2026 regulation year
Cheapest Non-Resident Fishing License 2026 — Ranked by Week-Trip Cost
Last updated
For a 7-day non-resident fishing trip, the cost depends on which short-term licenses each state sells. Some states publish a single 7-day pass; others require you to stack two or three 3-day licenses or even seven 1-days. This ranking computes the cheapest combination across all published non-resident options for the 11 states fishregs covers deeply for 2026.
The cheapest week to fish is in North Carolina at $23 (1× 10-day). The most expensive among covered states is Michigan at $70 (7× 1-day).
Ranking
| Rank | State | 7-day trip cost | Cheapest combo | Annual (compare) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | North Carolina | $23 | 1× 10-day | $45 |
| 2 | Arkansas | $25 | 1× 7-day | $50 |
| 3 | New York | $28 | 1× 7-day | $50 |
| 4 | Wisconsin | $28 | 1× 15-day | $50 |
| 5 | Florida | $30 | 1× 7-day | $47 |
| 6 | Texas | $40 | 2× 5-day | $58 |
| 7 | Minnesota | $43 | 1× 7-day | $51 |
| 8 | Alaska | $45 | 1× 7-day | $100 |
| 9 | Ohio | $51 | 1× annual | $51 |
| 10 | California | $62 | 1× 10-day | $174 |
| 11 | Michigan | $70 | 7× 1-day | $76 |
40 jurisdictions are not yet ranked — deep fee data is still rolling out across the remaining states. Each state still has its own indexable page at /states.
How the ranking is computed
- For each state, every published non-resident license duration (1-day, 2-day, 3-day, 4-day, 5-day, 7-day, 10-day, 14-day, 15-day, and annual) is considered as a possible purchase.
- A dynamic-programming search finds the minimum-cost combination of those licenses that covers at least 7 days. The result picks whichever bundle is cheapest — sometimes a single 7-day, sometimes 2× 3-day + 1× 1-day, and occasionally an annual is cheaper than any short-term stack.
- Add-on stamps (saltwater, trout, king-salmon) and resident-status discounts (senior, youth, disabled-veteran, family) are excluded. Coastal licenses are excluded when an inland equivalent of the same duration is available, since most freshwater anglers buy the inland tag.
- Processing surcharges at point of sale are not modeled — each state's online vendor adds them at checkout.