Can you keep a sheepshead in Alabama?

Twelve inches — but measured to the fork of the tail, not the tip. The Carolinas set 14 inches of total length. Comparing the numbers without the measuring method compares two different things.

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 — carry footnotes in ADCNR’s table about federal seasons and a reef fish aggregate. Those seasons are set federally and change within the year; only size and daily limit are published here, not the season.
• The digest these tables come from was the 2025–2026 edition at retrieval. Alabama’s rule year starts on September 1, so a new edition was due within weeks.