Maryland · Red drum (redfish)
Can you keep a red drum (redfish) in Maryland?
Yes, with limits
statewide tidal waters
Open year-roundSlot
18–26 inches
total length
Daily bag
3
per person per day
A slot means the fish must fall between those two numbers. Shorter than 18 inches goes back, and so does longer than 26.
A true slot of 18 to 26 inches, 3 a day, open all year — a real ceiling rather than New York's reverse rule of no minimum but a hard 27-inch cutoff. Same rule in the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic and coastal bays.
What we left out on purpose
- This page covers Maryland's tidal, estuarine and Atlantic species only. Maryland also regulates largemouth and smallmouth bass, walleye, yellow perch, chain pickerel and catfish in the same Chesapeake Bay and Tributaries table — those are freshwater and tidal-freshwater rules, out of scope for a silo that otherwise compares coastal species across states, and are not carried here.
- American lobster is left out. Maryland measures it by carapace length (3⅜ to 5¼ inches), a method this schema does not carry — every other species here is measured by total length.
- Grouper and snapper are published as combined, aggregate limits across every species in each group, exactly as Maryland's own table does — not broken out species by species.
- Where a species carries the identical rule on both the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean pages published by MD DNR, it is carried here once as 'statewide tidal waters' rather than as two duplicate regions.
- Sharks and tilefish are referenced by MD DNR's own tables as having further specialized regulations elsewhere; neither is carried here.
Other species in Maryland
- Striped bass (rockfish)
- Summer flounder (fluke)
- Spotted seatrout (speckled trout)
- Black drum
- Black sea bass
- Bluefish
- Cobia
- Tautog (blackfish)
- Weakfish
- Sheepshead
- Spanish mackerel
- Atlantic croaker
- American eel
- Atlantic menhaden (bunker)
- Scup (porgy)
- Spot
- Dolphinfish (mahi-mahi)
- Grouper (all species, combined)
- Snapper (all species, combined)