Fishing, Hunting and Trapping (United States) — NAICS 114

A rollup primer for a general investing audience — public-market and private investors alike. This is a NAICS subsector (3-digit): it aggregates two very different child industries. This page's job is the contrast between them, plus this level's own ground-truth federal figures. For the detailed treatment of each child, follow the linked child primers. Figures are U.S. and cover employer businesses unless noted; forward-looking statements are flagged as judgments.

1. Overview

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is the U.S. government's standard for grouping businesses by activity. Code 114, "Fishing, Hunting and Trapping," is a three-digit subsector — the level that sits between the two-digit sector (11, Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting) and the four-digit industry groups below it. It is the part of the food-and-resource economy built on taking wild animals from nature rather than farming them: catching wild fish and shellfish, and selling access to wild game and wild fur.[2]

For an investor, 114 is best understood as two adjacent but genuinely different businesses under one roof:

• Fishing (1141) — the boat-and-net, trap-and-dredge, wild-capture seafood business. A regulated, scarce-resource commodity food industry: the annual catch is capped by law and by nature, and the right to fish is a valuable, tradable asset.[1]
• Hunting and Trapping (1142) — paid hunts, game preserves and ranches, and commercial trapping. A scarce-land recreation-and-services business plus a shrinking fur commodity, sold to a slowly declining base of hunters.[1]

Both share a defining feature: their supply is set by government wildlife management, not by how hard the operator works. Both are fragmented, private, and hard to reach through public markets — there is no U.S.-listed pure-play harvester in either. But they differ in size (fishing is roughly four-to-five times larger), in what the core asset is (fishing quota vs. hunting land and access), and in direction of travel. Those contrasts are the point of this page.

2. What's inside — the two children and how they differ

NAICS subsectors usually bundle several industry groups; 114 bundles just two, and they roll up cleanly with no residual "other" bucket. The table below is the heart of this primer — it compares the children on size, direction, ownership, and how (if at all) you can invest. Shares are of this subsector's own ground-truth federal figures (see Section 3).[1]

Two contrasts jump out. First, hunting/trapping employer establishments are larger on average (about 4.6 W-2 employees each vs. 1.8 in fishing) — preserves, game ranches and nuisance-control operations carry more staff than a small fishing boat — yet they pay about half as much per head. Fishing's W-2 payroll is concentrated in a small, high-wage, capital-intensive corporate segment (pollock cooperatives and at-sea processors); hunting/trapping's is spread across lower-paid seasonal recreation work.[1] Second, fishing dominates on every dollar measure but the gap narrows on headcount — a reminder that fishing's value sits in the harvest itself, while hunting's sits in labor-heavy services.

Each child, in turn, is a single-child chain to its leaf industry — 1141 equals 11411 (which splits into finfish/shellfish/other-marine at the six-digit level), and 1142 equals 11421 equals 114210. The per-leaf detail, company lists, and full regulation are in the child primers; this page does not duplicate them.

3. How big it is (this level's rollup figures + undercount)

Our ground-truth federal business statistics (U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), 2023) for NAICS 114:[1]

These roll up exactly from the two children (2,503 + 446 = 2,949 establishments; 4,581 + 2,034 = 6,615 employees; $404.1M + $93.5M = $497.6M payroll).[1] Average pay across the subsector is about $75,200 per employee, but that blends fishing's high-wage corporate core with hunting's seasonal work and hides the split shown in Section 2. These are payroll figures — not industry revenue, landings value, receipts, or profit. Our ground-truth file for this level contains only these four metrics: no sales, catch volume, acreage, quota value, assets, debt, or ownership mix, and no suppressed cell should be read as zero.

These figures dramatically undercount real activity — read them with care. CBP counts only employer establishments and W-2 payroll; it excludes the self-employed, sole proprietors without an Employer Identification Number (EIN), and most government workers.[6] Both children are dominated by exactly the people CBP misses:

• In fishing, most crew are paid by the "lay" (share) system — a cut of the catch, not a wage — and most vessels are self-employed owner-operators. This level shows just ~$405M of fishing payroll, yet the total U.S. commercial catch was worth about $5.1 billion ex-vessel ("ex-vessel" = the first-sale, dockside price) on 8.4 billion pounds in 2023, landed by tens of thousands of permit holders.[3]
• In hunting and trapping, the activity is overwhelmingly one-person operations — a trapper, a guide, a landowner leasing hunting rights. The 446-establishment payroll count is a small fraction of the roughly 17,600 total businesses a third-party source (IBISWorld) estimates once sole proprietors are counted, against estimated industry revenue near $1.2 billion (an estimate, not a Census figure).[4] And most hunting is non-commercial (self-guided hunters generate no 114 transaction): 14.4 million Americans hunted in 2022 and spent $45.2 billion, almost all of it outside this code.[5]

