Shad (American and hickory) size limit in Georgia

Eight a day, American and hickory combined.

Georgia WRD source page

What we left out on purpose

• Georgia’s own site refused every automated request at retrieval — georgiawildlife.com answered 403 to scripts, including for its regulations PDF. The figures here come from the eRegulations edition that Georgia WRD publishes its guide through, read as raw page text rather than as a summary.
• A summarised source stated a 14-inch statewide minimum for largemouth bass. The regulation text says 12 inches statewide with named exceptions at 14 — and Lake Allatoona and Lake Hartwell are not among them. Publishing 14 across the board would have been wrong at half of this site’s Georgia waters.
• The 15-fish limit for striped bass, white bass and hybrids is a shared limit across all three, and the black bass limit of 10 is shared across largemouth, spotted, shoal and redeye. The registry records limits per species, so those numbers are the shared pool rather than a per-species allowance. Each note says so.
• Inside that shared 10-fish black bass limit sits a second cap found on 2026-08-08: no more than 5 of the 10 may be Altamaha, Bartrams, Chattahoochee, Coosa, shoal, smallmouth, Suwannee or Tallapoosa bass combined. This schema has no field for a sub-limit inside a shared limit, so it is carried in the shoal bass note rather than as a number.
• Lake Richard B. Russell (Russell Dam to Hartwell Dam and Lake Secession Dam) carries its own striped bass rule — 2 a day, only one over 34 inches — found on 2026-08-08. Lake Russell is not one of the waters this site reports on and is left out, the same treatment as Blue Ridge, Burton, Juliette and the others already named below.
• The striped bass rule "only two fish of the total limit 22 inches or longer" is a cap on large fish, not a minimum size. It has no field in this schema and is carried in the note.
• Lake Hartwell straddles Georgia and South Carolina, and Georgia’s striped bass entry points to an agreement with South Carolina whose terms were not read. Anglers on the state line should check both sets of rules — South Carolina’s are on this site as well.
• Georgia also sets special rules for Lake Blue Ridge, Burton, Juliette, Blackshear, Oconee, Walter F. George, Lindsay Grace, Seminole and the Public Fishing Area lakes. None of those waters is reported on by this site, so none is carried here.
• The overall cap of 50 game fish in possession, channel and flathead catfish excepted, applies across every species listed. It has no per-species field and appears in the notes where it bites hardest.