Fish catch and production 2022

In 2022, a total of 142 million kilos of fish was caught and farmed in Finland. The total catch includes fish caught by commercial and recreational fishers. Farmed fish means food fish produced for consumption and fish supplied for fishing ponds.

• The catch volume ranged from 105 to 193 million kilos in 1980–2022. In 2022, the total catch was 125 million kilos, down by eight million kilos from the previous year.
• Baltic herring and sprat caught by commercial fishers accounted for 65% of the total catch.
• Commercial marine fishers caught 87 million kilos of fish, being 11 million kilos less than in 2021. Recreational fishers caught 5.6 million kilos of fish from sea areas in 2022.
• The commercial inland fishery catch was 5.1 million kilos, being the same as in the previous year. Recreational fishers caught 28 million kilos of fish from inland waters.
• Measured by quantity, vendace was the most important species in commercial inland fishery, accounting for 46% of the catch. The commercial inland pikeperch catch increased significantly during the 2010s, with more than 80% of the commercial pikeperch catch being caught from inland waters at the end of the decade. In the 1990s, 90% of the commercial pikeperch catch came from sea areas.
• Recreational fishers caught the most fish in the first half of the 1990s, and their catch covered almost half of the total catch in 1992. The recreational catch of 33.5 million kilos in 2022 accounted for 27% of Finland’s total catch.
• Perch was the most significant fish species caught by recreational fishers both in sea areas (1.9 million kilos) and inland waters (7.9 million kilos).
• In 2022, 16.3 million kilos of fish were farmed for human consumption in Finland. Of this, rainbow trout accounted for roughly 94%, with the remaining proportion mainly consisting of European whitefish.
• In 2022, commercial fishers totalled 4,700, more than 200 fishers fewer than in the year before. Fishers numbered 2,140 in sea areas and 1,640 in inland waters. More full-time fishers numbered 390 in sea areas and 340 in inland waters. Aquaculture employed 940 people. The number of recreational fishers was almost 1.8 million in 2022. Their number increased by more than 300,000 from 2020.