Louisiana has 218 open-market mitigation banks offering wetland and stream credits, and recorded 2,162 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 Louisiana, and how the state's permitting program relates to the federal one.
Louisiana ranks #7 of 50 states by credit sales recorded in the RIBITS ledger over 2016–2025 — 2,162 sales across 170 sellers. All states ranked
—no unit recorded — Stream · PCMB Galv Str Meth Phillips Creek (Perennial)—no unit recorded — Stream · PCMB Galv Str Meth Phillips Creek Tributary (Intermittent)
152 wetland banks have credits available now in Louisiana. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Bottomland Hardwood Credits, Forested Credits, Wet Prairie Credits, Marsh Credits, Tidal Estuarine Credits and Other Wetland Credits.
2 approved in-lieu fee programs serve Louisiana but hold no credits here right now, so mitigation banks are the only credit source in the state today.
Active watersheds in Louisiana
The HUC-6 watersheds where Louisiana banks hold offerings, by number of offerings.
Market reports
Three Louisiana watersheds have an in-depth market report. Sabine River (Beaumont–Port Arthur, Longview), Pascagoula (Hattiesburg, Gulfport–Biloxi) and Galveston Bay-Sabine Lake (Houston, Galveston) — each with its national rank, ten-year sales and per-class credit runway.
There is no published price for a mitigation bank credit in Louisiana, 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 Louisiana the record now runs to 4 verified transactions. Published in-lieu fee rates
verified transactions on file
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Louisiana mitigation banking regulation
Four Corps districts hold regulatory jurisdiction in Louisiana, because district lines follow watershed boundaries rather than the state line. New Orleans covers the south-eastern coastal parishes, Vicksburg the Mississippi corridor and the north, Fort Worth reaches in along the Sabine River and Toledo Bend shared with Texas, and Galveston's reach is set case by case rather than by a fixed parish list.
Which district approved a bank changes what its credits are counted in. New Orleans measures wetland impacts and mitigation with the Louisiana Rapid Assessment Method, introduced in 2016 after a year of interim evaluation, replacing the Modified Charleston Method it used before: a rapid field protocol whose output sizes both the impact and the mitigation that offsets it, so a credit represents assessed wetland condition rather than raw acreage. Vicksburg never made that switch and still runs the Charleston Method, an area-and-condition formula that originated with the Corps' Charleston District. Both names appear in the Unit column above. Each district reviews its banks through its own interagency review team, chaired separately.
Louisiana also runs a state permitting layer the federal process does not replace. The Coastal Resources Program requires a Coastal Use Permit for dredge and fill work in the coastal zone, and that permit cannot issue without compensatory mitigation for any net loss of ecological value — met by buying credits from a state-approved bank, from the state's in-lieu fee program, or by building a standalone project. That is a second, state-level credit requirement layered on whatever the Corps already required under §404.
Permits in Louisiana are issued by the Corps’ Fort Worth, Galveston, New Orleans and Vicksburg districts, across the Mississippi Valley and Southwestern Divisions. See our division overviews — Mississippi Valley and Southwestern — for new-bank approval timelines, and recent permit and bank applications.
Louisiana mitigation banking — common questions
How much does wetland mitigation cost in Louisiana?
We do not publish a price for a Louisiana 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 4 verified Louisiana 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 Louisiana?
In Louisiana, wetland and stream impacts are permitted through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Fort Worth, Galveston, New Orleans, Vicksburg Districts. 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 Louisiana?
We track 224 mitigation and conservation banks and in-lieu fee sites on record for Louisiana, of which 185 are approved. 218 are open-market banks whose credits can be bought; the rest are single-client captive banks excluded from the supply figures on this page.
Read the Louisiana watershed reports
Three Louisiana 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.