Three years of rod licence growth has angling feeling pleased with itself. The numbers are real, but they’re also flattered by free licences, holidaymakers, and a 22.7% price rise, while the main paid adult licence is in decline. We’re not recovering, we’re inflating a bubble.
The Environment Agency’s licence numbers are up for the third year in a row. The Angling Times reported it on the 1st of May. 973,859 licences sold across England and Wales. Junior numbers nearly doubled in three years. Income at £25.1 million. Industry voices, suitably briefed, queued up to call it positive news.
I’m not going to call it positive news. Not because the people who said it are wrong, but because they’re looking at the wrong numbers.
I’ve spent the last week going through the EA’s full 2025/26 sales report, line by line. The headline is true. The story underneath is more uncomfortable, and that’s the story I want to tell here.
What the Headline Number Actually Contains
Open up the full 2025/26 sales report, and the headline figure separates into a set of categories that aren’t equivalent in any normal sense. Treating them as if they were is where the trouble starts.
Take free junior licences. They’ve been free since 2017, which is possibly the right thing to do. The thirteen-year-old who wants to fish shouldn’t be priced off the bank. But every free junior licence issued goes into the headline number, and the EA issued 121,357 of them in 2025/26 across two-rod and three-rod, up from 97,051 the year before. A one-year jump of 25%. The three-rod junior category alone went up 44%. The disabled junior three-rod category went up 136%. These aren’t normal sales-growth numbers. They’re the numbers you get when a government body removes all friction from a transaction and then counts every transaction as growth.
A thirteen-year-old who got signed up at a Get Fishing event in May and hasn’t picked up a rod since still appears in the EA’s totals as a rod licence holder, looking the same on paper as a fourteen-year-old who fishes three times a week. Free junior licences make up 12% of the headline number on their own. The policy is right. Counting them in the same number as paid adult permits is not.
Then take short-term licences. One-day and eight-day permits. 207,071 of them in 2025/26, up 3% on the year. These are mostly holidaymakers, lapsed anglers buying a one-off licence for a week in the sun, or first-timers being taken out by a mate at a holiday park. They make no ongoing contribution to the sport, and disappear from the data the next year. Putting them in the same headline figure as a paying twelve-month committed angler is a disingenuous flattery that accounts for another 21%.
Senior over-66 categories were up low single digits, mostly demographic ageing of the existing angler base, not recruitment. Disabled licences up 11% to 15%, mostly expanded uptake of an entitlement that’s been in place for years but is now highlighted more. Both are welcome, but there is no evidence of new anglers entering the sport.
Which leaves the one number in the entire report that comes closest to measuring the committed paying angler population: the twelve-month full-price two-rod coarse and trout licence. The single largest revenue category. The flagship paid adult licence. It fell in 2025/26 by 1,218 licences, or 0.36%. The single most valuable category of licence the EA sells declined while the headline number celebrated success.
The Income Illusion
The £25.1 million income figure has been reported as further proof of recovery. It isn’t.
In late 2022, the EA proposed, and DEFRA approved, a phased three-year price rise on every paid licence category. The two-rod coarse licence went from £30 to £33 in April 2023, then
£35.80 in April 2024, then £36.80 in April 2025. A 22.7% rise. The three-rod licence rose almost the same. Salmon and short-term licences rose proportionally. Junior remained free.
Total income from rod licences over the same three years rose from £20.9 million to £25.1 million. A 20.3% rise. Total licence count rose by 7.8%.
The income story is a story about price rises, not about more anglers paying for licences. If the price had stayed at 2022/23 levels and we sold the same number of paid licences we sold in 2025/26, total income would actually be slightly lower than it was three years ago. The price rise was needed,d and the EA was upfront about it; that’s not the issue. The issue is that every time the headline says “income up another £1 million” without naming the price rise, the reader is being coerced into believing a recovery is underway when what’s actually underway is the price going up on a slightly shrinking customer base.
The Headcount Question
The EA also tracks unique anglers, deduplicating across categories. In 2025/26, there were 866,789 unique anglers, up 34,340 (4.1%) on 2024/25. That’s a real headcount of human beings, and it’s the one statistic in the whole report worth taking at face value.
But of those 34,340 net new unique anglers, 24,306 are the increase in free juniors. Strip those out,t and the year-on-year increase in unique paying or paid-for anglers across England and Wales is around 10,000. A good chunk of that 10,000 will be the new short-term licence buyers, the holidaymakers, who probably won’t be back next year. Net new committed adult anglers entering the sport in 2025/26, being generous, is in the low thousands. The year before, being generous, it was even lower!
