Salmon story

Wild vs farmed salmon: what’s actually different?

About five of every six tonnes of salmon in the world are farmed. Nearly all Atlantic salmon is farmed, so wild salmon almost always means one of five Pacific species, caught mostly off Alaska and Russia. They are different fish, sold in different seasons, at different prices. Here is what the data says about each difference, and where the usual claims go wrong.

Farmed: 5 in 6 tonnes of the world’s salmon, 2025
Sockeye at the dock, 2024: $2.92 a kilo, against $8.34 for farmed
Fat per 100 g: 13.1 g farmed Atlantic vs 4.9 g wild sockeye

Farmed means Atlantic, wild means Pacific

In 2025 farms produced about 3.2 million tonnes of salmon and its close relatives, gutted weight, and fishermen caught about one fifth as much wild salmon, according to Mowi’s salmon farming handbook, which uses figures from the analysts Kontali. Farmed salmon has outweighed wild since 1999. The handbook puts it plainly: “almost all commercially available Atlantic salmon is farmed.”

That is because wild Atlantic salmon is barely fished at sea any more. Greenland has banned exports of its salmon since 1998 and lets fishermen sell only at local markets, with a catch limit of 27 tonnes. The Faroe Islands have had no commercial salmon fishery for years, and the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization has set no quota there up to the 2028/29 season. Norway’s whole sea catch of wild salmon in 2025 was 70 tonnes, the smallest on record. In December 2023 the IUCN moved Atlantic salmon from Least Concern to Near Threatened, after the world’s population fell 23% between 2006 and 2020.

Wild salmon is Pacific salmon: pink, chum (also sold as keta), sockeye, coho and king (chinook). In 2025 the commercial catch was about 745,000 tonnes, whole fish, according to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission. The United States caught 51% of it, almost all in Alaska, and Russia 46%. Pink was more than half.

At the first sale, most wild salmon is cheaper

In 2024, Alaska’s fishermen were paid $11.87 a kilo for king salmon, $2.92 for sockeye, $2.82 for coho, $1.11 for chum and $0.74 for pink. Fresh whole farmed salmon left Norway at an average of $8.34. In every year since 2000, the farmed price was higher than what the boats got for sockeye, coho, chum or pink. Only king was worth more, and not in 2002 or 2003.

Year	Farmed, Norway export $/kg	King $/kg	Sockeye $/kg	Coho $/kg	Chum $/kg	Pink $/kg	Alaska catch, tonnes
2000	3.60	4.33	1.68	1.18	0.53	0.29	275,202
2001	2.87	3.80	1.22	0.94	0.68	0.24	311,340
2002	2.93	2.63	1.24	0.76	0.37	0.15	237,255
2003	2.99	2.05	1.31	1.03	0.37	0.16	286,003
2004	3.33	4.05	1.36	1.51	0.44	0.23	316,561
2005	4.08	4.28	1.56	1.47	0.51	0.22	395,676
2006	4.97	5.64	1.45	2.13	0.61	0.28	287,680
2007	4.52	6.58	1.76	2.10	0.67	0.42	390,686
2008	4.78	9.32	1.91	2.82	1.22	0.78	290,440
2009	4.89	5.68	1.98	2.04	0.98	0.58	304,556
2010	6.20	7.41	2.40	2.40	1.48	0.81	343,290
2011	5.70	7.45	2.89	2.46	1.76	1.00	334,835
2012	4.75	8.20	2.85	2.61	1.67	1.04	277,563
2013	6.76	8.42	3.52	2.67	1.16	0.88	459,313
2014	6.51	7.93	3.07	2.41	1.31	0.61	309,948
2015	5.31	7.22	1.79	1.61	1.10	0.45	472,101
2016	7.15	9.00	1.92	2.35	1.19	0.50	246,118
2017	7.30	11.98	2.99	2.63	1.47	0.82	447,198
2018	7.47	13.20	3.68	3.19	1.84	0.98	252,577
2019	6.83	9.05	3.55	2.38	1.16	0.59	375,145
2020	6.00	10.30	2.44	2.98	0.96	0.75	222,362
2021	6.83	12.14	3.83	3.37	1.96	0.88	366,039
2022	8.17	12.68	3.15	3.48	2.33	1.11	314,423
2023	8.76	12.28	1.83	2.20	1.22	0.53	383,596
2024	8.34	11.87	2.92	2.82	1.11	0.74	181,395

