Fish and Game mails annual angler survey that sets the state's sport catch numbers

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game begins mailing its 2026 Alaska Sport Fishing Survey this week to about 47,000 households, and what anglers write down will become the state's count of how much people fished and how many fish they caught and kept.

The survey goes to randomly selected resident and nonresident households with at least one member who bought a sport fishing license or held a permanent license card in 2026. It asks how many days household members fished, where they fished, and how many fish they caught and kept, by species.

Those answers become the state's estimates of sport fishing effort, catch and harvest. The department says it combines them with creel surveys and other data to protect and improve Alaska's sport fisheries. It has used the mail survey to estimate harvest every year since 1977 and total catch since 1990.

Where few people answer, there's no count. At a February Board of Fisheries meeting on the Alaska Peninsula, Aleutian Islands and Chignik, the department's Tyler Pollom said sport fishing estimates there are rarely available for individual rivers "as response rates to the statewide harvest survey are intermittent or too low to generate estimates for individual fisheries." Instead, the department lumps the whole area together. Anglers there averaged about 13,400 days of fishing a year from 2015 to 2024, less than 1% of the statewide total, he said.

Households get a booklet, a color fish identification guide and a postage-paid return envelope. Results from the 2026 survey are due by fall 2027. Estimates for 1996 through 2025 are posted on the survey's website.