Bristol Bay salmon harvest

The world's largest sockeye salmon fishery: five districts of drift and set gillnet at the head of the Bering Sea, fished hard through June and July. This page tracks Bristol Bay's cumulative commercial salmon harvest from ADF&G's Blue Sheet, by species, against the area's preseason forecast. The numbers are common-property and cost-recovery catch in thousands of fish, preliminary and updated through the season; sport, subsistence and personal-use harvests are not included. Percent of forecast is a share of the full-season projection, not a good-or-bad call, and it climbs as each species opens and peaks: early low percentages are the run still building, not a weak year. Scope note: ADF&G's 2026 Bristol Bay sockeye forecast is a 33.53 million fish harvestable surplus that includes about 1.27 million Bristol Bay-origin sockeye taken in the South Alaska Peninsula June fishery. Because this page's harvest is the Bristol Bay management-area catch, the percent of forecast divides by the 32.26 million fish in-area expected harvest, not the 33.53 million fish total surplus. That South Peninsula interception is tracked separately under Alaska Peninsula; the full 33.53 million fish surplus is on the forecast page. In the ex-vessel table, value is that species' whole-season total in dollars as ADF&G prints it, not a per-fish or per-pound figure, so a species with a few hundred fish shows a total of a few dollars.

Five river districts make up the fishery: Naknek-Kvichak, Egegik, Ugashik, Nushagak and Togiak, each managed to its own escapement goals, and each opening and closing on its own run. Drift gillnet boats are capped at 32 feet by limited entry, which is why the fleet looks the way it does, and set gillnet sites are fished off the beach. The season is compressed to a degree nothing else in the state matches: the bulk of a run measured in tens of millions of sockeye moves through in about three weeks around the first week of July.

That compression makes processing capacity, not fish, the binding constraint in a large year. When the run arrives faster than the plants can take it, processors put boats on limits and the tender line becomes the real bottleneck. It is also why the Bristol Bay base price is announced late and revised afterward: buyers price a season whose volume they cannot know in advance. ADF&G forecasts the run from smolt abundance and sibling returns, and the preseason number the percentages on this page are measured against is that forecast rather than any historical average. Bristol Bay commercial fishing announcements, explained covers how each district's openings are called in season.

How the 2026 season ran. ADF&G's season summary, revised September 29, 2026, puts the 2026 inshore sockeye run at 45.7 million fish: 4% above the 44.1 million preseason forecast, 8% below the 2006 to 2025 average of 49.6 million, and the first run under 50 million since 2014. Run timing was two days earlier than the 20-year average. The east side carried the year. Against their district forecasts, Ugashik's run came in 37% above at 7.14 million fish, Egegik 26% above at 11.2 million and Naknek-Kvichak 5% above at 11.5 million, while Nushagak finished 16% below at 15.5 million and Togiak 43% below at 300,000.

Every sockeye escapement goal was met or exceeded except Togiak's, where the tower counted 119,298 fish against a 120,000 to 270,000 goal. The Nushagak, Igushik and Ugashik rivers went over their goals (Ugashik's tower counted 1,703,598 against 500,000 to 1,400,000), and baywide escapement totaled 15.6 million. Sockeye averaged 5.0 pounds, the same as the recent five-year average, although weight at each major age was at or below its 10-year average.

King salmon shaped the Nushagak. The Portage Creek sonar indexed 36,339 Nushagak kings, short of both the 55,000 to 120,000 escapement goal and the 95,000 in-river goal, and ADF&G managed the district more conservatively than its king salmon stock of concern plan required. From 2026 the Board of Fisheries barred releasing kings caught in the Nushagak commercial fishery, and ADF&G began counting kings from processor production reports as well as fish tickets, so its 2026 Chinook figures do not compare with past years or with the Blue Sheet's Chinook line above. Nushagak chum indexed 199,809 at Portage Creek, just under the 200,000 goal.

ADF&G's preliminary price estimate, built from processor final operations reports, is an average of $1.72 a pound for sockeye, and $264.0 million in ex-vessel value for all species, 21% above the 20-year average of $207.8 million. The ex-vessel table above stays on the 2025 season until ADF&G publishes its statewide 2026 summary.