These are not the same product at the same step. The dock price is for whole, ungutted fish straight off the boat. Norway’s price is for gutted fish, packed on ice, at the border. Gutting alone takes off part of the weight, so a like-for-like gap would be smaller than the chart shows, but sockeye would still be well below farmed.

What a shop charges is another matter, and we found no official series that compares shop prices for wild and farmed salmon. Fresh wild salmon is in the shops for only part of the year. Pink, the biggest catch, is mainly used for canning, pet food and roe, according to Mowi’s handbook.

Dock prices also swing with the catch. Bristol Bay, the biggest sockeye fishery, paid a base price of $1.15 a pound in 2022 and $0.52 in 2023, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Wild catches swing, farms don’t

A farm can plan its harvest. A fishery takes what comes back. Alaska’s catch was 472,000 tonnes in 2015 and 181,000 tonnes in 2024. Most of the swing is pink salmon, which lives two years, so its runs alternate between big and small years: pink was 50% of the catch in 2023 and 25% in 2024.

Not every wild-caught salmon was born wild. Alaska releases young salmon from hatcheries, which then grow up at sea and are caught with the rest. In 2025 hatchery fish were 34% of Alaska’s commercial catch by number: 83% of the chum, 40% of the pink and 1% of the sockeye, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. They aren’t farmed, and the department says they “remain wild”, but they did start life in a tank.

Fresh wild salmon has a season

Wild salmon also has a season. NOAA Fisheries says sockeye is sold fresh in summer and early fall, and king and coho mainly from summer into fall. The rest of the year, wild salmon is frozen, canned or smoked. Farmed salmon is harvested all year. Over the last 52 weeks in our data, Norway exported fresh whole farmed salmon every single week, never less than 12,527 tonnes and up to 32,385.

When is farmed salmon cheapest?

Fat and omega-3

The clearest difference on the plate is fat. In 2023 the US Department of Agriculture bought farmed Atlantic salmon and wild sockeye in shops and analysed eight samples of each. Per 100 grams, the farmed fish had more than twice the fat and about half again as many calories. It also had more of the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA, because it had more fat overall.

Per 100 g, raw	Farmed Atlantic	Wild sockeye
Energy	197 kcal	130 kcal
Fat	13.1 g	4.9 g
Protein	20.3 g	22.3 g
Omega-3 (EPA + DHA)	0.90 g	0.54 g
Omega-6 (linoleic acid)	2.15 g	0.05 g

Farmed salmon has less omega-3 than it used to. Its feed was once mostly fish meal and fish oil. By 2020, Norwegian salmon feed was 22% marine ingredients and 73% plant ingredients, according to the research institute Nofima. Studies of Scottish farmed salmon found EPA and DHA fell from 2.74 grams per 100 grams in 2006 to 1.36 in 2015. In Norway, Institute of Marine Research scientists found the median fell by more than 60% from 2005 to 2020, mostly before 2014. They still found one portion a week covers an adult’s needs.

Wild species differ a lot too. In the USDA’s older reference data, king salmon has nearly four times the omega-3 of pink. The plant oils in farm feed are also why farmed salmon has far more omega-6 than wild; we found no health authority that draws a conclusion from that.

Pollutants: an old study and newer tests

The worry about farmed salmon and pollutants mostly goes back to a 2004 study in Science, which found more organochlorine contaminants, such as PCBs and dioxins, in farmed salmon than in wild, especially in salmon farmed in Europe. Those fish were raised more than twenty years ago, on feed that has changed a lot since.

