The catch form return time series runs from 1997 to the most recently published season.

The annual return rate of forms by Reporting Area is provided as the numbers of returns expressed as a percentage of the total numbers of forms issued. Reporting Areas are the finest geographical scale for which data are consistently available and that provide compliance with data protection legislation and the Code of Practise for Statistics. Where possible, Reporting Areas are single Salmon Fishery Districts. Districts are defined in legislation and correspond either to a single river catchment together with adjacent coast or to groups of neighbouring river catchments and associated coastline. Where there are few active fisheries, the data are aggregated into geographically-coherent groupings of Districts. A list of Salmon Fishery Districts with the corresponding Reporting Area is available for download below. Reporting areas are characterised by Name and Report Order. Ordering the data with respect to “Report Order” sorts the Reporting areas spatially. Reporting areas are ordered counter-clockwise starting with the Tweed as Report Order 1.

The annual return of forms across all Scotland is provided as the number of forms issued, together with the numbers of forms returned reporting catch or effort (identified as "Data" returns) and the numbers of Nil returns. The annual return rate of forms is indicated as the sum of "Data" and "Nil" returns expressed as a percentage of the total number of forms issued.