There is no stock assessment for this species. Based on reported landings to FAO, the world catch for this species is variable, but shows a gradual increase from around 5,000 tonnes in the 1950s to 10,826 tonnes in 2006 and from 2,373 to 3,440 metric tonnes per year between 1978–1982. Many landings of marlins do not specify this species, and it is discarded when caught as by-catch by long-line fisheries, and is not quantified.

The landing information on marlins for the whole Pacific Ocean is not available, except for the FAO statistics. Based on the FAO Year Book (1996), recently 47,000 metric tons of marlins were caught in the Pacific. Blue Marlin occupied about 42% of the total catch, Striped Marlin occupied about 25%, Sailfish 10%, and Black Marlin 5%, but “marlins” occupied 19% of the total, respectively. The category of “marlins” includes catch of other marlins than Blue Marlin, Striped Marlin, Black Marlin, and Sailfish, and also includes the catch of species unknown. International management authority of the Black Marlin in the Pacific is shared by the Inter American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). There has never been an assessment of the status of black marlin in the Pacific, but landings trends over the past thirty years have been generally declining.

In the Indian Ocean, catch per unit effort (CPUE) exhibited dramatic declines since the beginning of the fishery in the 1950s with catches in the initial fishing grounds decreasing substantially. Nominal CPUE in the northwestern Australian area has declined from 2.0 to about 0.25 (approximately 87%) since 1977, while nominal CPUE in the Seychelles area has been very low and has declined from 0.3 to 0.2 (30% decline) since the 1970s (IOTC 2009).

In the Eastern Pacific, FAO (2006) landing data from 1995–2005 has shown a rapid increase from 300 metric tonnes to 1,400 metric tonnes. Landings data from IATTC (2008) for Black Marlin taken by purse seine and long-line in the Eastern Pacific vary from 100 to 417 metric tonnes per year from 1978 to 2007, with a uniformly low catch. However, Black Marlin are often difficult to identify and the catch of unidentified billfishes increased from a few hundred to thousands of metric tonnes during this time frame. In the Eastern Pacific specifically, quantities of billfish caught are not attributed to a single species and many countries are not reporting the catch.

In Mexico, the majority of the marlin catch comes from the Gulf of California (89%), the remainder coming from the Gulf of Tehuantepec (11%). The total recreational catch of billfish has increased since 1990 (first year of reported data) from approximately 12,000 to 33,000 fish in 2005. Recreational fishing effort has also been increasing during the same time period from approximately 4,000 fishing trips in 1990 to 37,000 trips in 2005. Striped Marlin is the dominate species caught in the recreational fishery accounting for approximately 68% of the total catch. Sailfish account for 25% of the total recreational catch, followed Blue Marlin at 7% and Black Marlin at

Unknown