Norway tests its farmed fish every year. In 2025 the Institute of Marine Research found a median of 0.29 nanograms of dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs per kilo of salmon fillet, and at most 0.71, against an EU limit of 6.5. Mercury was at most 0.054 milligrams per kilo against a limit of 0.3. No sample was over an EU limit, and no antibiotic residues were found. Those results are for Norwegian salmon only.

No food safety authority we checked tells people to choose wild over farmed. The US FDA and EPA list salmon as a “Best Choice” and don’t separate the two. Norway’s food safety committee found the benefits of two to three fish meals a week outweigh the risks for all ages. Its report is also frank that eating that much fish would put almost all age groups over the tolerable weekly intakes for pollutants such as dioxins, PCBs and PFAS, which come from the whole diet. In 2018 the EU’s food safety agency named fatty fish one of the biggest sources of dioxins and PCBs in European diets.

Antibiotics depend on the country

2025	Antibiotics used	Per tonne of fish
Norway	498 kg	about 0.3 g	all farmed fish; a third went to halibut and cod
Chile	415 tonnes	360 g	salmon and trout farms; nearly all florfenicol

Where a farmed salmon comes from matters more than the word farmed. Norway, the biggest producer, used 498 kilos of antibiotics in all its fish farms in 2025, and fish at 1% of its salmon and trout farms were treated; its vets credit vaccines. Chile, the second biggest, used 415 tonnes on its salmon farms in 2025, mostly against a bacterial disease called SRS. Per tonne of fish, that is more than a thousand times Norway’s rate.

Why raw salmon is farmed salmon

Wild salmon can carry parasites such as Anisakis worms, from the small animals it eats. The EU’s food safety agency says every wild-caught fish must be treated as possibly carrying live parasites if it will be eaten raw, while for farmed Atlantic salmon raised in pens or tanks on dry feed the risk is “negligible”.

The rules follow from that. In the EU, fish to be eaten raw must first be frozen, to −20 °C for at least 24 hours or −35 °C for 15. The US Food Code asks for −20 °C for seven days or −35 °C for 15 hours. Both have allowed farmed fish raised on feed that can’t carry parasites to skip the freezing (the EU since 2011). So raw salmon that was never frozen is farmed salmon.

How Norway put salmon on sushi

What farms mean for wild salmon

Farms and wild salmon also affect each other. Norway’s scientific advisory committee for wild salmon estimates about 456,000 wild salmon came back from the sea towards Norway in 2025, among the six poorest years since records began in the early 1980s. Its 2026 report says “Salmon lice from fish farms are the biggest human-caused threat to Norwegian salmon, along with escaped farmed salmon and infections related to aquaculture”.

Escaped farmed salmon swim up the same rivers. In 2024 they made up on average 4.6% of the salmon counted in Norway’s monitored rivers, and in 7% of rivers more than 10%, according to the Institute of Marine Research. The committee says genetic changes from interbreeding with escapees have been found in a large number of Norway’s wild salmon populations.

How to tell which one you’re buying

You can’t tell them apart by colour: both get it from the same pigment, astaxanthin. The label is what tells you. In the EU it must say whether the fish was caught or farmed, and US shops must say wild or farm-raised. Our colour story explains the pigment, the colour scale and how labs catch fish sold under the wrong label.

Why salmon is orange

Sources

NOAA Fisheries and Statistics Norway, 2000 to 2024. Dock prices are NOAA Fisheries’ ex-vessel value divided by landed live weight, Alaska only, in dollars of the year. The farmed price is Statistics Norway’s volume-weighted yearly export price for fresh or chilled whole salmon, converted at Norges Bank’s average dollar rate for the year.

Download the catch data (JSON) · Another story: why is salmon so expensive?