North Carolina Mitigation Banks & Credits

Figures mirrored from USACE RIBITS · synced 2 days ago

242 stream banks & sites have credits available now in North Carolina. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Warm Water Stream Credits, Cool Water Stream Credits, Cold Water Stream Credits and Other Stream Credits.

Warm Water Stream Credits

2 more stream banks are sold out or closed in North Carolina and are not listed here.

Cool Water Stream Credits

Cold Water Stream Credits

Other Stream Credits

146 wetland banks & sites have credits available now in North Carolina. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Riparian Credits, Riparian Riverine Credits, Non-Riparian Credits and Other Wetland Credits.

Riparian Credits

3 more wetland banks are sold out or closed in North Carolina and are not listed here.

Riparian Riverine Credits

Non-Riparian Credits

Other Wetland Credits

39 mitigation banks have applied for approval to sell credits in North Carolina 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.

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.

1 further approved in-lieu fee program serves North Carolina but holds no credits here right now.

The HUC-6 watersheds where North Carolina banks hold offerings, by number of offerings.

There is no published price for a mitigation bank credit in North Carolina, 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 North Carolina the record now runs to 66 verified transactions. Published in-lieu fee rates

North Carolina runs no standalone state permitting program for wetland or stream fill parallel to federal law — compensatory mitigation here is driven by a §404 permit from the Corps' Wilmington District, paired with the state's own §401 water quality certification. Both sides of that permitting run on named state-developed assessment methods rather than a straight acre or linear-foot count: the North Carolina Wetland Assessment Method and its stream counterpart, the North Carolina Stream Assessment Method, both in the Unit column above. An interagency team of state and federal staff built them from 2003, and both work the same way — a rapid field form rating a site's hydrology, water quality and habitat function as high, medium or low rather than measuring its area or length.

Wilmington District adopted both by public notice in 2015 and uses them to set the amount and type of compensatory mitigation case by case, for every source of credit alike: permittee-responsible work, mitigation banks, and in-lieu fee projects. That last category carries real weight: the North Carolina Division of Mitigation Services runs a statewide in-lieu fee program covering stream, wetland, riparian-buffer and nutrient-offset credits. It fills gaps rather than competing: state rules bar a permittee from buying its credits where a bank already has credits available in the service area, so the banks on this page are looked at first.

Riparian buffer credits are a separate system again, and an unusual one. Several river basins — the Neuse, Tar-Pamlico, Catawba and Jordan Lake watersheds among them — require a vegetated buffer along waterways under state rule, and where a project cannot avoid disturbing it, the mitigation is priced and traded BY THE SQUARE FOOT rather than by acre or credit, through either a private buffer bank or the state's in-lieu fee program.

Permits in North Carolina are issued by the Corps’ Wilmington district, in the South Atlantic Division. See our division overview for new-bank approval timelines, and recent permit and bank applications.