California has 186 open-market mitigation banks and 21 in-lieu fee sites offering wetland, stream and species credits, and recorded 2,720 credit sales — credit withdrawals in the federal ledger — over 2016–2025. This page mirrors the federal USACE RIBITS registry: live availability by credit class and watershed, the banks serving California, and how the state's permitting program relates to the federal one. See California species conservation credits.
California ranks #4 of 50 states by credit sales recorded in the RIBITS ledger over 2016–2025 — 2,720 sales across 109 sellers. All states ranked
17 stream banks & sites have credits available now in California. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Ephemeral Stream Credits, Intermittent Stream Credits, Riverine Credits, Open Water & Pond Credits, Perennial Stream Credits, Riparian Credits and Other Stream Credits.
Ephemeral Stream Credits
Each bank name opens its full record — sales history, approved service area, credit ledger and sponsor contact.
—no unit recorded — Stream · Ephemeral Stream Upland Buffer Preservation—no unit recorded — Stream · Ephemeral Stream Riparian Buffer Preservation—no unit recorded — Stream · Ephemeral Stream Re-establishment—no unit recorded — Stream · Ephemeral Stream Preservation
Stream · Open Water Upland Buffer PreservationStream · Open Water PreservationStream · Open Water Re-establishmentStream · Open Water Riparian Buffer Preservation
5.31 — Stream · Open Water Upland Buffer Preservation0.73 — Stream · Open Water Preservation0.622 — Stream · Open Water Re-establishment0.10 — Stream · Open Water Riparian Buffer Preservation
—no unit recorded — Stream · Open Water Upland Buffer Preservation—no unit recorded — Stream · Open Water Preservation—no unit recorded — Stream · Open Water Re-establishment—no unit recorded — Stream · Open Water Riparian Buffer Preservation
—no unit recorded — Stream · Alluvial Floodplain Re-establishment—no unit recorded — Stream · Alluvial Floodplain Upland Buffer Preservation—no unit recorded — Stream · Alluvial Floodplain Riparian Buffer Preservation
28 wetland banks & sites have credits available now in California. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Riparian Credits, Emergent Credits, Vernal Pool & Swale Credits, Palustrine Other Credits, Forested Credits, Marsh Credits, Upland Buffer Credits and Other Wetland Credits.
—no unit recorded — Wetland · Seasonal Wetland Riparian Buffer Preservation—no unit recorded — Wetland · Wetland Riparian Re-establishment—no unit recorded — Wetland · Wetland Riparian Buffer Preservation
Ratio — Wetland · Vernal Pool Preservation (404)—no unit recorded — Wetland · Vernal Swale Preservation (404)—no unit recorded — Wetland · Vernal Swale Preservation (404)Ratio — Wetland · Vernal Pool Preservation (404)
—no unit recorded — Wetland · Depressional Re-establishment—no unit recorded — Wetland · Depressional Establishment—no unit recorded — Wetland · Depressional Rehabilitation
—no unit recorded — Wetland · Group: Seasonal Wetland (404+CDFW)
40 sales
Mitigation banks pending approval in California
25 mitigation banks have applied for approval to sell credits in California and are still under review. Pending means the reviewing agency has not approved them yet, so they cannot sell credits here today. They are listed because they are the supply that could enter this market next. No credit quantity is shown for a bank that cannot sell.
3 further pending banks in California are single-client captive banks, built for their own sponsors' projects rather than for sale, and are not listed here.
In-lieu fee programs serving California
An in-lieu fee program sells the same regulatory outcome as a bank for an administrative fee. Federal rule ranks bank credits first (33 CFR 332.3(b)), so programs are listed here — after the bank sections — and never inside them.
7 further approved in-lieu fee programs serve California but hold no credits here right now.
5 in-lieu fee programs on record for California are withdrawn or terminated and are not listed.
Active watersheds in California
The HUC-6 watersheds where California banks hold offerings, by number of offerings.
Market reports
Two California watersheds have an in-depth market report. Lower Sacramento (Sacramento, Chico) and San Joaquin River (Fresno, Stockton) — each with its national rank, ten-year sales and per-class credit runway.
