Western District
Open year-round| Size limit | No size limit stated | total length |
|---|---|---|
| Daily bag | 20 | per person per day |
| Possession | 40 | total you may hold |
No minimum size, twenty a day, forty in possession.
Flathead Lake, north of the Flathead Indian Reservation boundary
Open year-round| Size limit | No size limit stated | total length |
|---|---|---|
| Daily bag | 100 | per person per day, only 1 over 36 inches; fish 30–36 inches must be released immediately |
| Possession | 100 | total you may hold |
Five times the Western District's already-generous standard bag — Flathead Lake is managed for aggressive lake trout removal to protect native bull trout and cutthroat, with a release slot protecting the 30-to-36-inch size class. A tribal permit is required on the lake's southern portion within the Flathead Indian Reservation.
Central District
Open year-round| Size limit | No size limit stated | total length |
|---|---|---|
| Daily bag | 3 | per person per day |
| Possession | 3 | total you may hold |
No minimum size, but far fewer than the Western District — three a day.
What we left out on purpose
- Bighorn Lake (a separate water from the Bighorn River this site tracks) carries its own sauger/walleye numbers (6 combined daily, only 3 may be sauger) — not modelled here since this site follows the river, not the lake.
- Gallatin River carries a boat-fishing closure between the Yellowstone National Park boundary and the East Gallatin River, and a fixed general season (third Saturday in May – November 30) on the stretch from Porcupine Creek Road to the West Fork — gear/access rules rather than size or bag numbers, not modelled in this schema.
- The Madison River's Lyons-Bridge-to-Ennis-Bridge stretch is actually two adjoining catch-and-release segments (Lyons–Varney and Varney–Ennis) with a near-identical but not byte-for-byte identical rule (one restricts all trout, the other only rainbow). This site's tracked coordinate sits almost exactly at Varney Bridge, the boundary between them — both are described together rather than forcing a guess about which side of the bridge the coordinate falls on.
- Channel catfish, shovelnose sturgeon, tiger muskie and walleye/sauger are not modelled for these six waters because none of the six carries its own number for them and none is a species this site's water reports actually target.
- Montana's hundreds of further named-water exceptions beyond the six waters this site tracks are not modelled — the same restraint used for Colorado's, Kansas's, Michigan's and Minnesota's named-water exceptions.
Other species limits in Montana
Where to try today
- Bighorn River 7/10 · Biting
- Bitterroot River 6/10 · Biting
- Canyon Ferry Lake 5/10 · Picky
- Flathead Lake 5/10 · Picky
- Gallatin River 6/10 · Biting