World Record Catfish: Blue, Flathead, Channel, Wels, Mekong Giant

The world record catfish, if you mean the heaviest one ever caught on a rod in North America, is a 143 lb (64.9 kg) blue catfish that Richard Nicholas Anderson pulled from Kerr Lake on the Virginia–North Carolina line on 18 June 2011, on a piece of chicken. If you mean the biggest catfish ever weighed, it is a 646 lb (293 kg) Mekong giant catfish netted by fishermen in northern Thailand in 2005, nine feet long and the largest freshwater fish on record. And if you mean the longest, it is a European wels of 292 cm (9 ft 7 in), caught and released by two Polish anglers at Rybnik Reservoir in October 2025. Below: the record for every catfish an angler is likely to ask about, with the angler, the water, the date and the story, and the answer to how old a fish like that is.

The channel catfish record has stood since 7 July 1964, and it was caught on a lure. Sixty years of bait fishing have not beaten a bucktail jig.

The records

The North American figures are the IGFA all-tackle records as reported by Outdoor Life and Field & Stream; the wels and Mekong figures are the cited figures on the species’ reference pages and in the news reports linked above. Records change; check the IGFA database before you call a fish one.

The three American records, told properly

The 143 lb blue. Anderson was drifting cut bait and chicken at night on Kerr Lake, a Roanoke River reservoir that had already produced Virginia’s 102 lb record from the James two years before. The fish was 57 in (145 cm) long with a 44 in (112 cm) girth, weighed on certified scales on 22 June, and certified as the world record. It beat a 130 lb Missouri River fish from 2010 and a 124 lb Mississippi River fish from 2005. Anderson wanted to keep it alive for a public aquarium; it did not survive the tank. The blue catfish’s run of records since 2005 tracks the species’ spread into new, fertile waters, above all the Chesapeake tributaries, where Virginia’s wildlife agency now asks anglers to harvest small fish because the blues have become the dominant predator.

The 123 lb flathead. Ken Paulie was crappie fishing with a live minnow under a bobber on a Zebco 33 spincast reel spooled with 12–14 lb line when the fish took. He landed it, 61 in (155 cm) long, and it was weighed at 123 lb (55.8 kg). Fisheries biologists later examined the fish and estimated its age at at least 22 years, most likely a male. A larger flathead, 139 lb 14 oz, was reported from the Arkansas River in 1982, but never certified; it is the folk record.

The 58 lb channel. W. B. Whaley’s 1964 fish from Santee-Cooper in South Carolina, 47.25 in (120 cm) long, was caught on a bucktail jig, not bait. No channel catfish has come close since, and the reason is biology: channel catfish in natural waters take two to four years to reach a pound, and a fish twice the common maximum needs an extraordinary water and an extraordinary life. The channel catfish page has the growth figures.

The giants abroad

The wels (Silurus glanis) is Europe’s catfish and the only one that rivals the Mekong giant. The weight record, 134.97 kg from the Po in 2010, has stood for fifteen years; the length record has changed twice in three years, from Biancardi’s 285 cm Po fish in May 2023 to the Polish fish of 292 cm in October 2025, both released alive. Italy’s Po and Spain’s Ebro produce most of the giants; both are introduced populations that grew fast in warm, food-rich water.

The Mekong giant catfish (Pangasianodon gigas) is critically endangered, and the 2005 fish was netted, not angled; it died. The piraíba of the Amazon, a 300 lb-class predator, is the third giant, and the goonch of the Himalayan rivers the fourth; their IGFA records are on the IGFA site.

How old is a 100 lb catfish?

Old. The 123 lb flathead was at least 22 years old; Virginia’s tidal-river study found blue catfish up to 25 years old, and their James River fish reach 3 lb (1.4 kg) in eight years and 20 lb (9 kg) at eleven. A 100 lb blue is therefore a fish of twenty years or more, in a river that fed it well the whole time. That is why every record fish that died in a tank or on a scale was a loss the water needed decades to replace, and why the blue catfish and flathead catfish pages both end with release advice for big fish. The catfish hub holds the rest of the family.