KeepsUntilSearch My fridgeSeafood · USDA FoodKeeper

How long does Fish last in the freezer?

6 kinds · each with its own window

Fish, raw but headed and gutted · In the freezer

Use by6 months

Counted from the day you bought it

Quality window · past it, judge it yourself

How this date is worked out

From KeepsUntilIt is past the dateWhat to do when the window has run out, and when tasting is not a test Where these numbers come fromThe USDA source, the parse rules and what this site cannot tell you Every food on the siteOne page, every product, longest first

Turning the range into a date

Fish (raw but headed and gutted) keeps 6 months in the freezer. Each kind gets its own dated rows here, 11 rows across the 6 the USDA lists under this name, because a date is only worth printing against the window it belongs to.

Fish, hot smoked, air pack

In the freezerUse by9 months to 12 months after the day you bought it
From purchase · in the fridgeUse by14 days to 45 days after the day you bought it

Fish, hot smoked, vacuum pack

In the freezerUse by6 months to 12 months after the day you bought it
From purchase · in the fridgeUse by14 days to 45 days after the day you bought it

Fish, cold smoked, air pack

In the freezerUse by9 months to 12 months after the day you bought it
From purchase · in the fridgeUse by14 days to 30 days after the day you bought it

Fish, cold smoked, vacuum pack

In the freezerUse by9 months to 12 months after the day you bought it
From purchase · in the fridgeUse by21 days to 30 days after the day you bought it

Fish, breaded

In the freezerUse by18 months after the day you bought it

Fish, raw but headed and gutted

In the freezerUse by6 months after the day you bought it
After cooking · in the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you stored it

The USDA rates 6 kinds of this separately

Fish, cold smoked, air pack keeps 14 days, which is shorter than the window this page answers with. The USDA files 6 separate entries under this name, each listed below with its own windows, and they do not keep for the same time: at its best the shortest-keeping of them holds 3 days to 4 days after cooking outside the freezer, the longest 14 days to 45 days.

A short window, and what shortens it further

Fish, raw but headed and gutted is one of the short-lived entries in the data: 4 days after cooking outside the freezer, position 5 of 17 in the Seafood list. At that scale a day of delay is a large share of the whole window, which is why the figure is printed as a range rather than an average. Hot smoked, air pack and hot are the same food in the source list.

Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item

The USDA rates this item cold or frozen and never at room temperature: no pantry figure exists for it, as for 222 of the 466 foods in the data that get no pantry time at all. The source also indexes it as hot smoked, air pack, hot and smoked.

Fish, hot smoked, air pack

In the freezer9 months to 12 months
From purchase · in the fridge14 days to 45 days

Fish, hot smoked, vacuum pack

In the freezer6 months to 12 months
From purchase · in the fridge14 days to 45 days

Fish, cold smoked, air pack

In the freezer9 months to 12 months
From purchase · in the fridge14 days to 30 days

Fish, cold smoked, vacuum pack

In the freezer9 months to 12 months
From purchase · in the fridge21 days to 30 days

Fish, breaded

In the freezer18 months
In the fridgenot recommended
Outside the freezer—

Fish, raw but headed and gutted

In the freezer6 months
After cooking · in the fridge3 days to 4 days

From KeepsUntilWhere these numbers come fromThe USDA source, the parse rules and what this site cannot tell you

What the USDA adds in words

The USDA attaches 4 handling notes to this item, reproduced below word for word. 2 of the 4 are about safety rather than quality, and they are printed first. These are the source's own sentences, not ours, and they are the part of the FoodKeeper record that a table of durations cannot carry.

Fish, breaded, in the freezer, from the day you bought it. Keep frozen. For safety, cook as directed.

Fish, raw but headed and gutted, in the freezer, from the day you bought it. Keep frozen. For safety, cook as directed.

Fish, breaded, in the refrigerator. Not recommended to refrigerate after cooking due to decreased quality.

Fish, raw but headed and gutted, in the refrigerator. Recommendation is for storage after cooking.

Can you freeze fish?

Yes. The USDA gives fish (raw but headed and gutted) 6 months in the freezer from the day you buy it, and held at 0 °F food stays safe beyond that: the figure is about quality. This is a food sold frozen: keep it at 0 °F and do not let it thaw on the way home.

How to tell if fish has gone bad

Go by the date first: fish keeps 6 months in the freezer. Ice crystals and dry patches are freezer burn, a quality loss, not a hazard; a package that thawed and refroze in a solid lump should go. Keep the freezer at 0 °F or below.

Sources: USDA FSIS: the danger zone USDA FSIS: freezing and food safety FDA: are you storing food safely FoodSafety.gov: the FoodKeeper app.

Is it still safe to eat, or just past its best?

The answer at the top of this page reads 6 months in the freezer. The USDA rating this place at all is the USDA saying Fish, raw but headed and gutted keeps there, so the figure rates how good it will be. Past it, whether it has gone bad is yours to judge by look and smell: this window rates quality, not the day it turns hazardous.

The figures in the fridge and in the fridge here are a safety limit. The same page carries windows of more than one kind, so which sentence applies depends on which row you are reading, not on the food.

It is past the date. Now what?

Say the calculator above puts Fish, raw but headed and gutted past its 6 months in the freezer window. Past that the calendar stops deciding and the food itself does. Mold, a slimy or sticky surface, soft or darkened spots, or a sour smell mean it goes out whatever the date says.

The USDA's limit for perishable food standing at room temperature is 2 hours, or 1 hour when the kitchen is above 90 °F, and that clock runs whatever the storage figure says. The whole rule, including the cases the source does not cover, is set out under what to do when the date has passed.

Items that behave the same way

All 3 of the 6 items nearest Fish, raw but headed and gutted keep exactly as long as it does, 4 days after cooking, so the ranking around it is a tie rather than an order.

Where these numbers come from

Every storage time on this page is the USDA’s own published figure from the FoodKeeper data, one of the 9 it keeps per food, reproduced unchanged and never an estimate of ours. Where the USDA lists several kinds under one name, each kind keeps its own windows, and the page names the kind its answer is for. The dates and multipliers are ours, computed from those ranges.

Source: USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026. Found a figure that does not match the source? Tell us on the contact page. How the site is built is on the method page.

Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for Fish, raw but headed and gutted, which is the kind the plain name means here, chosen kind by kind rather than by the order the source happens to list them in.

USDA index terms: air pack, bread, breaded, cold, cold smoked, gutted, headed, hot, hot smoked, pack, raw, smoked, vacuum, vacuum pack

KeepsUntil is an independent reference built on public USDA data. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration. Whether a given window is a safety limit or a quality window is stated on the page that prints it.