Ohio hunters and anglers now have their 2027 spring turkey dates and a simpler set of bass fishing rules. The Ohio Wildlife Council approved the spring 2027 wild turkey seasons and a sweeping simplification of bass regulations at its Wednesday, Oct. 28 meeting, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife announced.
Spring turkey season again runs in two zones, split to match the timing of turkey nesting in each region, according to the ODNR announcement reported by The Outdoor Wire. The south zone, covering 83 counties, holds its youth weekend April 17-18, 2027, and its regular season April 24 through May 23, 2027. The northeast zone — Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake and Trumbull counties — holds its youth weekend April 24-25, 2027, and its regular season May 1 through May 30, 2027.
Hunting hours follow the recent pattern, the Division of Wildlife said: youth weekend hours run from 30 minutes before sunrise to sunset, and during the first nine days of each regular season hunting runs from 30 minutes before sunrise until noon, shifting to 30 minutes before sunrise to sunset for the remainder of the season.
The bigger everyday change is for bass anglers. The council voted to remove many site-specific length restrictions and daily bag limits for largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass, the Division of Wildlife announced. Most waterbodies that carried their own bass rules will instead fall under the straightforward statewide limit of five bass per day with a 12-inch minimum length.
The Division of Wildlife said its surveys showed the site-specific harvest regulations were effectively meeting their management goals, making the patchwork of lake-by-lake rules no longer necessary — and the simplification is meant to make the rules easier for Ohio’s anglers to follow. The new bass regulations take effect March 1, 2027.
For southeast Ohio, where this story takes the region’s slot as a statewide substitution, the changes reach some of the state’s most-used turkey woods and bass water — the public lands and lakes across the Hocking Hills, Wayne National Forest country and the Ohio River corridor all hunt and fish under the same two-zone turkey calendar and, from March, the same statewide bass limit.
The Ohio Wildlife Council reviews and approves all rules and regulations proposed by the Division of Wildlife. What happens next: the approved seasons and rules are published in the Division of Wildlife’s 2027 regulations at wildohio.gov, with the bass changes effective March 1, 2027, and the first youth turkey weekend opening April 17, 2027.
Photo: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0