After heavy losses over 18 years, Alaska’s seafood processing industry is likely to stabilize at a lower new normal through 2034.
That’s according to the October edition of Alaska Economic Trends by the state Dept. of Labor and Workforce Development which focuses on job projections by industry through 2034.
Seafood processing has always been volatile, the article says, and between 1990 and 2025 nearly half were loss years due in great part to the Covid pandemic.
More recently, US tariffs, policy uncertainty by the Trump Administration and retaliation from China hurt seafood markets and resulted in seafood processing closures and consolidations. That caused 1,075 job losses from 2023 to 2024. Employment bounced back up to 7,972 jobs in 2025, a recovery of about half the previous year’s loss, but remained well below pre-pandemic levels.
After six years of lower employment, state job watchers claim seafood processing appears to have absorbed the changes and they “expect
it to stabilize to around 7,958 jobs by 2034.”
The longest uninterrupted growth streak in Alaska seafood processing was from 2002 to 2006, when the industry expanded from 7,525 to 9,337 jobs.
Other Alaska job outlooks
Health care and mining top the job growth list through 2034.
The category expected to decline most over the decade is educational instruction and library occupations, by 589 jobs, or 3.3 percent. “Because these occupations are concentrated in public schools, they will be vulnerable to the job losses projectedt in education,” the Trends article said, adding: “Still, this field will generate an estimated 1,631 openings each year, even with job losses figured in.”
