The State of Spearfishing Law 2026

Almost nowhere is spearfishing simply legal

Of 222 jurisdictions, exactly 1 — Guatemala — is recorded as plainly legal, and even that one is a qualified yes: sport fishing there runs on a licence granted by ministerial resolution and valid for ten years. Everywhere else, spearfishing is either restricted or banned. That is the first thing to understand about this body of law. There is no permissive default anywhere in the world; the question is only what shape the conditions take.

The picture is clearer on the 181 jurisdictions with a sea coast — a prohibition in a landlocked country usually means there is no marine fishery to regulate rather than a policy against spearfishing, and 20 of the bans in the dataset are of that kind. Among coastal jurisdictions, 154 are restricted, 24 prohibit spearfishing outright, and 2 publish too little for us to say.

“Restricted” is doing an enormous amount of work in that chart, and it is worth being blunt about it: it is our own middle box, and it covers everything from “buy a twenty-euro permit” to “residents only, pole spear only, daylight only, outside every protected area.” The rest of this report is an attempt to open that box.

The 24 coastal jurisdictions that ban spearfishing outright are not a geographic bloc, which is itself informative: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, British Virgin Islands, Brunei Darussalam, Djibouti, Gambia, Germany, Greenland, Haiti, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Maldives, Mauritius, Netherlands, Romania, Seychelles, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Turks and Caicos Islands and United States Minor Outlying Islands. They arrive at the ban by different routes. Germany reaches it through animal-welfare and weapons law rather than fisheries law at all. Sweden bans it nationwide while its immediate neighbours do not, which is why our Swedish record notes that Swedish spearfishers travel. Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands all sit in the same corner of the Atlantic and reach three different answers.

A speargun ban is not a spearfishing ban

The single most expensive misreading a travelling diver can make is to treat “spearfishing is legal here” as an answer about gear. 13 coastal jurisdictions where spearfishing is lawful nevertheless ban the speargun itself: Bahamas, Bermuda, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, Curaçao, Egypt, Honduras, Japan, Monaco, Oman, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan and United Republic of Tanzania.

Two of them are neighbouring Atlantic archipelagos that reached opposite conclusions. In the Bahamas, the speargun is prohibited and the Hawaiian sling is the permitted device — it is written into the regulations as a device for discharging a missile underwater by the force of a rubber sling. In Bermuda, the pole spear is the only legal implement and the Hawaiian sling is named among the things you may not use. The gear that is mandatory in one is an offence in the other.

The definitions matter more than the headline. The Cayman Islands define “speargun” so widely that it swallows the Hawaiian sling, the pole spear, the stick spear and the harpoon alike — so there is no lighter tier of gear to fall back on. Japan keeps powered spearguns off the recreational permitted-gear list nationwide, reserving them to the commercial fishery, which leaves free-dive pole-spearing as the only lawful form. Monaco prohibits harpoons, multi-branch spears and tridents while permitting single-pointed darts. In none of these is the wrong shaft a paperwork problem; it is the offence.

Scuba is the one thing the world agrees on

Of the 155 coastal jurisdictions where spearfishing is not banned outright, 92 take a published position on taking fish while on scuba — and 85 of those, 92%, prohibit it. Nothing else in this corpus comes close to that level of agreement. It crosses every legal tradition and every ocean, and it is almost always framed the same way: the fish is entitled to the limits of a human breath.

The 7 that do not ban it are mostly silence rather than permission — records where no instrument reaches the question, not records where a legislature decided scuba spearfishing was fine. That is the honest reading, and it is why the denominator above is 92 and not 155: 63 jurisdictions state no position we could find, and counting their silence as permission would turn a gap in the world’s statute books into a finding.

The Mediterranean wrote a common code without writing a treaty

This is the finding we did not expect. The Mediterranean has no shared recreational-fisheries statute — 23 jurisdictions on that coast, each legislating alone, in eight languages, across the EU border and outside it. They have nevertheless converged on the same two rules.

14 of the 23 confine spearfishing to daylight by national rule. And of the 12 that publish a numeric national recreational daily cap, 11 publish the same figure — five kilograms per person per day — 8 of them with the same carve-out permitting one fish that alone exceeds it. The twelfth, Monaco, counts seven fish instead of weighing them.

Convergence is not harmonisation. No instrument obliges any of them to pick five kilograms, and the wording differs everywhere — Croatia adds the weight of the oversize fish, Israel allows two large fish instead, Cyprus sets a different allowance for boat fishing. What has happened looks more like a shared professional norm hardening into national text one country at a time. For a spearfisher it means the Mediterranean is the one sea where the rules travel with you, and for anyone studying fisheries policy it is a reasonably clean natural experiment in how a norm spreads without a treaty.

