Alaska pink salmon harvest

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

Pink in Alaska's catch and value

In the 2026 season, ADF&G's preliminary figures put Alaska's commercial pink harvest at 44.1M fish averaging 3.3 lb, worth $95.2M at the dock. That is 45% of the 98.9M fish the five species together landed and 15% of their $648.3M ex-vessel value. That works out to about $2.16 a fish, the lowest 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 pink season ran

ADF&G's April 2026 projection called for a statewide commercial harvest of 56.0 million pink salmon, the forecast in the table above and less than half the 2025 catch. Even years have tended to bring smaller pink returns than odd years in recent decades, and pinks are the hardest species to forecast: they all return at two years old, so no younger siblings come back first to signal the run, and most areas project their harvest from past brood-year catches. Southeast Alaska is the exception, where the 19 million fish projection rests on a NOAA and ADF&G survey of juvenile pinks the summer before.

Prince William Sound accounts for most of the distance between that forecast and the catch. Its 2026 projection was 18.6 million pinks, 14.7 million of them hatchery fish, and ADF&G's May 1 outlook already called the Sound's hatchery forecast one of the lowest in recent history. The Valdez Fisheries Development Association run was slow to show: test sets in Port Valdez in early July caught 50 pinks or fewer, the association had earned less than 1% of its 2026 pink cost recovery revenue goal by July 10, and it paused cost recovery after July 15 to build broodstock, reaching 16% of the revenue goal by August 7. The Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation met its pink cost recovery goal on August 10, and ADF&G opened the terminal areas at its Cannery Creek and Koernig hatcheries to the seine fleet the next day; that 12-hour period on August 11 took 624,000 pinks, and a broad seine opening across the Sound followed on August 13. Hatchery pink samples from July 9 to August 6 averaged 2.9 to 3.9 pounds a fish. The Sound's purse seine season closed September 14.

Where pink salmon are caught

Pink salmon, called humpies for the pronounced hump spawning males develop, are the smallest-bodied and most numerous salmon Alaska harvests, and odd-year statewide catches can top 100 million fish. Southeast Alaska, Prince William Sound, Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula are the major pink-producing areas, and Prince William Sound's fishery in particular carries a large hatchery-origin component built specifically around pink and chum production.

Season and market

Pink runs peak later in the summer than sockeye, typically late July into August, and follow a genetics-driven two-year cycle: odd-year and even-year returns to the same river system are separate populations that can differ enormously in size, which is part of why pink forecasts are notoriously hard to pin down season to season. Pink salmon carries the lowest ex-vessel price per pound of the five species most seasons, but the sheer volume of fish makes it the backbone catch, the "bread and butter" fishery, for many coastal Alaska communities even when the per-pound price is thin. Historically most of the pack was canned; frozen production has grown steadily since the early 2000s, and pink roe is its own smaller but real market. Statewide pink harvests can exceed the combined harvest of the other four species in a big year, which is one reason the season's overall percent-of-forecast figure often tracks pink's own progress as much as any other single species.