Licence and MAB Capacity Constraints

Growth Is Licensed, Not Chosen

A Norwegian salmon farmer cannot grow by buying more feed. Every licence caps the live fish it may hold in the sea, and the state decides when that cap rises or falls. So the licence book is the growth asset, and last year’s harvest only shows how much of it was used.

What MAB Caps

MAB (maksimalt tillatt biomasse, maximum allowed biomass) caps the weight of live fish a licence may hold in the sea at any one moment. It limits a stock, not a year’s output. Fish are stocked, grown and harvested through the year, so the stock turns over and annual harvest is usually well above MAB. New capacity takes 12-18 months to show up in harvest: smolt, the young salmon put to sea this year, become next year’s harvest.

Bakkafrost reported 75,024 t of fish at sea at 31 December 2025. That is biomass on a date, and the Faroes set no fixed limit per licence (below).

What the Farmers Disclose

The totals are not a like-for-like ranking. SalMar’s includes licences for demonstration, broodstock and research, and Lerøy’s counts commercial licences only. Mowi farms in seven countries and gives a licence book value instead of one MAB total, so its harvest is the measure of scale.

Grieg’s 98% is its own measure of fish in the sea against the limit at year-end. Harvest divided by MAB is a different thing, a turnover ratio, so check how a company defines utilisation before quoting one. Grieg’s farms sit in production area 2, one of 13 stretches of coast the state grades green, yellow or red for lice (below). It was yellow, meaning no area-wide growth, in 2024 and 2026, so at 98% use Grieg can add little volume unless the colour improves, its farms qualify for the low-lice exception or it buys capacity.

Norway Growth Mechanisms

Norway adds or removes capacity through a small set of rules:

Every two years the state grades each of the 13 production areas by how many wild salmon its farms’ lice are estimated to kill. The 2024 decision set 6 green, 5 yellow, 2 red areas. The decision of 19 June 2026 set 3 green, 9 yellow, 1 red: areas 1, 12 and 13 green and area 3 (Karmøy to Sotra) red, for about 8,300 t of growth offered against about 5,300 t withdrawn (Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries). The biological risk guide covers the grading.

The fixed price (the 2026 figure from iLaks, 11 September 2026) puts a number on a marginal tonne of permitted biomass. Take the fictional farm in the worked example below: each tonne of MAB supports 1.25 t of harvest a year, and at NOK 68/kg against a NOK 60 cost it keeps NOK 4.24/kg after 47% tax. That is about NOK 5,300 a year per tonne of MAB, so NOK 270,000 buys some 51 years of it; the growth pays only where the extra fish earn well above that margin.

The Faroes Regulate the Farm, Not the Licence

The Faroe Islands set no fixed biomass cap per licence. A report for the Falkland Islands Government, written after its officers met Faroese regulators in May 2025, describes the system:

So Faroese capacity grows when a farmer’s biology earns it.

A Worked Ceiling

Take a hypothetical farmer with 120,000 t of MAB harvesting 150,000 t a year, a turnover of 1.25 times. If its sites can turn standing biomass into harvest at most 1.8 times a year (the Excel model’s default ceiling, an assumption; the farmers in the table above turned 1.53 to 1.71 times), its ceiling is 216,000 t, and any plan above that needs more licences, whatever the salmon price.

In a yellow area no area-wide growth is offered, so a farmer near its limit can add volume by buying licences, by harvesting more from the same biomass, through the low-lice exception, or after a later colour change. In a green area it may buy up to 6% more.

Licence capacity sets the ceiling; farming cost per kg (see the cost guide) and the salmon price (see the spot cycle guide) set the earnings per tonne inside it.