A sport with a million paying customers, growing the committed adult base by maybe 5,000 to 10,000 a year while the same group ages out at many times that rate, is a sport in slow decline dressed up as recovery. That’s the bubble. The day this stops looking like growth, the gap will appear all at once.
Why We Keep Telling Ourselves This Story
We need to stop kidding ourselves.
Comfortable fictions are easy. The data above is uncomfortable, le and what it implies is harder. If the headline number is accepted as real growth, the sport doesn’t have to do anything different. The clubs don’t have to modernise. The participation strategy doesn’t have to change. The trade doesn’t have to ask harder questions. Everyone gets to carry on doing what they were already doing, because the numbers say it’s working.
Comfortable fictions aren’t lies. They’re choices about which true things go in the press release and which true things stay in the spreadsheet. They keep getting chosen because the alternative is being honest about how much work the sport actually has to do, and honesty is expensive. Telling yourself the numbers are good is free.
If we want angling to still be here in 2040, we have to stop choosing the free option.
The Seventeen-Year-Old Delusion
The entire participation infrastructure (Reel Education, Get Fishing, Take a Friend Fishing, the doubled coaching pipeline) is built on one theory: get enough children to try fishing for the first time, and enough of them will stay anglers into adulthood to halt the decline in adult licence numbers.
That theory was always going to fail. Not because the programmes are badly run. They aren’t. Because of what happens to a person between 16 and 25.
You leave school. You start a job, an apprenticeship, a college course, or a university degree. You move out of your parents’ house. You meet someone. You pay rent. You pay bills. You commute. You break up with someone. You change jobs. You buy a car. Maybe you have children of your own. You discover there aren’t enough hours in the week to do all the things you said you would when you were fifteen.
Almost nobody between 16 and 25 has the spare time, the disposable income or the headspace for a hobby that needs four hours on a riverbank on a Sunday morning. This isn’t a failure of angling. It’s the universal issue of being a young adult in 2026. Football clubs lose their juniors at this age. So do cycling clubs, rugby clubs, rand owing clubs.
Andrew Race, Chair of the Angling Trades Association, told the Angling Times that “people in their late teens go to college or university… at that age, life gets in the way of fishing. This has always been the case.” He’s right. Yet our entire current strategy for halting the decline of paid adult licences depends on a high conversion rate from sixteen-year-olds who don’t pay to seventeen-year-olds who do. That conversion is never going to be high. The system is built around an assumption that the people who built it must know is wrong.
Where Lifelong Anglers Actually Come From
The counter-argument is that juniors come back to the sport later in life when their lives have settled down. It’s the get-out clause angling tells itself when the conversion rate gets uncomfortable, and unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up.
It doesn’t hold up because the number of juniors who’ve ever fished is tiny compared to the adult population they’d be returning to. The total number of children through Reel Education in its three years is in the low tens of thousands. The UK adult population is fifty million. Even if every child who ever attended a Get Fishing event came back to the sport at thirty, the addressable adult angling pool from that route would be a rounding up away from being nothing.
If we want to grow adult angling participation, we have to grow it from the adult population that hasn’t fished. Not lapsed anglers. Not former juniors. New adults. People in their thirties, forties and fifties who, given a clear, friction-free, modern entry point, would discover that they enjoy it. They aren’t lapsed anglers, they’re anglers we never had. And they’re the only group large enough to actually move the needle on a sport with a million license holders set against an adult population of fifty million.
You won’t reach them by visiting more primary schools, and you won’t reach them with a Take a Friend Fishing day licence aimed at people who already have a friend who fishes. You’ll reach them, if you reach them at all, by treating them as a serious commercial audience. The same way the cycling, running and wild swimming industries have spent the last decade reaching new adult participants who never did the activity as children. We’re not doing that. We’re assuming adults will somehow find their own way to the sport. And then, the moment they try, they hit the wall.
The wall they hit
This is the bit nobody in the sport’s willing to say out loud, so I will, because I’ve spent the last three years managing software that exists specifically because of it and tackling it at my own club for a period into decades.
Many angling clubs and fisheries in this country are, in 2026, embarrassingly dated in the way they handle adult joining and renewal. Anyone who’s tried to join a club or buy a day ticket recently, as a curious adult with no idea how the sport works on the inside, knows what I’m talking about.
You find the club’s website. It looks like it was last updated in 2014. The membership form is a downloadable form. To complete the form, you have to print it, fill it in by hand, attach a cheque, and post it to a man called Dave, who is the membership secretary, who lives at an address given as “Dave’s house, near the post office in [insert village here].”
