Size and Bag Limits for Perth Fish: What You Need to Check

If you fish out of Perth, knowing the rules is part of the job — same as tying a decent knot or remembering to take a gaff. This article is a starting point, not a reference. It won’t list specific size limits, bag limits, or closure dates because those numbers change, and any article quoting them would be wrong by winter. What it will do is walk you through how WA’s rules are structured, which species you need to check individually, and why the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) is the only source worth trusting.

How WA’s Recreational Fishing Rules Are Structured

WA doesn’t have a single flat set of rules statewide. The coast is split into management zones — the West Coast Bioregion covers Perth, Mandurah and Busselton; the Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberley each have their own rules; the South Coast is separate again. If you fish Perth, you’re in the West Coast Bioregion, and the numbers here are not the same as what your mate from Exmouth will confidently tell you over a beer.

Within each zone, rules are stacked in layers:

  • Size limits — a minimum (and sometimes maximum) length a fish must be to keep.
  • Daily bag limits — how many of a species you can keep in a day.
  • Combined bag limits — a ceiling across a whole category of species. Demersal reef fish in the West Coast Bioregion are managed as a group, so you can’t stack a full bag of pink snapper on top of a full bag of WA dhufish.
  • Possession limits — what you can legally have in the freezer, the car and the esky combined.
  • Seasonal closures — spawning closures (snapper in Cockburn Sound, the annual West Coast demersal closure) that shut certain fisheries for parts of the year.
  • Gear restrictions — hook limits on some species, net rules, spearfishing zones.

You don’t need to memorise all of that. You need to know it exists, and that ignoring any one layer is still an offence even if you nailed the other five.

Demersal vs Pelagic: Why It Matters

WA’s rules lean heavily on the demersal/pelagic split. Demersal species live near the bottom — dhufish, pink snapper, baldchin groper, breaksea cod, blue morwong. They’re slow-growing, long-lived, and they don’t bounce back quickly when a fishery gets hammered. Pelagic species — tailor, Australian herring, mackerel, tuna — swim in the water column, grow faster, and are generally managed less tightly.

The practical upshot for a Perth angler: demersal trips out of Ocean Reef Marina or Hillarys Boat Harbour have stricter combined bag rules and a season that actually closes. Pelagic-focused trips — chasing tailor off North Mole, herring off a jetty, mackerel out wide in summer — run under a different set of limits. Same boat, same day, two different rulebooks depending on what ends up in the esky.

Species-by-Species: Where to Check

The rules for the fish Perth anglers actually target are all on DPIRD, and each of these has a species page here with the current WA numbers summarised. Use it as a checklist — read the limits, confirm them on DPIRD, then go fishing:

There’s a pattern here. “Check DPIRD” isn’t lazy writing — it’s the only honest advice.

The Recreational Fishing Guide (And Why Last Year’s Version Isn’t Good Enough)

DPIRD publishes a Recreational Fishing Guide each year. It’s free, it’s downloadable, and it’s the single best document for WA anglers. It pulls the zones, bag limits, size limits, closures and gear rules into one place in plain English, with diagrams of how to measure a fish and maps of the closure boundaries.

One catch: it’s updated. The bloke at the bait shop who swears the rules are “the same as last year, mate” is often wrong and occasionally expensively wrong. Download the current guide at the start of each season, skim it properly, and keep a copy on your phone. Five minutes at the kitchen table beats a fine that ruins a good trip.

Check Before You Go, Not When the Officer Arrives

Fisheries compliance officers work the Perth ramps. Hillarys, Ocean Reef, Woodman Point, the Fremantle ramps, Two Rocks — they all get checked, and the checks can be thorough. Eskies opened, fish measured, livewells inspected, the Bunnings receipt-style ritual of a uniformed officer working through your catch one fish at a time while you try to remember whether that last tailor was a legal fish or a hopeful one.

“Mate, it’s fine, no one checks here” is the fishing equivalent of “she’ll be right” — usually true until the one time it isn’t. Officers also patrol jetties, beaches and rivers, not just ramps. Ignorance of the rules isn’t a defence. Forgetting is not a defence. A screenshot from a Facebook group dated 2019 is definitely not a defence.

Take the five minutes before the trip. Open the DPIRD page for each species you’re likely to catch, confirm the current size and bag limits, note any closures that affect your patch of coast, and go fishing with a clear head.

Why the Rules Exist (The Part Worth Remembering)

WA’s fisheries rules aren’t red tape for the sake of it. Cockburn Sound’s pink snapper aggregation collapsed once and has taken decades to limp back. Herring stocks dropped hard enough that management had to step in. The West Coast demersal fishery has been on a recovery trajectory for years, and the closures and combined bag limits are a core part of that recovery.

Every rule on a DPIRD page is a response to something that went wrong, or a measure to stop something going wrong. Treat them that way and the whole structure makes more sense. The fish we’re still catching are the fish someone decided were worth protecting.

Before any trip, check current rules for your target species at DPIRD’s recreational fishing site. Once you’re sorted on the rules, check wind, swell, tide and solunar for your spot on BiteCompass. Two tabs, a few minutes — and you head to the ramp knowing what you can keep, what you can’t, and where the fish are likely to be.