Minnesota · Yellow perch
Can you keep a yellow perch in Minnesota?
Yes, with limits
Statewide
Open year-roundSize
No size limit stated
total length
Daily bag
20
per person per day
Possession
40
total you may hold
No minimum size. One of the few Minnesota species where possession (40) is double the daily catch limit (20) rather than equal to it.
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