You then wait for Brian to acknowledge receipt of your application, which may take two weeks because Brian is also the treasurer and the head bailiff and is currently on holiday in Cromer.
Or you find a fishery’s website and the day ticket process consists of “ring this number on the day, leave a voicemail, the bailiff will call back when he gets a minute.” You’re 38. You’ve got a meeting at 10 a.m You wanted to know right now whether you can fish on Saturday. You give up. You take the kids to soft play instead.
Modern adults don’t do paper and postage and application forms. They certainly don’t do them for something as trivial, in the grand scheme of their week, as a fishing trip. They expect to find a website, see prices, click a button, get a confirmation, turn up and fish. That’s the standard set by every other thing they book and everything they buy. Anything that doesn’t meet that standard, they walk away from. A round of golf is bookable from an app. The wild swimming group has a booking process. Fishing wants them to post a letter to Dave.
Clubs and fisheries up and down the country are turning curious adults away every weekend, in numbers nobody’s counting, and nobody’s writing about. The people inside the sport are largely the people who were inside the sport in 1997, and to them, the existing systems work fine, because the systems were built for and by people exactly like them.
Angling is eating itself through stubbornness. We’re living in the past, and we’re letting the present pass us by.
What an honest version would look like
If we wanted to grow this sport, actually grow it in a way that translates to paid adult licences five years from now, the path forward isn’t complicated. It’s just unfashionable for most of the people who would have to act on it.
Start by separating the numbers. The headline rod licence figure shouldn’t bundle free junior licences in with paying adult permits. Two figures, reported separately. Both useful, neither misleading.
Then redirect the participation effort. A significant chunk of the funding currently spent on getting children to try fishing should be redirected to getting adults to try fishing. Adults in their thirties, forties and fifties, with the disposable income to pay for licences, memberships and tackle, reached through the channels they actually use today. Reel Education is the wrong shape for the right age group. We need its equivalent for the right age group, and we needed it five years ago.
Then there’s the bit that falls to clubs, not government. Every angling club and fishery in this country needs to be, by the end of the next two years, no harder to join or book than a five-a-side football pitch or a yoga class. A website that works on a phone, and online membership applications that can be completed in three minutes. Day tickets are purchased through an app, with a QR code that the bailiff can scan. The membership secretary’s job becomes administering an online system, not chasing cheques. None of this is complicated. The technology has existed for fifteen years. The platforms exist. I run one, and there are others. I’m not going to use this article as a sales pitch, but it’d be dishonest not to say that this is exactly the problem we built Clubmate to solve, because nobody else was going to.
And finally, the hardest one, because it concerns people I respect. The volunteers running clubs in 2026 are mostly the same people who kept those clubs alive through the slow decline of the last fifteen years. A lot of them are seventy years old. They’re owed our thanks for keeping the sport running. They aren’t going to be the people who modernise the front door of the sport, because to them, the front door doesn’t look broken. The next generation of club committee members has to be empowered, supported, and,d where necessary,ry overruled, into making the changes that the next decade depends on.
The Honest Position
Three years of growth driven by free licences for under-17s, short-term holidaymaker permits, and a 22.7% price rise, with the flagship paid adult category in decline and no published data on conversion to lifetime anglers, isn’t a recovery. It’s the careful production of a press-friendly number while the real problems of the sport go almost entirely unanswered. We’re aiming the participation strategy at the wrong age group, ignoring the only demographic large enough to halt the long decline, and locking that demographic out of clubs and fisheries even when, against the odds, they show up at the front door to give it a try. If I had never fished and was going to start today, I’d take one look at the accessibility and walk away.
None of this is the fault of any individual at the EA, the Angling Trust or the Angling Trades Association. They’re doing the best they can with the contracts and assumptions they’ve inherited. But the contracts and assumptions are fifteen years out of date. The world in which the sport competes for adult leisure time has moved on. Angling hasn’t.
I get accused of being negative quite often. I’d like to think the mindset is more about being real. I’d rather tear down a failing structure and rebuild it successfully than keep adding stories to a building that’s already wobbling in the breeze. Wouldn’t you?
It’s time to wake up. If we don’t stop kidding ourselves and start operating like other successful sports do, we’re going to keep telling ourselves bedtime stories until angling disappears in front of our eyes.
Rob Harris is Chairman of Peterborough & District Angling Association and General Manager of Clubmate, the UK fishery and club management software platform. He has been involved in club angling for over thirty years.