Texas closes flounder entirely from November 1 through December 14. TPWD's own language is unambiguous: daily bag is five fish except November 1 to December 14, when the fishery is closed and the bag limit is zero. The season reopens December 15 at five fish, 15-inch minimum, no maximum.
Which means the state shuts the door in the exact middle of the best flounder fishing of the year, on purpose, and if you want to be part of the fall run you have about five weeks starting now.
The rule, stated correctly
A lot of what is circulating about Texas flounder is out of date, so here is the current version straight from the Outdoor Annual and the codified rule at 31 TAC §57.981:
- Five fish daily, 15-inch minimum, no maximum. Possession equals the daily bag.
- Closed November 1 through December 14. Not December 15 — the rule text ends the closure on the 14th and the season reopens on the 15th. A 2021 TPWD release phrased it loosely as "Nov. 1 – Dec. 15," and that loose phrasing is still being copied around.
- The November rod-and-reel-only rule is gone. From 2009 through August 31, 2021, November was pole-and-line only with a two-fish bag. The 2020 rule package deleted that and replaced it with the flat closure. If your memory says "November you can still catch two on rod and reel," your memory is five years old.
- Gigging is legal year-round except during the closure, when no flounder may be taken by any method. Gigged fish count against the same five-fish, 15-inch limits.
Why 15 inches, and why a closure at all
TPWD raised the minimum from 14 to 15 inches for a reason it stated plainly: at 14 inches roughly half of female flounder are sexually mature, and at 15 inches more than 90 percent are. One inch buys a lot of spawning.
The closure came from harder numbers. The 2020 commission item cited pronounced downward trends with catch-rate decreases of 60 percent or greater against historic long-term gill-net data, plus declines in the bag-seine and bay-trawl recruitment indices. Abundance had fallen roughly 50 percent since the early 1980s. Coastal Fisheries director Robin Riechers gave the department's whole position in one sentence: they cannot regulate any factor other than harvest.
Has it worked? I cannot tell you, because TPWD has not published a post-2021 abundance index or a formal stock assessment. That is a real gap and it is worth saying out loud rather than filling with optimism. What does exist is peer-reviewed: a 2025 paper in Marine and Coastal Fisheries found Texas southern flounder age structure truncated to ages 0 through 3, where it historically ran to 4; more than half the sampled fish were age-1; and the female-to-male ratio had fallen to 4.8:1 from roughly 7:1 in the 1990s. Mean length-at-age is declining too.
The part that makes this different from every other fishery
Southern flounder do not have genetic sex determination the way most fish you chase do. Sex is set by water temperature during a narrow juvenile window, when the fish are roughly 35 to 65 millimeters long.
A 2019 study in Scientific Reports nailed down the curve. Around 23°C is optimal for female development. Move in either direction and you get males: 19°C produced 83 percent males in the lab, 23°C produced 65 percent males, and 27°C produced 100 percent males. In wild North Carolina nursery habitat averaging 26.7 to 27.4°C, the researchers found up to 94 percent males. The authors noted those temperatures sit inside the range of predicted ocean warming.
Now stack that against a 15-inch minimum. Flounder are strongly size-dimorphic — the big ones are overwhelmingly female — so a minimum length is a rule that aims harvest at females almost exclusively. A warming nursery that produces fewer females in the first place, plus a size limit that removes the ones that made it, is not a regulation problem. It is a regulation working against a variable it has no authority over. That is the honest reason a Texas flounder rule can be correct and still not be sufficient.
The run: what it is and when
Adult flounder leave the bays in fall to spawn in the Gulf at 50 to 100 feet, with the peak from October through December. TPWD's field notes put it plainly: November is when the majority of flounder migrate out the passes, with males usually moving out first, ahead of the females.
The trigger is frontal passage. TPWD describes cold fronts as triggering mass migrations, while moderate winters spread departures over a longer window. There is no agency-published temperature threshold for this. The "70 degrees and they go" line you see in fishing forums is not sourced to anybody, and I am not going to repeat it as though it were.
Two findings complicate the tidy picture, both worth knowing. Harte Research Institute acoustic telemetry on 65 tagged fish in the Aransas and Packery systems found numbers still building through mid-December — the run is not over when the closure ends. And a Galveston study found that roughly 30 percent of tagged flounder never migrated at all. There are resident fish, and they are why somebody always has a good December day in the back of a bayou while everybody else is at the pass.
How to fish the five weeks you have
The pattern is the same everywhere and the details change by coast segment. You are looking for a current break where an ambush predator can sit facing into moving water — a drain, a cut, a channel edge, a bulkhead corner, scattered shell.
Upper coast (Sabine, Galveston). Marsh drains on the incoming tide, flooded roseau roots, current breaks in ten feet or more. Live finger mullet or a small croaker on a 3/8 to 1/2-ounce Carolina rig, or a four-inch swimming mullet plastic on a quarter ounce, dragged slow with a twitch every few feet.
Mid-coast (Matagorda to Rockport). Bayou drains, cuts, scattered shell. Eighth to quarter ounce, up to 3/8 in the channels. The window is peak high tide into the first of the outgoing.
Lower coast (Laguna Madre). ICW drop-offs, the East Cut, gaps between spoil islands. Eighth to quarter ounce slow-rolled with the current.
Mud minnows remain the classic natural bait and are still the answer when nothing else is working. The retrieve matters more than the lure: a flounder eats by short-range ambush, so you are dragging, pausing, and giving it time — not swimming a bait past a fish that has already decided.
Tackle is unglamorous and specific. A seven-foot medium or medium-light with a fast tip lets you feel a quarter-ounce head ticking shell, which is the whole game; the Ol' Salty spinning rod sits right in that window and is built for the salt. Long-nose pliers are not optional — a flounder's teeth angle backward and your fingers will lose. The saltwater shelf has the rest of it, and we broke down the full Texas setup in the Gulf Coast gear guide and the Texas rod guide.
The hatchery, and what it does not fix
Texas has released more than 1.4 million southern flounder since 2006 from the CCA Marine Development Center in Corpus Christi and Sea Center Texas in Lake Jackson, into Aransas and Galveston bays. Annual output has climbed from about 50,000 to over 300,000, and UT-Austin work has cut hatchery malpigmentation from roughly 28 percent to 18 percent through diet changes.
Real work, and worth doing. Put it next to the numbers, though: 300,000 fish a year against a bay system where anglers keep five apiece. Stocking is a supplement to a wild population, not a replacement for one, and Texas's own genetics work on red drum — a far larger program running since 1983 — attributes only 6 to 17 percent of adult fish in the major bays to stocking. Nobody has published a comparable figure for flounder.
What to do with October
Fish it. The five weeks between now and November 1 are legal, the fish are staging, and every front between now and Halloween moves more of them toward the passes. Then put the rod down for six weeks and go do something else — the bull red run is peaking in the same passes on the same tides, and it is a fishery with no closure attached.
Come back December 15. The telemetry says the fish will still be moving. And if you do bring a few home, a flounder fillet is the single best argument for a good fried fish batter on the entire Texas coast.