Catfish size limit in Alabama

Alabama limits only the big ones: no limit at all under 34 inches, and exactly one a day over 34 inches. The size rule does not apply in the Perdido, Conecuh, Blackwater, Yellow, Choctawhatchee, Chipola and Chattahoochee river basins. Live catfish of 34 inches or more may not be taken out of the state.

ADCNR source page

What we left out on purpose

• Alabama measures sheepshead in fork length (12 inches) where the Carolinas use total length (14 inches). The registry carries the measuring method with every rule so the numbers cannot be compared as if they meant the same thing.
• The 10 black bass a day is a shared pool across largemouth, smallmouth, spotted, Alabama, shoal and the former redeye species, with no more than five smallmouth inside it. The registry records limits per species, so that number is the shared pool rather than a per-species allowance.
• Catfish has no daily limit in the ordinary sense: unlimited under 34 inches, exactly one over. No figure is published in the bag column for that reason; the rule is in the note.
• Alabama names many further waters with their own black bass, crappie and striped bass rules — Harris Reservoir, Lake Jackson, Weiss, Lewis Smith, Yates, Thurlow, Lake Martin and the Chattahoochee under a reciprocal agreement with Georgia. Only Guntersville is carried here, because it is the only Alabama water this site reports on.
• The reef species — groupers, amberjack, triggerfish, snapper — carry footnotes in ADCNR's table about federal seasons and two overlapping aggregates: a 4-fish grouper aggregate (gag, red, black, yellowfin grouper and scamp, with red and gag each capped at 2 inside it) and a 20-fish reef fish aggregate for species with no bag number of their own (lesser amberjack, banded rudderfish, lane snapper and others). Only size and daily limit are published here, not the federally-linked season — check the current NOAA Fisheries bulletin before a trip for any species marked with Alabama's (#) symbol.
• The digest these tables come from was the 2025–2026 edition both at the original retrieval and again on 2026-08-08 — Alabama's rule year starts September 1, so a new edition remains due. Every figure checked against the live table matched exactly on the second pass.
• White bass and yellow bass are each their own independent 15-fish limit, distinct from the striped-bass-and-hybrids pool, except specifically on the Chattahoochee River and its impoundments and tributaries, where white bass folds into the striped bass aggregate.