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In response to congressional action, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in 2009 revised the National Standard 1 (NS1) guidelines that govern federal fisheries management in the United States. The term “vulnerability” is referenced in sections of the NS1 guidelines that deal with: 1) differentiating between “fishery” and “ecosystem components” stocks, 2) assembling and managing stock complexes, and 3) creating management control rules. NMFS created a Vulnerability Evaluation Work Group (VEWG) in January 2008 to provide a methodology for determining vulnerability. While quantitative modeling provides the most rigorous method for determining whether a stock is vulnerable to becoming overfished or is currently experiencing overfishing, insufficient data exist to perform such modeling for many of the stocks managed by NMFS. These relatively data-poor stocks highlight the need to develop a flexible semi-quantitative methodology that can be applied broadly to many fisheries and regions. The methodology developed and six example applications to US fisheries are contained in this document. The vulnerability of a stock to becoming overfished is defined in the NS1 guidelines as a function of its productivity (“the capacity of the stock to produce MSY and to recover if the population is depleted”) and its susceptibility to the fishery (“the potential for the stock to be impacted by the fishery, which includes direct captures, as well as indirect impacts to the fishery”). Upon review of several risk assessment methods, the Productivity and Susceptibility Assessment (PSA) was chosen as …