13 water quality classes under 6 NYCRR, 3,117 named waters — NYSDEC's own data, compiled here so you can search it.
Last updated 2026-09-28 · rebuilt nightly from NYSDEC data
586 of these waters have a full BirdTrout page with live water temperature, access and public land.
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation publishes New York's trout season dates in the New York Freshwater Fishing Regulations Guide and does not publish them as data. We do not retype them here, because a season date typed from memory is the one error on a page like this that costs the reader a citation — read them at NYSDEC. What NYSDEC does publish as data is the designation each water carries, and that is the section below.
NYSDEC publishes New York's trout seasons, sizes and creel limits in the Freshwater Fishing Regulations Guide and not as a machine-readable layer, and since 2021 those rules have run on a five-category system — wild, wild-quality, wild-premier, stocked and stocked-extended — which DEC assigns per water in the guide. This site does not hold that assignment as data and does not guess at it. What DEC does publish as data is the trout designation above, the classification below, and the public fishing rights easements the access pages are built on.
Every class NYSDEC uses, the waters in it, and what the class means. Counts are of named waters in our copy of the state's data.
“A source of water supply for drinking, culinary or food processing purposes”, primary and secondary contact recreation, and fishing — and suitable for fish, shellfish and wildlife propagation and survival. Class AA is water that meets New York's drinking water standards after disinfection alone.
Class AA with the special designation New York City's watershed carries.
“A source of water supply for drinking, culinary or food processing purposes; primary and secondary contact recreation; and fishing.”
“Primary and secondary contact recreation and fishing”, and suitable for fish, shellfish and wildlife propagation and survival.
“Fishing.” Suitable for fish, shellfish and wildlife propagation and survival, and for contact recreation, though other factors may limit that use.
“Fishing.” Class D is water whose natural conditions — interrupted flow, a stream bed unsuited to game fish, low dissolved oxygen — cannot sustain propagation. It must still support fish survival.
Saline: shellfishing for market purposes.
Saline: primary and secondary contact recreation and fishing.
Saline: fishing, and suitable for fish, shellfish and wildlife propagation and survival.
Saline: fish survival.
Saline: secondary contact recreation and fishing, and suitable for fish, shellfish and wildlife survival.
NYSDEC best usage, carried as published.
NYSDEC best usage, carried as published.
Water carrying a rule of its own — a closure, a gear restriction, or a named regulation — with the water it applies to.
Nothing has moved since the previous build. This page is rebuilt nightly against NYSDEC's data and this section fills in the night a season, a limit or a classification changes.
New York classifies every surface water in the state under 6 NYCRR Parts 800-941, and the class is a best usage — what the water is protected for. AA and A are drinking-water sources, B is swimming, C is fishing, D is water whose natural conditions cannot sustain a fishery, and SA to SD are the saline classes on Long Island and in the harbour. Four of the five fresh classes name fishing among their best usages, so the letter on its own does not tell you whether there are trout in it. The trout statement is the suffix. (T) means DEC designates the water trout water; (TS) means it is suitable for trout spawning. Both attach a stricter dissolved-oxygen specification, and 6 NYCRR 704.2(b) attaches a thermal one — no discharge may raise a trout water above 70 °F, or a spawning water above 50 °F in season. That is 27,852 miles of designated trout water on this site's map, against 62% of New York's classified reaches carrying no trout designation at all — and the suffix, not the letter, is what this map paints by.
The same classification, asked the other way round: what NYSDEC classifies as trout water within forty miles of one place, ranked by how much of it is in range. 68 towns in New York have one — a town is on this list when the water near it is not the water near a bigger town down the road.
We do not reproduce NYSDEC's licence pages or its digest. These are the originals.