Florida, South Carolina and Georgia are trying to salvage a 2026 red snapper season for recreational anglers in the South Atlantic with a plan that would open harvest Oct. 1-31. Submit public comment to NOAA Fisheries in support of this fall season through this link before the Aug. 25 deadline.
Dates and Limits for 2026 fall Red Snapper seasons
Through exempted fishing permits to study data collection in the recreational fishery, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina have proposed strictly monitored fall harvest of red snapper in the South Atlantic from Oct. 1-31, with the potential for additional harvest dates in December.
Bag limits for the 2026 fall season for all three states would be one red snapper per person, per day. Captains and crew on for-hire (charter) boats would be prohibited from retaining limits. South Carolina has proposed a 20-inch minimum length limit to keep red snapper. There are no size limits proposed for Georgia or Florida.
In the Florida plan, one red snapper per person would count toward a strict 10-fish snapper-grouper aggregate limit, which requires anglers stop bottomfishing once the limit is filled.
All three states will require use of non-offset circle hooks and descending devices.
Mandatory Reporting of Red Snapper Trips
Private anglers in Georgia and South Carolina will be required to electronically register and report their red snapper trips through the VESL app. Trips must be declared before departure. Within 24 hours of trip completion, a trip report must be submitted with information such as harvest, discards and hours fished.
Florida will conduct its data collection through the State Reef Fish Survey, which is free and already mandatory for bottomfishing anglers.
All three states will conduct targeted dockside intercepts to verify proper licensure and gauge accuracy of self-reporting anglers.
Background on South Atlantic Red Snapper
For more than 15 years, red snapper harvest for the recreational sector in the South Atlantic has been limited to short one- or two-day derby seasons by federal regulators operating under an admittedly flawed recreational data collection system known as MRIP (Marine Recreational Information Program).
With red snapper populations anecdotally booming, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida submitted to NOAA proposals for exempted fishing permits that would have allowed for summer recreational red snapper seasons off all four states.
A key to these proposals, as well as to the new fall-season proposals, is that MRIP was designed to use angler harvest to collect data on the status of the fishery. Precise and reliable data on recreational landings, fishing effort and discard mortality are necessary to produce accurate estimates. That data does not exist because of the long period of truncated recreational seasons.
The states proposed 2026 summer seasons to test new state-run data-collection systems designed to be far more accurate than the current MRIP system being used to regulate the red snapper fishery.
NOAA Fisheries approved all four state exempted fishing permits to create pilot programs and allow recreational summer red snapper seasons in the South Atlantic. With open dates to harvest red snapper, charter operations started booking red snapper trips and private anglers started preparing for the long-awaited real red snapper season.
Then commercial fishing interests via the Southeastern Fisheries Association filed a lawsuit challenging the exempted fishing permits. On May 21, hours before the Florida summer season was scheduled to open, a federal judge in Washington D.C. issued an injunction that shut down the 2026 recreational seasons for all four states.
North Carolina did not submit an exempted fishing permit proposal for fall of 2026. The new Georgia, South Carolina and Florida proposals have been modified to address the court decision that ended the 2026 summer red snapper seasons before they began.
