How long doesFishlast in the fridge?
The USDA rates 6 kinds of this separately
The USDA files 6 separate entries under this name — hot smoked, air pack, hot smoked, vacuum pack, cold smoked, air pack, cold smoked, vacuum pack, breaded and raw but headed and gutted — and they do not keep for the same time: Fish, raw but headed and gutted holds 3 days to 4 days outside the freezer, Fish, hot smoked, vacuum pack holds 14 days to 45 days.
Freezing changes the unit, not just the number
Here the freezer does not so much extend the answer as replace it. 4 days in the refrigerator becomes 6 months in the freezer: 45 times longer, and days turning into months. The kinds do not agree about the refrigerator: rated for at least one of them and marked not recommended for another.
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
- Unopened · in the fridge14 days to 45 days
Fish, hot smoked, vacuum pack
- In the freezer6 months to 12 months
- Unopened · in the fridge14 days to 45 days
Fish, cold smoked, air pack
- In the freezer9 months to 12 months
- Unopened · in the fridge14 days to 30 days
Fish, cold smoked, vacuum pack
- In the freezer9 months to 12 months
- Unopened · 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
- In the fridge3 days to 4 days
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.
Turning the range into a date
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
- Unopened · 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
- Unopened · 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
- Unopened · 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
- Unopened · 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
- In the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you stored it
Is this window about safety or about taste?
The answer at the top of this page reads 3 days to 4 days in the fridge. What decides that is the record's own note: this figure is for the product after cooking, which is cooked and still moist. Past it, throw it out rather than taste it: a perishable food can carry enough bacteria to make you ill while it still looks and smells fine.
The figures in the freezer and in the fridge here are a quality window. 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. Held at 0 °F food stays safe for as long as it stays frozen, which is why a freezer figure counts as quality on this site whatever the food is. Every figure assumes the food was sound when you stored it, that your refrigerator holds 40 °F or below and your freezer 0 °F or below, and that the package was handled normally.
It is past the date. Now what?
Say the calculator above puts Fish, raw but headed and gutted past its 3 days to 4 days in the fridge window, or the container sat out on the counter overnight. Throw the container out without tasting it, and count any hours it already spent out of the refrigerator as part of that window rather than on top of it.
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. Freezing stops the clock but does not turn it back: food already past its window is not rescued by putting it in the freezer. The FoodKeeper entry this page is built from prints storage times and nothing else, so anything past them here is USDA and FSIS guidance rather than a figure from the source. The whole rule, including the cases the source does not cover, is set out under what to do when the date has passed.
Is that a long time?
4 items in the Seafood list keep exactly as long as Fish, raw but headed and gutted, 4 days, so they all share place 5 of 17 rather than being put in an order the data does not support.
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, so the ranking around it is a tie rather than an order.
- Cooked fish, allkeeps exactly as long
- Crab legs, king, dungeness, snowkeeps exactly as long
- Cooked shellfish, allkeeps exactly as long
- Shrimp, crayfishkeeps 1 day sealed in the fridge
- Crab meatkeeps 1 day in the fridgefresh
- Lean fishkeeps 1 day sealed in the fridgecod, flounder, haddock, halibut, sole, etc.
Products the USDA rates in the same places
No other product in the file is rated in exactly this set of places: freezer from the day of purchase, refrigerator and refrigerator from the day of purchase, and nothing else. That makes the shape of this record unique among the 466 products here, so the closest comparisons available are the entries that share most of it — Crab meat, Crab legs and Cooked shellfish. Their windows are printed beside them below, and none of them is rated in quite the same way.
Nothing carries this exact set of places, so these share most of it.
- Crab meat1 day in the fridgefresh
- Crab legs2 days sealed in the fridge
- Cooked shellfish3 days in the fridge
- Scallops1 day sealed in the fridge
- Shrimp, crayfish1 day sealed in the fridge
- Squid1 day sealed in the fridge
- Fresh lobster tails2 days sealed in the fridge
- Lean fish1 day sealed in the fridgecod, flounder, haddock, halibut, sole, etc.
The rest of the Smoked shelf
The USDA files this product on a shelf of two. Its only shelfmate under Smoked is Herring, which keeps 6 months against this one's 4 days, so every comparison on this page that reaches wider than the shelf has to climb to the whole of Seafood to find enough entries to say anything with. The order counts the longest window outside the freezer, so Fish, raw but headed and gutted sits here at 4 days rather than at the 3 days in the fridge its own answer prints.
- Herring6 months4 months sealed in the fridge
If it has to keep longer than this
If it has to keep longer than 4 days, Seafood offers 4 products that hold at least twice as long outside the freezer. The nearest step up is Shucked clams at 10 days against this one's 4 days, and the rest are Fresh clams, Caviar and Herring. A short list like this one is itself the finding: the category has few longer options. In the other direction, 4 entries in the category keep half as long or less, Lean fish and Fatty fish among them.
- Shucked clams10 days3 days sealed in the fridge
- Fresh clams10 days5 days sealed in the fridge
- Caviar4 weeks2 days in the fridge once opened
- Herring6 months4 months sealed in the fridge
The record this page is built from
This name is one of the crowded ones in the file: 6 rows carry it, starting at record 164, out of 661 rows in the snapshot altogether. All 6 are printed on this page as separate kinds, because a page that merged their windows into one figure would be publishing a number the USDA never did. 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.
Where these numbers come from
Every range on this page is published by the USDA FoodKeeper and reproduced unchanged. The multipliers, the rankings, the percentages and the dates are ours, computed from those ranges. Where the source gives a span such as 3 to 5 weeks, comparisons use the upper figure, and the full span is always printed.
Rankings cover only the items the USDA gives a usable figure for, and identical ranges share a place rather than being ordered arbitrarily. Neighbors are chosen by nearest storage time within the same category, never alphabetically: two foods filed next to each other by name usually have nothing to do with each other. The freezer is excluded from ranking because it flattens almost everything.
Where the USDA lists several kinds under one name, they share one page here and every kind keeps its own windows: the source prints them as separate rows, and a page that merged them would be inventing a figure the source never published. Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for the kind the plain name means — the shell egg for eggs, the can for tuna — which is settled name by name rather than by the order the source lists its rows in, and the page names it. Where the plain name means no single kind, the page prints no single figure at all and lists the kinds instead.
Source: USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026. This site computes every comparison on this page and takes responsibility for it. Found a figure that does not match the source? Tell us on the contact page, with the page and the row — the parsing is mechanical, so a mismatch is our bug and we want it. How the whole site is built, which figures are ours and where the source can be checked is on the method page.
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.