Who may dive at all: the cut that decides a trip

Of the 155 jurisdictions where spearfishing is lawful, 136 state whether a licence is required. 98 require one; 38 expressly do not.

What the price is, we frequently cannot tell you. 52 of the 98 jurisdictions that require a licence publish no fee we could establish from an official source. Some of that is genuine — fees set per province, per emirate, per lake lessee — and some of it is the limit of our own research. We are not going to dress it up as a finding about transparency when part of it is a finding about us.

The cut that actually decides whether a trip is possible is nationality. 14 jurisdictions permit spearfishing and close it to visitors: Antigua and Barbuda, Bermuda, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, Cayman Islands, Curaçao, Egypt, Grenada, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore and Somalia. The Cayman Islands are the cleanest case — only Caymanians over eighteen may hold a speargun licence, so there is no route for a visitor at any price. Bermuda issues its spearfishing licence to residents only. A further 59 jurisdictions do not bar foreigners but require a foreigner-specific licence or permit, which is a different problem — one that has to be solved before you travel rather than on arrival.

Closed seasons are rarer than the folklore suggests

146 records carry at least one closed season, and the dataset holds 390 season rules in total. But 184 of those are species closures — they reach a spearfisher the same way they reach an angler, by taking one fish off the list rather than by closing the water.

Closed seasons aimed at underwater fishing itself are genuinely rare. Only 9 national closures in the whole dataset name underwater or spear fishing and give calendar dates, and they are almost all European: Poland (10-15–05-15), Monaco (10-15–03-15), Belarus (03-20–05-18), Belarus (04-10–06-08), Belarus (04-01–05-30), Finland (04-15–05-31), Latvia (03-01–04-30), Cyprus (05-01–05-31), Greece (05-01–05-31). Cyprus and Greece both close the month of May and nothing else. Finland, Latvia and Belarus close their spring spawning windows. Monaco is the outlier in both length and direction: it closes the whole winter and opens for the season, which is a rule about the amenity rather than the fish.

The same thinness shows up in bag limits. 119 of the 154 coastal jurisdictions in the restricted category publish no numeric national daily limit at all. Taken with the gear and area findings above, the shape of this body of law is consistent: it regulates where, how and who far more than it regulates how much. Our own map shows the same asymmetry from the other side — the records name 2,561 areas where spearfishing is prohibited against 257 where it is expressly permitted, and 104 records name no permitted area at all. A permission is usually the unstated default, so it only gets written down where the default is closure.

What actually changed

Because we hold one snapshot rather than a series, we will not draw a trend line. What we can do is name the dated instruments our records picked up over the last year — each one an instrument the record names, with a commencement or gazette date the record states.

1. Türkiye

   A speargun fisher must now hold the five-year Amateur Fisherman Document (Amatör Balıkçı Belgesi), endorsed for the diving method. It stays optional for every other amateur method — the speargun alone acquired a paperwork requirement.

   Circular 6/2 (Tebliğ 2024/21) art. 16(4)(ç), added by Tebliğ 2025/12, Resmî Gazete 16 April 2025 no. 32872 · in force 1 January 2026

2. Croatia

   The speargun may be used only on a purchased sport licence — the cheaper recreational licence, which most visitors buy, does not permit it. Being towed behind a boat or an underwater scooter is banned, and groupers are capped at one fish across three genera.

   Pravilnik o sportskom i rekreacijskom ribolovu na moru, Narodne novine 48/2026 · in force 8 May 2026

3. Greece

   All fishing by any means — spearfishing included — is closed from 1 April to 31 May each year in the belt out to 1.5 nautical miles around the whole island of Amorgos.

   Presidential Decree 73/2025 (ΦΕΚ 148 Α΄, 18 August 2025), arts. 2 and 6 · in force 18 November 2025, for five years

4. Spain

   The Cabo de Palos–Islas Hormigas reserve was re-zoned into three cells and recreational underwater fishing was banned by name in the new cell C — while shore angling stays permitted there, so of the recreational methods it is precisely spearfishing that was closed out.

   Decreto 31/2026 de 14 de mayo (BORM 116), art. 7.2 · in force 23 May 2026

5. Malta

   Spearfishing is prohibited in all fifteen Conservation Areas around wrecks. They are not blanket no-take zones — trolling lines stay legal in ten of the fifteen — which is worth knowing before assuming a dive site is closed to everyone.

