Purpose One third of the global fish stocks is classified as overfished. Life cycle impact assessment methods for overfishing exist but are not fully implemented and do not allow to compare results of different impact categories. Thus, a new approach based on the ecological scarcity method (ESC) was developed to be applied in life cycle assessment (LCA) and to compare results of overfishing with other categories like climate change and land use. Methods Based on the ESC and the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) concept, an approach was developed to assess overfishing. The region specific approach considering the overall catch in Europe in relation to the European catch within sustainable limits (MSY) and defines the overfishing indicator as the species-specific characterization factor. The introduced approach was applied to the production of three salmon feed: feed 1 with fish oil and fish meal; feed 2 with VERAMARIS® Algal Oil and fish meal; feed 3 with VERAMARIS® Algal Oil and other agricultural ingredients and compared to the impact categories climate change and land use. Results and discussion When comparing the three different feed in the categories climate change, land use and overfishing it was determined, that the category overfishing had the highest impacts for feed 1 and 2, because both feed contain fish meal and/or fish oil. For feed 3, where the omega-3 fatty acids come from algae oil and agricultural products only, the overfishing impact was zero. The impacts in the categories land use and climate change increased only slightly with growing amounts of agricultural products. One of the main reasons for the high overfishing impacts is the defined target of having no overfishing, whereas the targets of the other two categories are formulated less ambitious. This result would therefore change, when other more ambiguous targets are considered, for example for climate change. Conclusions A new approach was developed for the assessment of overfishing in LCA, which allows for the comparison of different impact assessment categories. Its applicability was demonstrated within a case study comparing different fish feed. It was shown, that the use of wild fish in fish feed in Europe leads to high overfishing impacts, whereas the use of algae oil does not significantly increase impacts of land use and climate change.