Cruise ship size comparison: 39 big ships, every figure sourced

The biggest cruise ships right now

The top of the table is a tie. Royal Caribbean publishes the same gross tonnage, 248,663, for Icon of the Seas (in its fact sheet), Star of the Seas (in its investor fleet table) and Legend of the Seas (in its investor fleet table), all ships of its Icon class. That is 12,190 more than Utopia of the Seas, the largest of the Oasis class ships in the table, at 236,473. Below the Royal Caribbean ships come MSC's World class and Disney Adventure, then a cluster of ships between roughly 170,000 and 186,000 from MSC, Costa, AIDA, P&O, Carnival and Princess.

The table covers ships sailing, or scheduled to start sailing, by December 31, 2026. MSC World Asia is in it because its first sailing was scheduled for December 2026; it had not carried paying guests when we checked. We do not claim the order is an exact world ranking: some official figures conflict, and for a few large ships we could not confirm a tonnage at all.

What gross tonnage measures

Gross tonnage is not weight. Under the 1969 tonnage convention of the International Maritime Organization, it is calculated from the moulded volume of all the enclosed spaces on a ship. That includes crew areas, machinery spaces and storage as well as the parts guests use, so it describes the overall size of the ship rather than the space you will have. We sort the table by it because it is the size figure we could confirm for the most ships: 37 of the 39.

A few sources print the figure as "GRT", an older term; we mark those cells with a G. Disney Adventure and Scarlet Lady are marked as approximate because their sources say "approx." or "about".

Length and width tell you something different. The published widths of the Oasis and Icon class ships in the table are 64 to 66 meters, against 41 to 43 meters for most ships between 170,000 and 186,000 in tonnage. Lines publish this figure on different bases, some as moulded breadth and some as a width without saying which, so the figures are not directly comparable. Hover over a figure to see how its source describes it.

Why passenger numbers disagree

Published passenger figures use different occupancy definitions, and many do not say which one they mean. A cruise line can publish at least three different numbers for the same ship: guests at two per cabin, the maximum when third and fourth berths are filled, and the total of everyone on board, crew included. For Mardi Gras, the gap between the 2 per cabin figure and the maximum in the table is more than a thousand people.

We only put a figure in the "2 per cabin" column when the source says it is double occupancy or lower berths. We never work it out by doubling a cabin count. That is strict, and it leaves gaps: 24 of the 39 ships have no double occupancy figure we could confirm. A page that just says "6,000 guests" does not tell you which of the numbers it means, so we leave it out rather than guess. In the maximum column, MSC World America is marked with an asterisk because its source gives a "capacity" without saying it is the maximum. MSC's current pages also give other guest numbers, 6,764 for World America and 6,758 for World Asia, without saying which occupancy basis they use.

If you are comparing how busy two ships might feel, compare like with like. The 2 per cabin figure is the most consistent basis we can show across lines. Cabins with third and fourth guests push the number on board above it, toward the maximum.

When official sources contradict each other

For 12 of the 39 ships, we found two different exact figures for gross tonnage from official sources. The biggest group is Royal Caribbean, whose ship fact sheets and the fleet table on its investor site do not agree. For Symphony of the Seas, the fact sheet says 228,081 and the investor table says 230,000. Carnival's current pages and its older ship PDFs also disagree for Mardi Gras and Carnival Celebration.

Where sources conflict, we show the figure from the more specific source: usually the ship's own fact sheet, or, for Norwegian Prima, the shipyard's technical table over the introductory text on the same shipyard page. We keep the other figure in our records, with its date, because an older document may have been right on the day it was published. Figures marked H come from older line documents that we could not reconfirm against a current page: Carnival's ship PDFs for Mardi Gras (October 2021) and Carnival Celebration (November 2022), and Holland America's fleet sheet effective November 17, 2020, for Koningsdam.

Some figures we could not confirm at all. Queen Mary 2 has no gross tonnage in the table because the Cunard pages we checked did not state one. Across the table, 106 of 273 cells are empty for that reason. We would rather show a gap than copy a number from a site that does not say where it came from.

Guests per crew member

Dividing the 2 per cabin guest count by the published crew count gives a ratio of guests to crew. It is our calculation, and only 14 ships have both figures confirmed. Among them, Norwegian Prima has the lowest ratio, about 2.1 guests per crew member, and Carnival Celebration and Carnival Jubilee tie for the highest, about 3.1.

Treat it as a ratio of two published numbers and nothing more. The crew figures come from documents of different dates and are described in different ways, from "international crew" to "total team members", so the ratio is not a measure of service.

The same figures give gross tonnage per guest at 2 per cabin. It ranges from about 44.9 for Norwegian Prima to about 34.2 for Carnival Jubilee. Because gross tonnage counts all enclosed space, including areas guests never see, this is a rough comparison of overall size per guest, not of public space.

How to use this table

Click a column heading to sort. Sorting by length or crew rearranges the order, and the longest ships are not always the largest by tonnage. Every figure links to the exact page we took it from, so you can check it yourself or see a newer figure if the line has updated its fact sheet since we looked.

If you are choosing between two ships, add your ship in the cruise cost calculator and save it to your plan. You can also look up the CDC sanitation inspection scores for many of these ships before you book.

Spotted a figure that has changed? Email us with the source and we will update the table and log the change on our corrections page.