State guide
Wisconsin Mitigation Banks & Credits
Wisconsin has 81 open-market mitigation banks and 20 in-lieu fee sites offering wetland and stream credits, and recorded 790 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 Wisconsin, and how the state's permitting program relates to the federal one.
Wisconsin ranks #13 of 50 states by credit sales recorded in the RIBITS ledger over 2016–2025 — 790 sales across 51 sellers. All states ranked
Figures mirrored from USACE RIBITS · synced
Wisconsin mitigation bank map
Wisconsin Stream Mitigation Credits
4 stream banks have credits available now in Wisconsin. Banks are sorted by available quantity.
Other Stream Credits
Which of these banks can serve your site? Approved service area decides eligibility, so resolve a location before you shortlist.
Find eligible banksWisconsin Wetland Mitigation Credits
43 wetland banks & sites have credits available now in Wisconsin. Banks are sorted by available quantity. The listings below are grouped as Wet Meadow Credits, Forested Credits, Scrub-Shrub Credits, Marsh Credits, Wet Prairie Credits and Other Wetland Credits.
Wet Meadow Credits
2 more wetland banks are sold out or closed in Wisconsin and are not listed here.
Forested Credits
Scrub-Shrub Credits
Marsh Credits
Wet Prairie Credits
Other Wetland Credits
Mitigation banks pending approval in Wisconsin
13 mitigation banks have applied for approval to sell credits in Wisconsin 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.
1 further pending bank in Wisconsin is a single-client captive bank, built for its own sponsor's projects rather than for sale, and is not listed here.
In-lieu fee programs serving Wisconsin
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 Wisconsin but holds no credits here right now.
1 in-lieu fee program on record for Wisconsin is withdrawn or terminated and is not listed.
Active watersheds in Wisconsin
The HUC-6 watersheds where Wisconsin banks hold offerings, by number of offerings.
Two Wisconsin watersheds have an in-depth market report. Mississippi Headwaters (Bemidji, Brainerd) and Upper Mississippi-Crow-Rum (St. Cloud) — each with its national rank, ten-year sales and per-class credit runway.
See the watershed reportsWhat mitigation credits cost in Wisconsin
There is no published price for a mitigation bank credit in Wisconsin, 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, state by state; Wisconsin is not one we hold a verified transaction for yet. Published in-lieu fee rates
Wisconsin mitigation banking regulation
The Corps' St. Paul District holds sole federal permitting authority across Wisconsin, and credits here are set by plain acre-based ratio in nearly every case: no named functional assessment method appears in the Unit column above.
Wisconsin regulates wetlands well beyond the reach of the federal Clean Water Act. The Department of Natural Resources permits impacts to "nonfederal wetlands" under a statute that has defined that category since 2001, when Wisconsin became the first state to regulate isolated, non-federally-jurisdictional wetlands directly. That authority predates Sackett v. EPA by more than two decades and needed no legislative response afterwards. A project can require a DNR permit, a Corps permit, or both, and DNR routes individual permit applications through a St. Paul District project manager as a screening step, so the two reviews are coordinated rather than run from scratch twice.
The Wisconsin Wetland Conservation Trust, DNR's in-lieu fee program since 2014, is not a separate state track running alongside the federal one. It is a single Corps-authorized ILF instrument, administered by DNR and overseen jointly by the Corps and EPA, whose credit sales satisfy the federal and state mitigation obligations at once — the same kind of instrument as any other in-lieu fee program in the federal system, just state-run.
Permits in Wisconsin 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.
Wisconsin mitigation banking — common questions
How much does wetland mitigation cost in Wisconsin?
We do not publish a price for a Wisconsin 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 no verified Wisconsin transaction on record yet — 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 Wisconsin?
In Wisconsin, wetland and stream impacts are permitted through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Paul District. 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 Wisconsin?
We track 169 mitigation and conservation banks and in-lieu fee sites on record for Wisconsin, of which 103 are approved. 81 are open-market banks and 20 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 Wisconsin watershed reports
Two Wisconsin 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.
About the data on this page
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.