In 2025, 68.1 million fish were lost in sea cages and
175.3 million juveniles were lost in smolt facilities.
Of the 466.7 million smolt put to sea, 14.6% were lost
before ever reaching slaughter.
Source: Fiskeridirektoratet, Official Statistics, updated 02.06.2025
This dashboard uses total losses rather than reported mortality as its primary figure. Losses include all fish removed from stock that never reach slaughter, deaths, culled fish, and escapes. The choice is a transparency one: from a welfare standpoint, it is not clear that a fish lost to one cause matters less than a fish lost to another. Using the total keeps every removal visible without making a judgement about which ones count.
Fiskeridirektoratet has not yet published full escape, lice violation or disease outbreak figures for 2026. As an early, unofficial signal, the Norwegian Veterinary Institute's Laksetap tracker publishes monthly mortality risk estimates for 2026, drawn from the same underlying farm reports. This is a different metric from the numbers on this page. Treat it as a placeholder preview, not a replacement.
Norway's government has set a target of reducing salmon sea losses to
5% of all fish put to sea.
In 2025, the industry lost 68.1 million fish, nearly three times the 23.3 million that would be lost at the 5% target. That's 44.8 million excess losses every year above the government's goal.
The percentage hides the scale, this is hundreds of thousands of fish lost above target every single day.
5% goal · 0.0M fish
0%0.0% · 0.0M fish25%
At 5% Target
0.0M fish
would be lost if industry hit the goal
Actual Losses
0.0M fish
lost at sea in 2025
Excess Losses
0.0M fish
lost above the 5% target
Gap to Target
0.0pp
percentage points above 5%
01 · 2025 At A Glance
The numbers behind Norwegian salmon
Smolt Put To Sea
466.7M
juvenile fish released
↑ +1.5% vs 2024
Sea Phase Losses
68.1M
lost in sea cages
↓ -3.2% vs 2024
Sea Loss Rate
14.6%
of fish put to sea
↓ -0.7pp vs 2024
Smolt Phase Losses
175.3M
juveniles lost on land
↑ +3.4% vs 2024
Production Sold
1.86M t
tonnes round weight
↑ +12.7% vs 2024
Cleaner Fish Used
16.6M
wrasse & lumpfish
↓ -26.4% vs 2024
Industry Revenue
113.2B NOK
total sales value
↑ +3.3% vs 2024
Farm Escapes
54,000
fish escaped to sea
↑ +37% vs 2024
02 · Is It Getting Better?
Sea loss rate has barely improved in 30 years
Despite industry promises of better welfare, the share of fish lost
at sea has fluctuated between 13–22% since the mid-1990s. In 2025, 14.6%
of all fish put to sea were lost.
Sea Phase Loss Rate
Losses as % of smolt put to sea, 1994–2025
03 · Scale of Loss
More production, more loss
As the industry has scaled from under 100 million to nearly 500 million fish
put to sea, the absolute number of losses has grown in lockstep. From 10 million
fish lost in 1994 to 68 million in 2025.
Fish Put to Sea vs. Fish Lost at Sea
Millions of fish, 1994–2025
04 · The Hidden Cost
175 million juveniles are lost before reaching the sea
The smolt and juvenile phase is hidden from public eyes. Yet in 2025, losses
in land-based facilities were more than double the losses at sea.
These fish are lost in hatcheries and smolt facilities from disease, handling,
and production failures.
Sea Phase vs. Smolt Phase Losses
Millions of fish lost, 2005–2025 · smolt split into natural deaths + fry destruction (stacked)
05 · What the Veterinary Institute Says
Disease, injuries, and unknown causes dominate mortality
The Veterinary Institute's 2025 fish health report breaks down mortality, fish confirmed dead, by cause.
Injuries and trauma, infectious disease, and deaths of unknown cause together account for most recorded mortality events in Norwegian aquaculture.