There is no published price for a mitigation bank credit in California, or anywhere else. Credits change hands in private bilateral deals with no disclosure requirement, and the federal registry has no price field — so any single “average price per credit” you find has been modeled, not measured. What can be documented is individual purchases, one public record at a time. That is what we do, and for California the record now runs to 104 verified transactions. Published in-lieu fee rates
verified transactions on file
104
California mitigation banking regulation
California layers state authority on top of §404. A discharge still needs a Corps permit where federal jurisdiction reaches — Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco all permit here — but the State Water Resources Control Board and its nine regional boards independently regulate "waters of the state" under the Porter-Cologne Act, and issue the §401 certification a federal permit depends on. Since 2020 that layer has run on its own wetland definition, which puts the burden on an applicant to show a wetland is not state-jurisdictional — so when Sackett v. EPA narrowed federal reach, the wetlands that lost federal cover stayed regulated, through Waste Discharge Requirements with no federal process alongside.
Species and conservation banks, the largest class here, are not a Corps product. An interagency review team approves them — the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Corps and EPA — working from one prospectus and bank instrument, so a bank tied to a federally listed species clears CDFW and USFWS jointly rather than twice. The state Endangered Species Act separately lets CDFW require mitigation for take of state-listed species, independent of any federal listing.
No functional assessment method dominates the Unit column above, and the reason is structural: each district negotiates a bank's credits in its own instrument, on an acreage or ratio basis, rather than against a published statewide protocol. The California Rapid Assessment Method scores wetland and riparian condition and can inform the ratio a district sets, but is not itself a credit unit. A credit's value comes from the service area and the species or wetland type it was banked for. The districts and the regional boards are also drawn on different lines, so a bank's district does not tell you which board certified it.
Permits in California are issued by the Corps’ Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco districts, all in the South Pacific Division. See our division overview for new-bank approval timelines, and recent permit and bank applications.
California mitigation banking — common questions
How much does wetland mitigation cost in California?
We do not publish a price for a California credit, and nobody else can honestly publish one either: credits are sold in private bilateral deals with no disclosure requirement, and the federal registry has no price field. What we hold is 104 verified California transactions documented from public records — the counts are on this page and the records themselves are not published. What actually moves a credit's price — scarcity in the specific service area that covers your site, the credit class, the unit it is measured in and whether credits are already released — is set out on the credit-cost pillar.
Who issues wetland permits in California?
In California, wetland and stream impacts are permitted through the state program described above together with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco Districts for federal §404 impacts. A mitigation bank's credits offset the impact once a permit requires compensation; being in the same state as a bank is not enough — the bank's approved service area must cover your site.
How many mitigation banks are in California?
We track 227 mitigation and conservation banks and in-lieu fee sites on record for California, of which 147 are approved. 186 are open-market banks and 21 are in-lieu fee sites whose credits can be bought; the rest are single-client captive banks excluded from the supply figures on this page.
Read the California watershed reports
Two California watersheds have a free market report on this site — national rank, ten-year sales and per-class credit runway. Any other US watershed can be ordered as a full analysis.
Bank details, status and credit balances are mirrored from the USACE RIBITS registry, the federal public record for mitigation banks. Single-client banks are excluded from supply figures. What we call a “credit sale” is a credit withdrawal — the entry written in the federal credit ledger when credits are committed to a permit. At commercial banks a withdrawal generally represents a sale; at a single-client bank it offsets the sponsor’s own project. The figures count ledger transactions, not distinct purchases — one purchase may produce several withdrawals — and we count entries rather than credits moved, because credit classes are different units and cannot be added together. Sales are counted from the withdrawals in RIBITS’s own credit ledger over the last 10 complete years. They are counts of transactions, never sums of credits, for the same reason totals are kept per class. Each bar in a sales chart counts the credit sales recorded in that calendar year — withdrawals from the federal ledger, not quantities of credits. The final bar is the year in progress and is shown in a different color. No bars means no sales in those years.
RIBITS provides credit type and credit classification for each bank listing which we display verbatim. The topic labels and headings you see are ours — we group those names so you can more easily find what you need. For example, five banks selling the same kind of wetland credit may record their classification as “Palustrine Forested”, “PFO - Palustrine Forested”, “Forested Wetland”, “Forested Wetlands” or just “Forested”; we gather all five under one Forested label. Watershed groupings come from each bank’s service area intersected with the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. We group at the HUC-6 level because it is the scale at which these patterns are legible: a HUC-8 is sub-regional and usually too small, while a HUC-4 is large enough to average away the local dynamics that decide whether credits are available where you need them. Those links are refreshed monthly rather than nightly, because service areas and watershed boundaries don’t change frequently.
Comps are documented purchases, confirmed against the RIBITS ledger where the transaction can be matched.