinct names share a mailing address — which is what folds per-vessel limited liability companies into the operating company that runs them. That merge absorbed 653 additional organisation names into 244 company clusters.
Known limits, stated plainly: the documented managing owner is not always the operator, so lessors and finance arms can look like operators and the true operator of a leased boat may be undercounted. Companies running multiple documented entities at different addresses are not merged. Tank-barge counts reflect only barges the company itself owns, so no barges does not mean does not tow barges.
Free to cite, free to reuse
These figures are published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Journalists, associations, researchers and competitors are all welcome to use them — cite Fairway Systems and the vintage of the underlying Coast Guard file, and tell people it is derived from a public source they can rebuild themselves.
If you want the company-level table behind these numbers for a specific purpose, write to aaron@fairway.systems and say what you are doing with it.