Also known as Perch, Ringed Perch, Lake Perch, Striped Perch, Jack Perch (large). Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
Yellow perch school by year-class — meaning all fish in a school are within 1 cm of length and within 6 months of age. Locate a school and the next 50 fish are all jumbo perch or all dinks; size selection is by location, not by lure choice. The trophy perch over 15 inches are almost always in the deepest water in the lake during summer.
Hero spots in our coverage where Yellow Perch is in season for May. Click through for the live forecast.
Out of season across our covered spots in May. Check back in July.
Find one, find a hundred — perch are heavily schooled fish, and once you locate a school the action is fast and family-friendly. Lake Erie (the perch capital of the world): drift or anchor over the central basin reefs in 35–60 ft with a spreader rig and minnows, or jig vertically over schools marked on sonar. Saginaw Bay MI: similar drift-and-jig pattern. Smaller northern lakes (Wisconsin, Minnesota): cast small jigs or minnows tight to weed edges and rocky points in 6–15 ft. Ice fishing: drill a series of holes over weed-edge or rocky-point structure in 8–20 ft; jig a small spoon or jig tipped with waxworm. Perch are arguably the best-eating freshwater fish in North America — fillets are pearl-white, mild, and sweet. The Lake Erie commercial-and-sport perch fishery is one of the world's largest freshwater fisheries.
Water temperature and ice-cover state matters most. Spring (water 40–55°F, ice-out): perch push shallow to spawn in 3–8 ft on weed beds and rocky shoals. Post-spawn (water 55–65°F): schools roam off shallow flats. Summer (water 65–75°F): jumbos hold deep on Lake Erie reefs (35–60 ft); smaller fish dominate the shallows. Fall (water 70°F dropping to 50°F): an aggressive feeding window on Lake Erie before ice-up — September and October produce the year's biggest "jumbos" (14"+ fish). Ice fishing (Dec–March on most northern waters): perch are one of the most reliable ice-fishing targets. Dawn and dusk dominate in summer; midday produces well in winter under the ice.
Perch are weakly moon-influenced. Stable barometric pressure and sunny calm days under the ice produce the best winter sessions. Pre-frontal pressure drops and a slight wind on open water consistently outperform moon phases as a triggering condition.
Generally generous limits given perch abundance. Ohio Lake Erie: 30 fish daily, no minimum size (verify ODNR — limits have tightened in recent years on western-basin pressure). Michigan Lake Erie / Saginaw Bay: 25 fish daily, no minimum size. Wisconsin / Minnesota inland lakes: typically 25 fish daily, no statewide minimum. New York Lake Erie: 50 fish daily on Lake Erie / Lake Ontario, no minimum. Always verify state DNR — Lake Erie perch are managed by lake-wide quotas split between US states and Ontario. Perch are heavily targeted for the table; commercial gillnetting still occurs in Lake Erie and Saginaw Bay under quota.
From our training corpus of ~1.1M angler-logged catches across 14 regions. Last refreshed 2026-05-18.
Olli-Mikael Vaittinen has fished his whole life. Fifteen years of fly fishing, guiding seasons on Norway's Lakselva — his favourite Atlantic salmon river — and a blue marlin landed in Vava'u, Tonga. Founder of Fishare — the app that puts the data behind the decisions every angler makes on the water.
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