Minnesota has 406 open-market mitigation banks offering wetland and stream credits, and recorded 2,531 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 Minnesota, and how the state's permitting program relates to the federal one.
Minnesota ranks #6 of 50 states by credit sales recorded in the RIBITS ledger over 2016–2025 — 2,531 sales across 173 sellers. All states ranked
149 wetland banks have credits available now in Minnesota. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Marsh Credits, Wet Meadow Credits, Forested Credits, Upland Buffer Credits, Wet Prairie Credits, Scrub-Shrub Credits, Open Water Credits, Palustrine Other Credits and Bog & Fen Credits.
Marsh Credits
Each bank name opens its full record — sales history, approved service area, credit ledger and sponsor contact.
0.025 — Wetland · Bog (Open Bog or Coniferous Bog)
Ratio — Wetland · Bog (Open Bog or Coniferous Bog)
15 sales
Mitigation banks pending approval in Minnesota
27 mitigation banks have applied for approval to sell credits in Minnesota 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 Minnesota 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 Minnesota
1 approved in-lieu fee program serves Minnesota but holds no credits here right now, so mitigation banks are the only credit source in the state today.
1 further in-lieu fee program is pending approval in Minnesota and cannot sell credits yet.
Active watersheds in Minnesota
The HUC-6 watersheds where Minnesota banks hold offerings, by number of offerings.
Market reports
Five Minnesota watersheds have an in-depth market report. Minnesota River (Minneapolis–St. Paul, Mankato), Mississippi Headwaters (Bemidji, Brainerd), Upper Mississippi-Crow-Rum (St. Cloud), Des Moines River (Des Moines, Fort Dodge) and Iowa River (Cedar Rapids, Iowa City) — each with its national rank, ten-year sales and per-class credit runway.
There is no published price for a mitigation bank credit in Minnesota, 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 Minnesota the record now runs to 4 verified transactions. Published in-lieu fee rates
verified transactions on file
4
Minnesota mitigation banking regulation
Minnesota is one of a handful of states that regulates wetland impacts under its own law, the Wetland Conservation Act. What makes it unusual is who runs it: not a state agency directly, but local government units — cities, counties, watershed districts and soil-and-water conservation districts — applying the Act's avoid-minimize-replace sequence, with the Board of Water and Soil Resources writing the rules and running the statewide wetland bank. A developer here answers to a local unit under state law and to the Corps' St. Paul District under federal §404 at the same time, not one instead of the other.
The two tracks share banks but not, automatically, credits. A single bank site can hold credits approved for state replacement, for federal §404 use, or for both, certified through separate processes — so a federal listing is not on its own proof that a credit will satisfy a state obligation, and a buyer has to confirm which. That dual structure is also why the Unit column above reads as ratio rather than a named method: the Act sets replacement in fixed ratios written into rule, and counter-intuitively the ratio is lower in the agricultural and heavily-drained parts of the state than in the parts that still hold most of their wetland. Credit is weighted by public value as well as area — restoring a fully drained wetland earns more than a lesser intervention — so a Minnesota credit stands for assessed replacement value, not raw acreage.
A separate agricultural wetland bank, run under the Board's own agreement with the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service, exists solely for agricultural-to-agricultural replacement and its credits are not interchangeable with the general bank's.
Permits in Minnesota are issued by the Corps’ St. Paul district, in the Mississippi Valley Division. See our division overview for new-bank approval timelines, and recent permit and bank applications.
Minnesota mitigation banking — common questions
How much does wetland mitigation cost in Minnesota?
We do not publish a price for a Minnesota 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 Minnesota 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 Minnesota?
In Minnesota, wetland and stream impacts are permitted through local government units under the state Wetland Conservation Act, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Paul District 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 Minnesota?
We track 495 mitigation and conservation banks and in-lieu fee sites on record for Minnesota, of which 233 are approved. 406 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 Minnesota watershed reports
Five Minnesota 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.