   Local Notice to Mariners 025 of 2026, under the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (Cap. 425) · in force February 2026

6. Norway

   Three year-round no-take zones opened in the Oslofjord and Skagerrak — the inner Oslofjord, Færder and the Hvaler archipelago — closing all fishing and harvesting, explicitly including by diving.

   Forskrift om regulering av fiske i Oslofjorden, FOR-2025-12-19-2889, Vedlegg 3 · in force 1 January 2026

7. Latvia

   Baltic salmon is limited to one farmed fish a day, identified by its clipped adipose fin — and the rule names underwater hunters, who must verify the clipped fin before shooting rather than after surfacing.

   Ministry of Agriculture decision on Baltic Sea fishing, recreational fishing and underwater hunting for 2026, under EU Council Regulation 2025/2454 · in force 2026 season

8. China

   The Fisheries Law was comprehensively revised, and for the first time states that an individual taking only small or sporadic amounts by recreational angling or hand collection is not carrying out "fishing operations" and needs no licence.

   Fisheries Law of the PRC, revised 27 December 2025, art. 32 · in force 1 May 2026

9. Ghana

   A new fisheries statute replaced the 2002 Act, and Ghana declared its first marine protected area under it — Greater Cape Three Points, 703 km², closed to fishing without the Minister’s written permission.

   Fisheries and Aquaculture Act 2025 (Act 1146), s. 39 · in force MPA declared 14 April 2026

10. Australia

    Fishing by any means was prohibited in the sanctuary and cultural-protection areas of the new Bardi Jawi Gaarra Marine Park in the Kimberley, adding twelve closed areas at once.

    Prohibition on Fishing (Bardi Jawi Gaarra Marine Park) Order 2025 (WA), Government Gazette 111, cll. 4–5 · in force 19 September 2025

One story we expected to tell, we cannot. Dominica’s Sperm Whale Reserve — the world’s first — would have been the most quotable item on this list, and our own record is not strong enough to carry it. It records that the Act was passed by Parliament in October 2025 and that a Reserve Board was appointed in March 2026 to implement it, but it states no commencement date and its citation is a bill, not the enacted Act. So we are reporting it as what the record supports and flagging it for re-sourcing rather than writing “in force.” The same treatment applies to a handful of attractive headlines elsewhere in the dataset that currently rest on a news report or an encyclopedia page instead of an instrument.

Rules that are widely repeated and are not the law

The corrections are as useful as the changes. Croatia is the clearest: a national closure of beaches and bathing areas from 1 May to 1 October is still repeated in guides, on forums and — until this year — by us. It was enacted by Pravilnik NN 155/2014 and repealed in December 2017 by NN 122/2017. It has not been re-enacted, and it is absent from both the 2026 rulebook and the Marine Fisheries Act. What survives is a narrower window inside Telašćica Nature Park, which is not the same rule and does not cover the coast.

Peru is a second: an express prohibition on scuba spearfishing has been proposed in a draft recreational-fishing regulation and is often described as existing. It has not been enacted. A proposal reported as law is the commonest failure mode in this field, and it is the reason every claim in our records has to name its instrument.

What this report cannot tell you

This is one reading of one corpus, and the corpus has a shape. Every figure above is reproducible from the country pages on this site; here is what sits behind them.

• It is a snapshot, not a series. We have one pass over the world, so “2026” here means the state of the law as recorded now. Any percentage in this piece compared against a previous year would be invented.
• Confidence is uneven. 89 records are rated high confidence, 128 medium and 5 low. The low ones are honestly low — Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, North Korea, State of Palestine and Togo — places with no spearfishing-specific statute we could locate.
• Dates mark research, not law. 197 of the 222 records were last touched in 2026, and the oldest dates from 2018-06-28. A record’s date records when we last checked it, not when the law last moved.
• Sub-national law is the weak point. A single national verdict is a poor fit for federal states. Australia, the United States, Canada, Japan and Spain all legislate this at state, territory or autonomous-community level, and where a national field has to hold one value we take the strictest defensible reading. Check the country page, not the colour on the map.
• Silence is not permission. Where a record says nothing, we count it as nothing — never as a “no.” That is why the denominators in this piece move from section to section, and why they are printed.

How the records are compiled, verified and gated is set out in full on our methodology page, including the anti-fabrication rule that every one of the 1,714 quoted provisions carries the URL it was taken from — 1,714 of 1,714 do. Every figure here is free to quote with attribution; the per-country detail behind them lives on the country pages and the map.

None of this is legal advice, and none of it survives contact with a rule that changed last week. Verify with the authority named on the country page before you get in the water — and if you find us wrong, tell us: corrections are the only thing that keeps a corpus this size honest.