Bottom line on size: treat 114's ~$498M payroll and 6,615 employees as a precise measure of a small W-2 niche, not of the wild-harvest economy. Wherever you need real scale, use landings value for fishing and total-business/participation estimates for hunting. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) classifies essentially the entire subsector as "small."[18]

4. The investable universe — where value concentrates

Across both children the answer is the same and it is unusual: there is no U.S.-listed pure-play harvester anywhere in NAICS 114.[7] The domestic wild-harvest sector is private and fragmented — no single firm is estimated to hold more than ~5% of either industry.[7] Listed exposure is always one step removed and differs by child:

• Fishing (the larger pool of value). Public exposure lives downstream in processors, canned/branded seafood, and distributors, or overseas — and much of the foreign listed "seafood" is actually farmed fish (aquaculture, a separate NAICS code, 1125), not wild capture. Within fishing, value concentrates in shellfish (crab, lobster, shrimp, scallops — the highest dollar value) and in the finfish corporate core (Bering Sea pollock cooperatives and at-sea processors — the wage-paying part that shows up in this level's payroll).
• Hunting and trapping (the smaller pool). Public exposure is a nuisance-wildlife-control roll-up inside a large pest-control company, and timberland real estate investment trusts (REITs — companies that own income-producing property) that earn hunting-lease income. Private value concentrates in the Texas exotic-game and deer-breeding cluster (the most-capitalized private sub-segment) and in independent outfitters, preserves, and hunting-lease land.

Tickers and named companies are reserved for Section 10 and the child primers; the key point here is that every public route is a proxy with materially different economics from the wild-harvest activity it stands in for.

5. How the money works

The two children run on different engines, and the contrast is the analytical core of this level.

Fishing is a capped-volume commodity. Revenue = pounds landed × ex-vessel price.[3] Volume is fixed by regulation (quota / catch limit) and by nature (stock abundance), so the only way to grow harvest is to buy or lease more quota — which makes the harvesting right a balance-sheet asset often worth more than the boat.[8] Price is set by global commodity markets, not by the operator's costs; a glut abroad can crush the dockside price regardless of how the season fished. The biggest variable cost is fuel; crew cost flexes with revenue through the lay/share system. Winners own their quota and integrate vertically into processing and cold storage.

Hunting and trapping is a scarce-land services business — not utility rate base, not REIT funds-from-operations, not mining all-in sustaining cost. Four models sit under the code: preserves and guide/outfitter operations (per-hunter revenue, high fixed cost against a short season, so utilization is everything); deer breeders and exotic ranches (breeding-stock sales plus hunts, capital- and permit-intensive); commodity trapping (a price-taker on globally set fur prices, depressed for a decade, where the more durable money is now paid nuisance and predator control); and landowners leasing hunting rights (passive yield of roughly $5–$50+ per acre per year).[10][11][12][13]

What they share: both sell access to a wild resource whose supply the operator cannot expand at will, and both contain a "global-commodity price-taker" segment (wild seafood broadly; fur within hunting). Where they diverge: fishing's scarce asset is a transferable quota; hunting's is land, access, and breeding stock. Fishing scales by accumulating harvesting rights; hunting scales by controlling land and filling a short season.

6. Demand drivers

• Fishing: global protein demand and steady per-capita seafood consumption; foodservice and premium channels; heavy import competition and farmed substitutes (roughly 80% of U.S. seafood is imported, against a ~$20.3 billion trade deficit in 2023); exports (pollock, roe, live lobster and crab into Asia and Europe, so tariffs and the dollar move dockside prices); and nature, which caps supply.[10][3]
• Hunting and trapping: hunter participation, which has drifted down for decades (about 15.9 million paid license-holders in 2021 versus a higher share of the population in past decades) against an aging base; discretionary income (guided hunts are luxury recreation); shrinking free land access, which pushes hunters toward paid preserves and leases; weak fur-fashion and export cycles set abroad; and rising urban/suburban wildlife conflict, which lifts demand for paid nuisance-wildlife removal — the subsector's clearest growth corner.[13][14]

Common thread: both are bounded by the health of wild populations and eroded by substitution — farmed seafood for wild catch, and a shrinking hunter base for the recreation half. Neither is a demographic growth story; both depend on scarcity, premium positioning, and (for hunting) extracting more revenue per remaining customer.

7. Regulation

Regulation is the supply curve for the entire subsector — more so than in almost any other industry, because government sets how much wild resource may be taken.

