Minnesota · Rock bass
Can you keep a rock bass in Minnesota?
Yes, with limits
Statewide
Open year-roundSize
No size limit stated
total length
Daily bag
30
per person per day
Possession
30
total you may hold
No minimum size, thirty a day — its own limit, not folded into the sunfish or crappie groups.
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.
Other species in Minnesota
Where to try today
- Lake Minnetonka 7/10 · Good
- Rainy Lake 6/10 · Decent