This page publishes an estimate, not a measurement. Everything below is what we know about the difference.
- What is Juneau's daily cruise passenger cap?
- 16,000 cruise passengers ashore Sunday through Friday and 12,000 on Saturdays, in force for the 2026 Alaska season. The limits are a voluntary agreement between the City and Borough of Juneau and CLIA Alaska, negotiated in summer 2024 — not a law and not a permit condition. A separate voluntary five-ship daily limit, in place since 2024, still applies on top of them. The cap is on total passengers ashore across every ship in port that day, which is why the figure above sums ships rather than reading any one of them.
- Our sourced account of the 2026 caps
- Where does the number on this page come from?
- It is our own arithmetic: the published passenger capacity of every ship scheduled to call at Juneau on Sunday 17 May 2026, summed. It is not the borough's count, and it is not a headcount of people who went ashore. That sum is 10,448 against a cap of 16,000, over 6 scheduled ships.
- What does a ship's published capacity actually measure?
- Not one thing, and that is the largest known source of error in the figure above. The capacity column is written by three pipelines and carries no per-row record of which one wrote it: a hand-curated seed of about thirty Alaska ships, whose field is documented as double occupancy — the lower-berth figure; Wikidata's property P1083, whose own label is "maximum capacity", backfilled only into rows that were still empty; and CruiseMapper's ship-detail capacity spec, for which we record no basis at all. Lower-berth figures understate a full ship; maximum-capacity figures overstate a typical one. The direction of the error therefore is not uniform across the fleet, and for any single ship we cannot tell you which convention her number follows. Our own backfill code says so: its sanity check notes that drift between lower berths, maximum berths and passengers-plus-crew cannot be caught by any plausibility band.
- Does a scheduled call mean those passengers came ashore?
- No. These are scheduled calls. A call can be cancelled, moved by weather, or anchored offshore with shore time reduced, and the cap counts passengers ashore, which is always fewer than the number aboard. Nothing on this page observes a ship arriving or a passenger landing — it is a schedule read against a published limit.
- How much of the day's fleet does the estimate cover?
- 4 of 6 ships publish capacity — the estimate covers those. A ship that publishes no capacity is still counted in the day's fleet but contributes nothing to the sum, and a ship whose capacity we could not read is never counted as a zero — the two are different facts and we keep them apart.
- Which day is this, exactly?
- The day is Alaska's civil date, resolved in America/Anchorage — the statewide zone, the same offset as the borough's own America/Juneau, so the regulator's weekday and the state's weekday are always the same day. It is not the UTC date, which runs eight to nine hours ahead and would put the evening's ships under the following day's cap.
- Does a dated page use the capacities that applied on that date?
- No. The ships table stores each ship's current specification, not a snapshot per date. A dated page here re-computes the sum from today's capacity values against that day's scheduled calls, so a capacity corrected or filled in later changes the figure shown for a past day. The scheduled calls themselves are the ones recorded for that date.
- Can I get this as data?
- Yes. The same record is served as JSON, keyed by the same date, with the cap, the sum, the per-ship capacities and the coverage counts. Requests are rate-limited per IP like the rest of the public API. The day shown here is 2026-05-17.
- /api/v1/juneau-cap?date=2026-05-17