What is ex-vessel price?

Ex-vessel price is the price a fisherman is paid for salmon at the boat, before any processing, in the first sale of the fish. It sits below the wholesale price a processor charges its buyers and well below the retail price on the seafood counter. When you read that sockeye brought a certain price in a given season, ex-vessel is almost always the number being quoted, because it is the one that lands in a permit holder's pocket.

The first price in a long chain

The salmon a boat delivers changes hands several times before dinner. Ex-vessel is the first link, fisherman to first buyer, usually a tender or a processor. From there the fish is headed, frozen, canned, filleted or turned into roe, then sold on at a wholesale price that carries all of that added cost and margin. Retail is the last link. Each step is a different number, and mixing them up is the most common mistake in reading salmon prices. Ex-vessel is the raw-fish price, nothing more.

Base price, adjustments and bonuses

The ex-vessel price a fisherman actually earns is built in pieces. There is a base price, the per-pound figure a processor pays on delivery, sometimes announced early in the season and sometimes not settled until fish are already coming over the rail. Then come post-season adjustments and bonuses, extra cents per pound paid weeks or months later for quality, for chilling the fish, for icing or refrigerated seawater or simply because the market firmed up after the season closed. Roe can add to the settlement too. The final ex-vessel price is the base plus everything paid afterward, which is why an early-season number and a final number for the same fishery can differ by a lot.

Why the value numbers lag

ADF&G publishes ex-vessel prices, but on a delay, and the delay is the whole point to understand. A preliminary price appears after the season as processors report what they paid, and it can still be an estimate before a company has sold its pack. The final price, the one that folds in every post-season adjustment and bonus, is not settled until the following year, once operators file their annual reports with the state. ADF&G's preliminary season summary lands in the fall after the season, and the finals follow well behind it. An ex-vessel figure is a rear-view number by nature.

How this site handles the lag

The Run labels every ex-vessel price to the season it reports, and it never dresses a lagged price up as a live in-season number. The harvest on the scoreboard is this year, updated through the season. The value is the last season ADF&G has published, and it is marked as such. Putting a stale price next to a live catch and implying they belong together would be the easiest way to mislead a reader, so we keep them clearly separated. Where ADF&G has published a price, we show it and date it. Where it has not, we leave it blank rather than guess.

The sockeye page above carries the harvest against forecast and, where ADF&G has published it, the last ex-vessel price by area, each dated to its season. Read the catch as current and the price as the most recent published mark, not as today's going rate at the dock.

For how that price is built through the fishing chain, from the tender's delivery slip to the final settlement, see the guide on tenders, processors and the price chain. The Run reports prices as ADF&G publishes them and does not forecast where they will go.