Trout: The Types of Trout and How to Tell Them Apart

Rainbow trout painted by Duane Raver: olive back, a pink band along the silver side, small black spots across the body, dorsal fin and tail — Illustration: Duane Raver, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain)

Trout is a common name for about a dozen fish that anglers chase in cold, clean water, and two of the most famous, the brook trout and the lake trout, are not trout at all but chars. The rest split into the Pacific trout (rainbow, steelhead, cutthroat, golden, Apache, Gila) and the brown trout from Europe. Learn one rule about spots, one about spawning seasons and one about water temperature, and you can name the fish in your net, know when it is catchable, and know when to leave it alone.

A rainbow trout is closer kin to a Chinook salmon than to a brook trout. The “trout” everyone learns first is two different branches of the salmon family.

Start here

Trout fishing: the season, the water and the tackle, for stocked and wild fish.
Rainbow trout: the most stocked trout on the continent and the one most anglers catch first.
Brown trout: the European import of 1883 that grows biggest in American rivers.
Brook trout: the native char of the East, and why its spots are pale.
Trout water temperature: the 68 °F line and what to do when a river reaches it.

Types of trout: the mark that settles each

Spots are the first sort. Dark spots on a light body means a true trout; light spots on a dark body means a char. After that, one mark per fish does the work.

Fish	Group	The mark that settles it	Native to
Rainbow trout	Trout	Pink band down the side, black spots over the whole tail	Pacific slope, Alaska to Mexico
Steelhead	Trout	A rainbow back from the sea: chrome, larger, band faint	Same species as the rainbow
Cutthroat trout	Trout	Red-orange slash under each side of the lower jaw	Western North America
Brown trout	Trout	Black and red spots with pale halos, tail nearly unspotted	Europe; stocked from 1883
Golden trout	Trout	Golden sides, red band, about ten parr marks kept for life	Kern Plateau, California
Apache trout	Trout	Yellow-gold, even dark spots, Arizona’s state fish	White Mountains, Arizona
Gila trout	Trout	Gold sides shading to copper, fine spots on the back	Gila drainage, NM and AZ
Brook trout	Char	Wormlike pale marks on the back, red spots in blue halos, white-edged lower fins	Eastern North America
Lake trout	Char	Deeply forked tail, pale spots on gray-green, no red	Canada, Great Lakes, Northeast
Tiger trout	Hybrid	Marbled all over, no spots at all	Hatchery: brown × brook
Splake	Hybrid	Brook trout colors on a lake trout shape, slight fork	Hatchery: lake × brook

Two name traps catch almost everyone. The golden trout of California is a wild native, while the bright yellow “palomino” or golden rainbow in stocked water is a color strain bred in a West Virginia hatchery in the 1950s. And the “speckled trout” of the Gulf Coast is a seatrout, a saltwater drum, not a trout.

Spring spawners and fall spawners

The seasons follow one split. Rainbow and cutthroat trout spawn in late winter and spring, rainbows starting as the water climbs into the upper 40s °F. Brown, brook and lake trout spawn in fall: browns from October to December at about 42–48 °F, brook trout in September to November, lake trout in October and November on rubble shoals in the lake itself rather than in streams. Each species is shallow, aggressive and easiest to find in the weeks around its spawn, and easiest to harm then too: wading through gravel beds crushes eggs, so step around the clean, fanned patches in a riffle.

Temperature decides the day

Wild trout feed best in water of about 50–65 °F (10–18 °C). Stress starts around 68 °F (20 °C) for rainbows and browns and a few degrees lower for brook trout, and Keep Fish Wet’s review of the release studies puts the safe line for catch and release lower still, at 61 °F (16 °C); lake trout go deep in summer, below 50 ft and some past 200 ft, to stay near 50 °F. Browns tolerate the warmest water of the three stream trout, which is part of why they took over rivers that brook trout lost. A stream thermometer is the most useful piece of trout tackle, and the water temperature chart gives the numbers species by species.

Stocked and wild

Most trout that anglers catch were raised in a hatchery. Pennsylvania’s 2026 program alone put about 3.2 million adult trout into 684 streams and 130 lakes, three quarters of them rainbows, at an average of 11 in and 0.58 lb. Stocked trout grew up on pellets, which is why they take dough baits and bright spinners in the first weeks after a truck visit. Wild trout, born in the stream, are warier and far more selective about what drifts past them.

Records

The all-tackle records, from the IGFA list: rainbow 48 lb from Lake Diefenbaker, Saskatchewan, in 2009, a sterile fish from an escaped net pen; brown 44 lb 5 oz from New Zealand’s Ohau Canal in 2020; lake trout 72 lb from Great Bear Lake in 1995; cutthroat 41 lb from Pyramid Lake, Nevada, in 1925; and the brook trout’s 14 lb 8 oz from Ontario’s Nipigon River in 1915, the oldest of them all.

Where to go next

Every species has its own page under this one, along with the pages on trout lures, trout bait, trout flies and how to hold a trout so it swims away. For the tackle, the line and hooks hubs cover the light setups trout ask for.