Key findings from Fiskehelserapporten 2025
Veterinærinstituttet · Report 1a – 2026
The Norwegian government has set a target to reduce sea losses to 5%
across all farmed species, roughly a third of the current level. The Veterinary Institute reports
mortality (confirmed deaths) using cause-of-death
data from the AquaCloud industry database, covering 408 salmon localities,
approximately 49% of active sea localities in 2025. The figures below show
the share of registered dead fish by cause of death, not real industry-wide prevalence, and highlight the main categories:
33.5%
Injuries & trauma (C)
28.1%
Infectious diseases (A)
27.4%
Unknown cause (F)
Remaining 11.0%: environmental conditions 4.3%, physiological causes 4.7%, other 2.0%
The same report also breaks mortality down by specific named cause rather than broad category.
In that finer breakdown, the top three causes of death in 2025 were unknown specific cause
(15%), unspecified handling injuries (13%), and
unspecified non-medicinal treatment (11%). Winter sores caused by the bacterium
Moritella viscosa, the top named cause in 2024 at 13%, fell to around 4% of registrations in 2025.
Within the environmental category, extreme currents dominated registrations in the January–April period (driven by rough weather
on the west coast), while algal poisoning accounted for the large majority of environmental registrations in the northernmost
production areas between May and August.
Finnmark's loss rate remains volatile year to year, partly explained by having very few active localities,
meaning individual catastrophic events weigh heavily on the regional statistics.
ISA remains elevated. Lice violations stay near a decade high.
Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA) has remained persistently elevated since 2020, recording 21 cases in 2023, 2024 and 2025 alike · compared to a low of 6 in 2019.
Pancreas Disease (PD) peaked at 159 cases in 2020 and has continued to decline, down to 44 cases in 2025. Meanwhile, lice limit violations
eased only slightly from 1,092 in 2024 to 1,062 in 2025 · still the highest level since 2019.
Best and worst regions differ by nearly 2x in loss rate
Trøndelag has the lowest loss rate (12.1%) while producing 288,000 tonnes.
Møre og Romsdal loses 22.1% of all fish put to sea, nearly twice as much. For every 1,000 tonnes
produced, Troms loses the fewest fish (31,000) while Finnmark loses the most (41,000). But is this
about farm density, or something else entirely?
Loss Rate vs. Production by Region
2025 · loss rate % (bar) with production volume overlay (line) · Source: Fiskeridirektoratet
Production vs. Loss Share by Region
Each region's share of national production vs. share of losses
Efficiency: Losses per 1,000t Produced
Fish lost (×1000) for every 1,000 tonnes of salmon sold
Farm Clustering vs. Loss Rate: Does Proximity Matter?iHow this is calculatedFarm GPS coordinates are taken from a mid-year snapshot (week 26) of the Barentswatch API. Farms are grouped into regions by latitude band. For each farm, the straight-line (Haversine) distance to every other farm in the same region is measured, and the shortest distance, its nearest neighbour, is kept. These per-farm nearest-neighbour distances are then averaged across all farms in the region. A lower value means farms are genuinely clustered close together.
Avg. distance to nearest neighbouring farm (km) vs. sea loss rate · bubble = production volume · Source: Barentswatch API
Best: Trøndelag
12.1%
loss rate · 288kt produced · 158 active localities
Worst: Møre og Romsdal
22.1%
loss rate · 230kt produced · 80 active localities
Most Losses: Vestland
14.4M
fish lost · 363kt produced · 271 active localities
Most Localities: Vestland
271
active farm sites · more than any other region in 2025
08 · Cleaner Fish
Millions of fish used as living lice-removers
The industry deploys wrasse and lumpfish into salmon cages to eat sea lice.
Usage peaked at 61 million in 2019 but has since declined further to 16.6 million in 2025,
partly due to high cleaner fish loss rates and a shift toward mechanical delousing.
Cleaner Fish Deployed Per Year
Millions of individuals, 1998–2025
Explore Further
See every farm. Updated weekly.
Explore the live map of all salmon farming localities along the Norwegian coast
with weekly lice counts, disease status, and treatment data from Barentswatch.