Maine’s lobster fleet is running on thinner margins than at any point in recent memory, with fuel costs up nearly 45 percent from a year ago and the price of lobster sitting at its lowest level in years. The squeeze is reshaping the economics of the state’s flagship maritime industry just as voters head to the polls in November’s midterm elections, where the issue features prominently in the contest between veteran Republican Senator Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson.
The arithmetic is stark at the dock. Lobsterman Steve Train, 59, starts each workday about $1,000 in the hole before hauling a single trap from Casco Bay, north of Portland. His costs include thirty gallons of diesel at $6.49 per gallon and three drums of bait at $260 apiece, alongside rising berthing, insurance and maintenance expenses. Speaking aboard the 36-foot single-engine boat he operates with his brother, the “Moira Bay,” shortly after unloading 430 pounds of American lobster at the Portland pier, Train said it is hard to make a business plan amid so much uncertainty. He will still back Collins because of her longtime support of Maine’s maritime workers, even as he described Trump’s tariff policies and high fuel prices as “slapping us in the face,” calling the president “such a wild card.”
The industry’s market weight is considerable. Maine’s lobster harvest reached 78.8 million pounds in 2025, an eight-million-pound drop from the previous year, yet it still accounts for three quarters of the state’s fisheries value, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. In Stonington, the state’s busiest lobster port, the town lands 11 million pounds of lobster per year, worth $50 million to the local economy from 350 boats, according to Alexa Dayton, executive director of the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries. “We could not replace that kind of economic power,” she said. With costs rising while lobster prices sit at multiyear lows, Dayton noted that belt-tightening among households is also cutting demand, and that some operators are asking themselves whether the work is still worth it.
Meanwhile, underlying the cost squeeze is a longer structural shift in the resource itself. Maine’s baby lobsters peaked in 2008, when slightly warming temperatures, not warm enough to cause thermal stress, spurred larval growth, according to Damian Brady, professor and director of the Darling Marine Center at the University of Maine. Eight years later, when those lobsters reached legal size, Maine landed a record of more than 100 million pounds. The catch has declined ever since. Climate change, which Trump dismisses as a “hoax,” is a factor: since 1982, average annual surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have warmed at nearly triple the rate of the world’s oceans, according to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Canada and the US have landed roughly equal volumes over the years, but Canada’s lobsters are now “doing better,” Brady said, because warming in Maine waters is stressing lobster populations while conditions in Canada are not. As the harvest shifts, Maine’s lobstermen are sailing to deeper waters on bigger boats, burning more diesel and carrying more crew.
Regulation adds another layer of cost risk. Federal rules aimed at protecting endangered North Atlantic right whales, which risk entanglement in the vertical lines running from lobster traps to surface buoys, could prove especially consequential. The US House of Representatives last month passed a bill freezing whale protection rules until 2035. If it fails in the Senate and whale-safe lobster requirements come into force, Brady warned, the consequences for lobstermen would be devastating. For the thousands of Maine families who rely on lobstering, the viability of the trade, and the coastal economy built around it, hangs on how these intersecting pressures resolve, and on whether a harvest that once topped 100 million pounds can stabilize at a level that keeps the fleet afloat.