Can you keep a american eel in New York?

9 inches, 25 a day, open all year. A separate, more restrictive rule applies in the Harlem, East and upper Hudson Rivers in New York City, where eel may only be kept for use as bait.

NYSDEC source page

Same 9-inch minimum, but customers aboard a licensed party or charter boat may keep 50 a day instead of 25.

NYSDEC source page

What we left out on purpose

• dec.ny.gov itself could not be reached for this state — every path we tried (direct fetch, browser render, the 2026 PDF at a different path) hit the same Cloudflare Managed Challenge. Everything here comes from two older official documents plus dated press coverage, cross-checked against each other rather than against the live page.
• Summer flounder, Atlantic cod, cobia and the boat-based tier of scup are left unsettled: the 2023 DEC summary PDF and the codified 6 NYCRR §40.1 table describe structurally different rules for each, not just different numbers, and neither could be confirmed as the newer one without reaching dec.ny.gov directly.
• Everything else on this page matched exactly between the 2023 DEC summary and the codified NYCRR table, or — for striped bass specifically — was confirmed through two dated DEC press releases (2023 for the marine slot, 2024 for the Hudson River slot) that postdate both documents.
• NYSDEC regulates fish differently depending on how an angler is fishing (shore, private boat, or licensed party/charter boat) more often than most states on this site. Where that split changes the number, it is carried here as separate regions rather than folded into one line.
• This page covers New York's marine and coastal district only. New York also publishes an entirely separate freshwater fishing guide (bass, trout, walleye, pike and panfish in lakes, ponds and inland streams) that is not carried here.