Alaska salmon preseason forecast, 2026

The preseason forecast is one number a year. Every April the Alaska Department of Fish and Game publishes "Run Forecasts and Harvest Projections", a special publication that puts a projected commercial harvest on each management area and each of the five salmon species for the season about to open. The table above is that report, by area and species, in thousands of fish. ADF&G does not revise it once fishing starts, and neither do we. Staying fixed is what makes it usable as a benchmark: the harvest moves all summer and the line it is measured against does not. ADF&G posts the report itself on its salmon forecast page.

What ADF&G projected for 2026

The department put the 2026 statewide commercial harvest at 125.5M fish. Sockeye accounts for 49.7M fish of that, pink 56.0M fish and chum 17.2M fish. Sockeye and pink pull a season in different directions. Pink usually carries the fish count and sockeye carries the money, so a year can post a big number and a thin one at the same time depending on which of the two shows up. The per-species pages break each of them out by area.

The biggest line in the report: Bristol Bay

Bristol Bay sockeye is the single largest projection ADF&G publishes, and it is the one most people mean when they search for an Alaska salmon forecast. For 2026 the department put it at 33.5M fish, published as a harvestable surplus. That surplus counts about 1.27M fish of Bay-origin sockeye taken in the South Alaska Peninsula June fishery, which are fish caught outside the Bay. The Bay's own in-area expected harvest is 32.3M fish, and that in-area number is the denominator this site uses any time it puts a Bristol Bay harvest over a Bristol Bay forecast. The table above reports the surplus, because that is what ADF&G published. Both numbers are right and they answer different questions, and reading a Bay harvest against the wrong one moves the percent by several points. Day-by-day district numbers are on the Bristol Bay daily run summary.

How the forecast has tracked

As of Sep 7, 2026, the statewide commercial harvest stands at 87.2M fish, 73% of The Run's 119.9M fish commercial-comparable statewide forecast. Bristol Bay sockeye is separately at 29.7M fish, 92% of the Bay's 32.3M fish in-area forecast. Those two percentages are not comparable to each other and are not meant to be. Each fishery fills its own forecast on its own calendar, and Bristol Bay peaks in early July while the pink fisheries that carry most of the statewide fish count run later. Statewide pink is at 37.9M fish against a 56.0M fish projection, 68% of it, and pink is the largest species line in the statewide total. Until that fishery runs, the statewide percent stays low no matter how the sockeye areas do.

How a forecast gets built

ADF&G builds these projections from the return records of past runs, not from anything happening in the water this spring. The two workhorses are sibling models, which relate this year's likely return to how earlier age classes from the same spawning years came back, and spawner-return relationships, which tie a run to the number of fish left to spawn several years earlier. The department publishes its methods with the forecast and is candid that the results miss: over the past two decades its Bristol Bay sockeye forecasts have run about 14 percent below the actual return on average, with individual years off by much more in both directions. A forecast is a starting line, not a promise. For the longer version, see how ADF&G forecasts salmon runs.

Reading the table

Every value is thousands of fish, so a line reading 33,530 is 33.53 million fish. A cell reading n/a is an area or species ADF&G does not forecast, not a projection of zero. Area totals are ADF&G's own where the report prints one and the sum of the species projections where it does not. The Run does not publish a forecast of its own and does not adjust ADF&G's, and nothing here is a prediction of where prices or the harvest will finish. To watch the season fill this table in, see the season scoreboard.

The harvest side of every comparison on this page is read from ADF&G's Preliminary Alaska Commercial Salmon Catch Report, the report the fleet calls the Blue Sheet. How to read it is in the Blue Sheet guide.