It should be noted that previously this report was prepared by the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (RBFF) which lost its federal funding in 2025. RBFF and it's associated organization, Take Me Fishing, had been funded by the excise tax we pay every time we purchase fishing or hunting equipment.
The 2026 Special Report on Fishing details participation trends in overall fishing, saltwater fishing, fly fishing and other areas of our sport based on licenses, surveys, tackle sales and many other metrics from the previous year (in this case, 2025). The survey counts anyone ages 6 and over who fished at least one time during the calendar year.
Overall trend. Participation declined slightly from 57.9 million in 2024 to 57.0 million. This marked only the second decline in 13 years. And in fact, in the last decade (2015-2025), participation has grown 25 percent. The participation rate is 18 percent, just under the all time high of 19 percent. However, the number of anglers who fished more than 11 times per year continues on a slow but steady decline. This despite 39 percent of respondents describing themselves as "avid" anglers.
Youth participation ages 6 to 12 declined slightly to 7.4 million, while ages 13 to 17 increased slightly from 5.2 to 5.4 million. Among minorities, black participation reached an all-time high at 5.9 million. Hispanic participation continues to break new records. In the past decade, this group has gone from 3.4 million anglers to 6.9 million. Women anglers dropped very slightly, from 21.3 to 21.1 million, but still an impressive number from the 15.7 million only a decade ago.
Fly Fishing. Our sport remained somewhat steady with 7.9 million participants in 2025 compared to 8.0 million the year before. Fly fishing had been growing at roughly 2.2 percent since 2010 (5.5 million anglers). While there were significant numbers of new fly anglers, this segment - like all other types of fishing - suffers greatly from a high "churn rate" - the percentage of anglers who leave the sport compared to first-time anglers.
While numbers remain strong, activity is on the decline. Only 3 percent of fly anglers fish more than once a week in 2025 compared to 6 percent a decade ago. Only 18 percent make more than 11 days fly fishing per year, also on a downward trend.
If there's good news in the fly fishing sphere it's that female numbers continue to grow. Of the 8 million fly anglers, a whopping 21 percent were female first timers. Women now make up 31 percent of all flyfishers. Hispanic participation also continues to grow with 14 percent, while African-American numbers continue to lag at 12 percent.
By age, the distribution is quite even, with age group 25-34 making the largest segment at 19 percent, followed by group 35-44 at 14 percent. Historically, fly fishing has the highest income and highest education levels, and again, there was basically no change from 2024. Nearly 54% of longrodders have income of $50k or more, and 51% have some college or college degree.
Since revamping the regional participation metric (fewer regions), in 2024, it's been difficult to do historical comparisons here. However, it does appear that the South region continues to grow, while the Northeast region continues to decline. The South region - Virginia to Texas - accounted for 40 percent of all fly anglers, and 52 percent of all saltwater fly anglers.
The Leaky Bucket. At ICAST, Stephanie Vatalaro of Wave Maker Strategies went into detail about the "Leaky Bucket" that is of great concern to the industry. It should be pointed out that Ms. Vatalaro was with RBFF for many years, so her analysis was consistent with previous work that RBFF provided the industry.
Earlier we mentioned the "Churn Rate". This is the percentage of anglers who joined or continued fishing compared to those who quit the sport. For example, in 2024 we had 57.9 million anglers. For 2025, we had 18 million new or returning participants. However we LOST 19 million anglers. The Churn Rate was therefore 33 percent.
As Ms. Vatalaro pointed out, if we could keep even a third of those lost anglers, we would've had many more anglers in 2025. While many of us are happy with less competition on the water, for the industry it's loss of potential sales. For some businesses in these economic times, it's the difference between staying open or closing doors. The reasons for the Leaky Bucket are many, and include: death or illness, loss of job or other life event, or simply a case of not enjoying the sport.
However, with fly anglers the biggest obstacle to retention remains lacking success with basic skills. For example, the failure to make a consistently decent cast, or determine what leader to use or what fly to use, etc.. This results in many folks taking up the sport and then dropping it the next year. This is why the Churn Rate in fly fishing is higher than other types of fishing.
At some point, we'll go into more detailed discussion on the Leaky Bucket and what the causes are, and what can be done to remedy.
