Alaska chum salmon harvest

This page tracks Alaska's statewide commercial chum salmon harvest, known in the fleet as dogs, 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.

Chum in Alaska's catch and value

In the 2026 season, ADF&G's preliminary figures put Alaska's commercial chum harvest at 13.5M fish averaging 7.9 lb, worth $151.4M at the dock. That is 14% of the 98.9M fish the five species together landed and 23% of their $648.3M ex-vessel value. That works out to about $11.21 a fish, the third 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 chum season ran

ADF&G's April 2026 projection called for 17.2 million chum statewide, the forecast in the table above, and most of it was hatchery fish. Southeast Alaska's 10.1 million included 9.2 million from its hatchery associations, and Prince William Sound's 4.6 million included 4.2 million hatchery fish, with the Sound's wild chum projected at 413,000.

Most of the statewide chum catch comes from Southeast, and the week-by-week table shows when it landed. Prince William Sound's hatchery chum came back short. The Cordova office's May 1 outlook listed the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation's chum returns at 1.87 million to the Wally Noerenberg Hatchery, 840,000 to the Port Chalmers remote release site and 330,000 to the Armin F. Koernig hatchery. By July 15 the Port Chalmers fishery had taken 407,000 chum and the Koernig hatchery area 163,000. The Coghill District, which fishes the Wally Noerenberg return, closed after a July 6 period and stayed closed through late July for low chum escapement at the hatchery and low sockeye counts at the Coghill River weir, and on July 22 the corporation said it might fall short of its chum broodstock goal.

Where chum salmon are caught

Chum, known in the fleet as dogs, have run second only to pink salmon in statewide harvest volume since statehood. Southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound, both of which run large hatchery chum programs alongside their pink fisheries, account for most of the commercial catch, with the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak contributing smaller shares. In the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region, chum shares the same rule Chinook does: commercial openings wait on subsistence escapement goals being met first, so a weak AYK chum return can shut the commercial fishery down for the year.

Season and market

Chum run over a broad window, typically June through August, overlapping both the earlier sockeye fishery and the later pink and coho runs. Chum has typically carried the lowest or near-lowest ex-vessel price per pound of the five species, but that understates its value: chum roe makes up a larger share of the species' total value than roe does for any other Alaska salmon, so the roe market meaningfully offsets a modest per-pound price on the meat itself. Alaska's hatchery program has driven a steady, decades-long increase in commercial chum harvests since the 1980s, on top of whatever the wild runs produce in a given year. A meaningful share of Prince William Sound's chum comes through hatchery cost-recovery fisheries, where processors sell a portion of hatchery-origin returns to fund the hatchery program itself, a financing arrangement that has no equivalent in the wild sockeye or Chinook fisheries.