• Fishing is governed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA, 1976), which extended U.S. control to a 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone and created eight Regional Fishery Management Councils that set science-based annual catch limits, implemented by NOAA Fisheries (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS).[9] Catch shares — Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) and cooperative allocations — turn a public catch limit into privately held, tradable shares, the mechanism that makes "quota" an asset.[8] Layered on are U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shellfish-sanitation rules, Endangered Species Act (ESA) measures, and import controls against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
• Hunting and trapping is regulated primarily by state wildlife agencies (licenses, seasons, bag limits, legal methods), with federal law layered on top: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), the ESA, the Lacey Act, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).[12] Uniquely, regulation here can eliminate a whole segment: California's Wildlife Protection Act of 2019 (AB-273) banned commercial and recreational fur trapping outright, the first state to do so, and such bans are spreading.[11] Deer breeders and exotic ranches operate under state and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) movement permits, with chronic-wasting-disease (CWD) containment tightening.

The common lesson for investors: the value of the core asset — quota, permit, or lease — is a creature of policy, and a council cut or a state ban can revalue it overnight. Child primers break the rules out in full.

8. Consolidation

Both children are structurally fragmented (no firm >5% share) with high barriers to entry — but the barriers differ, and so does what consolidation buys.[7]

• In fishing, barriers are limited-entry permits, quota costs, capital intensity, and U.S.-ownership rules. The multi-decade trend is real consolidation — quota accumulating into fewer hands, processors integrating from the buy side — but it mostly buys control over supply, quality and margin, not volume growth, because a bigger operator cannot manufacture more wild fish from a capped resource. A sharp 2023–25 downturn (Russian pollock and crab flooding world markets) is setting up a fresh M&A wave.[16]
• In hunting and trapping, geography and permit-dependence limit the value of a national operating model, so the recreation half has largely resisted roll-up. The one place consolidation is genuinely happening is nuisance-wildlife control, assembled under a public pest-control roof — but that sits on the boundary with pest control (NAICS 561710), not guided hunting.[14] The fur segment is in secular decline, not consolidation, following the 2019 insolvency of North American Fur Auctions and a decade of falling prices.[17]

9. Risks

The subsector's risks stack in two layers — shared and child-specific.

Shared across 114: biological, climate and disease risk is the defining structural risk (the Bering Sea snow-crab harvest was cancelled for the first time ever after an ~80% collapse; on the land side, chronic wasting disease can close deer seasons);[16] regulatory risk (councils can slash catch limits; states can ban trapping and pressure preserves); price and import/export risk (Russian seafood oversupply and a strong dollar on one side, collapsed fur prices on the other); and data/investability risk — federal statistics and private disclosures rarely reveal owner-operator economics, and there is no public liquidity in the underlying harvest.

Fishing-specific: fuel-cost shocks and extreme occupational danger (commercial fishing is among the deadliest U.S. jobs). Hunting-specific: secular decline in hunter participation, animal-welfare-driven bans, and thin capitalization in mostly sub-$8.5-million sole-proprietor businesses.[18][13]

The through-line: underwrite the specific asset — a quota share, a lease, a permit, a breeding herd — not the "wild harvest" label, because the two children behave differently and the listed proxies behave differently again.

10. How to invest & outlook

Public routes are limited and indirect across the whole subsector — and none should be valued off the payroll figures above.

• Fishing proxies (all one step removed, and none a U.S. wild harvester): seafood processors and brands such as High Liner, Thai Union, Dongwon and Premium Brands; food distributors such as Sysco and US Foods; and foreign, largely farmed-salmon names such as Mowi, SalMar, Lerøy and Bakkafrost.[7]
• Hunting-and-trapping proxies: nuisance-wildlife-control consolidation via Rollins; hunting-land economics via timberland REITs (Weyerhaeuser, PotlatchDeltic, Rayonier); and a participation proxy via gun/ammunition/gear names.[14][15] Investors chasing a "seafood growth" story will find it mostly in aquaculture — a different NAICS code.

Private routes are where the real assets sit, and they differ by child: in fishing, direct ownership of vessels plus permits/IFQ/quota shares (the appreciating, regulation-exposed scarce asset), the buy-side layer (dealers, processors, cold storage), and private-equity roll-ups; in hunting, operating a guided-hunt outfitter, preserve, or exotic-game ranch, breeding deer and exotic game (concentrated in Texas), yielding hunting-lease income on rural land, or running paid nuisance-wildlife and predator control — the most defensible cash flow in the whole subsector. Note that some fishing allocations (Community Development Quota and much cooperative allocation) are not open to outside investors.

