Alaska coho salmon harvest

This page tracks Alaska's statewide commercial coho salmon harvest, known in the fleet as silvers, from ADF&G's Blue Sheet, against the preseason forecast, with the harvest broken out by fishing area. Figures 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.

Coho in Alaska's catch and value

In the 2026 season, ADF&G's preliminary figures put Alaska's commercial coho harvest at 1.82M fish averaging 6.7 lb, worth $23.0M at the dock. That is 2% of the 98.9M fish the five species together landed and 4% of their $648.3M ex-vessel value. That works out to about $12.66 a fish, the second highest of the five species. The table below the chart breaks the same season out by area. For how the species compare in the market, see sockeye vs pink salmon: the five species and their markets.

How the 2026 coho season ran

ADF&G's April 2026 projection called for 2.4 million coho statewide, the forecast in the table above, and much of it is a yardstick rather than a run forecast. In Southeast Alaska, the largest coho area, the 956,000 wild coho in the projection are the average harvest of 2021 to 2025, and the region's hatchery associations projected another 572,000, for 1.5 million in all.

Southeast's trollers take the biggest share of that catch, and 2026 was a thin year on the troll grounds. On September 17, 2026 ADF&G extended the summer troll season for coho and other species (not Chinook) through September 30 because it projected the region's coho escapement goals would be met, but it said wild coho catch per unit of effort in the troll fishery had run below the 20-year average all summer, that troll effort was substantially reduced, and that the 2026 wild coho troll harvest would come in below the recent five-year average. Drift gillnet coho catch rates had risen to near or above their 10-year average by then. In Prince William Sound, the Copper and Bering River districts switch to coho management in August, with one or two 24-hour periods a week.

Where coho salmon are caught

Coho, the fleet's silvers, range farther than any other Alaska salmon, from Southeast Alaska north to the Chukchi Sea and far up rivers like the Yukon. Southeast's troll fishery, the same fleet that targets Chinook, takes the largest share of the statewide commercial coho catch. Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound and the Kodiak and Alaska Peninsula seine and gillnet fisheries all take coho too, mostly as part of a mixed-species season rather than as a fishery built around coho alone. A mature coho typically runs 8 to 12 pounds, smaller than a big Chinook but in the same range as a large sockeye.

Season and market

Coho are the last of the five species to run, with Alaska's peak typically in August and September, after sockeye and pink have largely finished and as chum fisheries are winding down. That late timing makes coho the fishery that closes out the commercial salmon season in most areas. Ex-vessel prices for coho typically land between the higher prices Chinook and sockeye bring and the lower prices paid for pink and chum, though the exact ranking shifts by area and year. Coho flesh has less fat and a milder flavor than sockeye, with a softer texture, which shapes how it's marketed relative to the richer, higher-priced species that run earlier in the season.