The concept of a social licence to operate (SLO) that first emerged related to mining has been developed into several strands of theoretical models and used to study the social acceptance of industries in different contexts. There is an emerging literature on SLO for salmon-farming, but very few quantitative analyses are done to identify and assess factors that affect the level of social acceptance. Models that explain social acceptance levels from people's trust in an industry or company, their confidence in governance, and views on procedural and distributional fairness (trust models) are designed for quantitative analysis, and they have been successful in explaining social acceptance levels for mining. In this paper, we use survey data to test whether the factors in trust models can also explain the level of local social acceptance for salmon farming in Norway. From the structural equation modelling analysis, we conclude that these models at best have limited explanatory power in our case. We then develop an alternative model to analyse social acceptance, where factors of perception and attitudes and respondents' individual characteristics are tested as direct regression paths to influence level of acceptance. This model explains the variation in the data well. The factors that most strongly affect the level of acceptance, and which industry or authorities also can influence, are the perception of to what degree aquaculture is environmentally sustainable, whether the industry acts according to society's expectations, and if the industry is trustworthy. Practical implications for the industry and governance are discussed. •Social licence to operate (SLO) is studied in the context of Norwegian aquaculture industry.•Models developed in mining literature do not fit the data well, a simpler model provides a better fit.•Scale, structure and role in the local economy are among the sector-specific factors explaining the result.•Country-specific factors related to governance also influence SLO model in this case.