Outlook (forward-looking judgments, not facts). Treat NAICS 114 as a small, private, scarce-resource corner of the food-and-recreation economy that public markets barely reach:

• Fishing stays supply-constrained and price-pressured while Russian product and whitefish inventories persist; durable value keeps concentrating in quota ownership and vertical integration, and in premium shellfish, even as a warming ocean squeezes supply.
• Hunting and trapping runs two-speed: the fur/trapping half keeps shrinking under dead-end prices and spreading bans, while the recreation-and-services half grows modestly on discretionary spending and shrinking free land access — with nuisance-wildlife control the steadiest grower and the only corner attracting institutional capital.

Bottom line: two different wild-harvest businesses, both cyclical, both bounded by nature and by policy, both dominated by owner-operators who never appear in the payroll data, and neither reachable through a clean public pure-play. The money is made by owning the specific scarce asset — quota for fishing, land and access for hunting — and diligence starts with which child, and which asset, you are actually buying. For the full breakdown, read the child primers: NAICS 1141 (Fishing) and NAICS 1142 (Hunting and Trapping).

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Sources

This rollup synthesizes the two child primers (NAICS 1141 → 11411 and 1142 → 11421 → 114210) plus our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 114. See the child primers' Sources lists for the complete underlying set.

1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns (CBP): 2023 — NAICS 114 and children 1141/1142 (establishments 2,949; employees 6,615; annual payroll $497.553M; Q1 payroll $91.160M). Ingested ground-truth federal statistics. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 NAICS Manual — definitions and scope of subsector 114 and industry groups 1141 and 1142 (and excluded adjacent codes: aquaculture 1125, seafood processing 3117, fur farming 112930, pest control 561710). https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
3. NOAA Fisheries. Fisheries of the United States, 2023 (8.4B lb / $5.1B national landings; ex-vessel prices; species values). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/sustainable-fisheries/fisheries-united-states
4. IBISWorld. Hunting & Trapping in the US — Industry Analysis (revenue ~$1.2B; ~17,600 businesses; no firm >5% share). https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/hunting-trapping/86/
5. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Americans Spent $394B on Hunting, Fishing, and Wildlife-Associated Activities in '22 (14.4M hunters; $45.2B hunting spend). 2023. https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2023-10/americans-spent-394b-hunting-fishing-and-wildlife-associated-activities-22
6. U.S. Census Bureau. CBP Methodology / Nonemployer Statistics (employer establishments only; excludes self-employed, non-EIN sole proprietors, most government). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
7. IBISWorld / The Motley Fool. Fishing in the US and Best Seafood Stocks (fragmentation; no firm >5% share; no U.S.-listed wild-capture pure play). https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-reports/fishing-industry/
8. NOAA Fisheries. Catch Shares (IFQ and cooperative allocations; quota as tradable asset). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/catch-shares
9. NOAA Fisheries / Regional Fishery Management Councils. Magnuson-Stevens Act (200-nm EEZ; eight councils; annual catch limits). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/laws-policies/magnuson-stevens-act
10. USDA Economic Research Service / SeafoodSource. U.S. seafood trade (~$20.3B trade deficit in 2023; ~80% imported; per-capita consumption). https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/108472
11. California Legislature. AB-273 — Fur-bearing and nongame mammals: fur trapping prohibition (Wildlife Protection Act of 2019; first state ban). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB273
12. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Federal wildlife law overview (Migratory Bird Treaty Act; Endangered Species Act; Lacey Act; CITES). https://www.fws.gov/law/migratory-bird-hunting-regulations
13. DJ Case & Associates / U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. R3 and hunter-participation trends (~15.9M license-holders in 2021; aging demographic). 2024. https://djcase.com/hunting-fishing-shooting-recruitment-retention-reactivation-r3
14. Rollins, Inc. Rollins Acquires Critter Control / Trutech (nuisance-wildlife-control consolidation; pest-control boundary 561710). https://www.rollins.com/investors/press-releases/detail/125/rollins-inc-acquires-two-critter-control-franchises
15. U.S. SEC. Weyerhaeuser and Rayonier, Form 10-K (timberland ownership and recreational/hunting leases). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/106535/000119312526051422/wy-20251231.htm
16. NOAA Fisheries. Research Confirms Link Between Snow Crab Decline and Marine Heatwave (~80% decline; harvest cancellation); and 2023–25 Russian seafood oversupply context. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-confirms-link-between-snow-crab-decline-and-marine-heatwave
17. CBC News. North American Fur Auctions seeks creditor protection (2019 NAFA insolvency; largest wild-fur handler). 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/north-american-fur-auctions-creditor-protection-1.5348510
18. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Small Business Size Standards, 2023 (fishing 114111 $25M / 114112 $14M / 114119 $11.5M; hunting/trapping 114210 $8.5M average annual receipts). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards