A seven-inch trout has been a legal keeper in Pennsylvania since 1983. From January 1, 2027, it will not be. The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission voted unanimously on Monday to lift the minimum size for harvesting trout to nine inches — the first change to that number in more than four decades, and only the second since it moved up from six inches.
The new limit covers Commonwealth inland waters, stocked trout waters open year-round, 13 streams governed by miscellaneous special regulations, and the extended trout season. Its target is narrow and specific: wild brook trout, the only trout native to the state.
Commission biologists built the case over ten years of electrofishing surveys, working roughly 3,000 stream sections between 2015 and 2024 and handling close to 200,000 wild brookies.
"Of those 200,000, roughly 6.5 percent or 13,000 of them were seven inches or greater," said David Nihart, who heads the commission's Division of Fisheries Management. "All of those fish would be susceptible to harvest."
At nine inches, that exposure all but disappears. "Roughly less than 1% of all the brook trout that we've collected over the last decade would have been available for harvest," Nihart said.
"I think it's a step in the right direction. I think biologically that 1% of brook trout that we're talking about that are over the nine-inch, seven-inch fish. They are the strongest fish in their habitat. They have the best genes, they live long enough for whatever reason to get that big," Hussar said. "Maybe it will get the awareness out of the importance of native brook trout, the self-sustaining aspect of them in our wildlife."
Commissioner Charlie Charlesworth was more measured, describing the rule as "a great compromise" that protects native fish without cutting into recreational opportunity.
On that second point the evidence is strong. Robert Caccese, the commission's director of policy, planning and communications, told the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association in May that stocked-trout anglers would barely notice.
"An increase from seven to nine inches will have little or no impact on anglers harvesting stocked trout," Caccese said. "The average size of a standard trout produced at a PFBC state fish hatchery and stocked into the waters of the Commonwealth is 11 inches, with most cooperative nurseries also producing similar sized trout for stocking in public waterways."
Hatchery figures bear him out — 92% of state-raised trout run between 11 and 13.9 inches, and just 5% fall in the 9 to 10.9-inch band. The commission stocks around 3.2 million adult trout each year. The adjustment falls mainly on cooperative nurseries, which contribute roughly another million fish and stocked some smaller trout in 2024; staff are working with the Bureau of Hatcheries to bring them above the line before the rule takes effect.
Anglers had already signalled where they stood. The commission's 2023 Pennsylvania Trout Angler Survey found 85% would back a nine-inch minimum to protect brook trout, and that harvest did not crack the top three reasons Pennsylvanians fish for trout at all. Sixty percent of stocked-trout anglers said keeping fish mattered not at all to them; among wild trout anglers the figure reached 78%. Formal public comment split 274 in favour to six against, out of 287 responses.
The board approved a companion measure that will settle a lot of arguments on riverbanks. Pennsylvania now has a codified definition of total length: "the greatest straight-line length as measured on a fish while laid flat on its side with its mouth closed from the most forward tip of the jaw or snout to the farthest extent of the tail with the upper and lower tail lobes compressed or squeezed together." The wording matches the diagram anglers already know from the Fishing Summary Book, and was required under the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's striped bass management plan.
Catfish rules for western Pennsylvania were finalised at the same meeting. Across the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, blue catfish become catch-and-release only — the species was reintroduced to the Pittsburgh region beginning in 2022. Flatheads are cut to a four-fish possession limit with a single fish permitted over 35 inches, superseding a blanket 50-per-day catfish rule that had treated them as panfish.
"It takes about 30 years for that fish to be about 35 inches," Nihart said. "A very old, very slow growing species."
The choice of a possession limit rather than a daily bag was deliberate. "The reason we put in this possession limit is that a lot of people that do fish for catfish are fishing at night," Nihart explained. "So, we wanted to have a regulation in place that would prohibit somebody from fishing until midnight, catching their four fish, and then staying after midnight, and catching four more fish."
Commissioner BJ Small of Cumberland County pressed on the longer-term risk: how soon blue cats — invasive anywhere in Pennsylvania outside the Ohio River Basin — might appear in the Susquehanna, arriving either from the Chesapeake or in the back of somebody's truck. Stocking them in any Commonwealth water is already against the law.
