Rules · all fifty states
The agency
is the authority.
Not this page.
Every state’s own fishing regulations, licence desk, stocking schedule and closure notices — linked, so what you read is whatever is true today.
There is deliberately no regulation text on this page. Rules change inside a season — Alaska issues emergency orders that close a fishery outright, Montana posts hoot-owl restrictions on a week’s notice — and a copy taken in March and served in August is not out-of-date information. It is wrong information wearing the clothes of current information, and somebody gets a ticket or kills fish believing it.
A link cannot go stale that way. It hands you the page the agency itself maintains, including the order posted this morning.
AZ
start at the agency site
This agency declines automated requests. The link is from the AFWA directory.
CA
California Dept. of Fish & Wildlife
start at the agency site
The agency site did not answer an automated check.
DC
DC Dept. of Energy & Environment
start at the agency site
HI
start at the agency site
IL
IN
start at the agency site
KS
Kansas Dept. of Wildlife & Parks
start at the agency site
This agency declines automated requests. The link is from the AFWA directory.
MA
start at the agency site
This agency declines automated requests. The link is from the AFWA directory.
MD
start at the agency site
MI
start at the agency site
This agency declines automated requests. The link is from the AFWA directory.
MN
MS
NE
start at the agency site
This agency declines automated requests. The link is from the AFWA directory.
NH
start at the agency site
This agency declines automated requests. The link is from the AFWA directory.
NY
News & closuresstart at the agency site
SC
TX
How this list was built
Agency addresses come from the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, the agencies’ own body. Every deeper link was then fetched and checked: 32 states had a regulations page that answered, 22 a licence desk, 16 a stocking schedule. Anything that did not answer was left off rather than guessed at, because a directory of dead links is worse than a short one.
Twelve agencies could not be checked automatically — some decline automated requests, some serve a certificate chain a script cannot verify. Those open perfectly in a browser, and they say so under their name rather than pretending to a check that never happened.
Last checked 2026-08-04. Rebuilt with tools/harvest_agencies.py.
The two that catch people out
- Emergency orders and in-season closures. These are the ones that change after the printed booklet went out. Alaska and Montana both use them heavily in summer. Check the news or closures link, not last year’s regulations.
- Water-specific rules. A state’s general regulations rarely tell the whole story on a particular river — delayed harvest, artificial-only stretches, seasonal trout water. Those live in the exceptions, and the exceptions are where the ticket comes from.