Boat ramp launch fees, state by state

What the agencies themselves publish about paying to launch — and where they publish nothing.

5,249

ramps whose managing agency publishes a fee field

out of 27,549 ramps — the other 22,300 say nothing about cost either way

Of those 5,249 records, 3,812 state that launching is free and 1,437 state that a fee applies — 27% of the ramps where the question is answered at all.

That denominator is the whole point. A fee field is absent far more often than it is present, and an absent field is not a free ramp. Day-use fees are frequently set by the parking lot or the park gate rather than by the ramp, so a state agency inventorying launch structures may legitimately have nothing to record while you still pay $8 to leave the car.

Where a fee is actually published

States by how many of their ramps carry a fee field, and how many of those charge
State	Ramps	Fee published	Fee charged
Minnesota	3,178	29	0
Wisconsin	3,171	26	13
Florida	2,661	2,350	643
Michigan	1,741	58	29
Georgia	973	840	448
South Carolina	911	15	5
Arkansas	899	8	2
New Hampshire	881	777	88
Virginia	876	26	3
Iowa	777	8	0
Washington	755	29	9
Tennessee	731	58	4
Nebraska	696	1	0
Missouri	608	34	2
Idaho	560	7	3
Texas	552	28	5
Ohio	549	2	0
Louisiana	535	9	1

What to check before you tow

The fee on a ramp page is the fee the agency published, at the date on that page. It is the only figure here that is not ours.
Annual launch permits usually cost less than four or five day passes, and several states sell them for out-of-state boats at a higher rate.
Federal ramps — Army Corps, Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation — often honour the America the Beautiful pass at the gate but not at the ramp, or the reverse. The signage at the site governs.
Where a ramp page shows no fee, treat the cost as unknown, not as zero.

Figures on this page are counted from the agency records behind this site each time it is built, and every count states the population it was computed over. See the sources.