Can you keep a northern pike in Minnesota?

Closes each year Closed late February through the fishing opener in early-to-mid May

24 inches, two a day — Minnesota splits pike into three angling zones (Northeast, North-central, Southern) with different rules in each; Lake Minnetonka falls in the Southern Zone, the simplest of the three. A statewide possession cap of 10 pike applies regardless of zone.

MN DNR source page

No minimum size and open year-round, but a protective 30-to-40-inch release slot — only smaller fish or the single trophy over 40 inches may be kept.

MN DNR source page

What we left out on purpose

• Minnesota's own bass table words the largemouth and smallmouth rows slightly inconsistently — the smallmouth row clearly closes the combined-harvest window on September 7 (catch-and-release only afterward), while the largemouth row describes a longer window 'when smallmouth season is open' that reads as extending further. We modelled the combined harvest window as the clearly stated May 24 – September 7 range; if Minnesota intends something more permissive for largemouth specifically, our figure is conservative rather than wrong in the risky direction.
• Season open/close dates tied to 'the Saturday nearest May 11' or similar floating rules are set to the 2026 calendar date and will drift by a few days in other years — flagged in each affected region's notes.
• Minnesota's northern pike, muskellunge and walleye zone and named-lake exceptions run for dozens of pages beyond Rainy Lake and Lake Minnetonka, the two waters this site actually reports on — the same restraint used for Colorado's, Kansas's and Michigan's named-water exceptions.
• Lake sturgeon, burbot, whitefish/cisco (both under separate netting-season rules), bullhead, gar, smelt and rough fish (bowfin, buffalo, carp, suckers — no limit) are not modelled here; none are the finfish this silo focuses on for either Rainy Lake or Lake Minnetonka.