The Best Trout Lures

The best trout lure is a 1/16 ounce Wordens Original Rooster Tail — for anyone fishing creeks, small rivers or stocked ponds with an ultralight spinning rod, which is most trout anglers in America. If you fish lakes or big open water instead, the 1/4 ounce Acme Kastmaster is the better first buy, because distance and sink rate matter more there than finesse.

That is the short answer. The longer one is that trout lures are not really ranked against each other — they are ranked against conditions. A spinner that is unbeatable in a knee-deep creek is uncastable on a windy reservoir, and the spoon that solves the reservoir is far too heavy for the creek. This page is organized around that, so you can match the lure to your water rather than to a review score.

How we picked these

We selected for coverage first: six lures that between them handle every trout water type and every mood a trout has, rather than six versions of the same thing. For each category we then chose the pattern with the longest commercial track record in that niche, the weight range that suits small-to-medium water, and a price that lets you lose it in a tree without caring.

We do not run controlled fishing tests, and nobody honestly can — catch rates depend on water, weather and the angler far more than on the lure. What we can judge is published specification, weight and size options, hook configuration, how each type behaves mechanically in current and still water, and how each one is actually fished. Our method is on the how we research and pick page, and every price here is read live and dated rather than written into the text.

What lures to use for trout, by water

This is the question behind almost every trout-lure search, and it has a short answer per water type:

One honest simplification: if you only ever fish one of these waters, you only need one or two lures from this page, and the rest is curiosity. The anglers who need all six are the ones who travel between creek, river and lake in the same season.

Size is the decision that matters

Nearly every beginner buys trout lures that are too big, and it costs them more fish than any other single mistake. Walk into a store and the eye-catching lures are 1/4 and 3/8 ounce, because those are the sizes that sell for bass. Stream trout eat insects and minnows an inch long. A 1/16 ounce spinner looks absurdly small in the hand and is exactly right in the water.

There is a mechanical reason the size question is really a rod question. A 1/16 ounce lure will not load a medium-power rod, so it cannot be cast more than a few feet — which is why people conclude small lures “do not work” and go back to the big ones. Fix the rod and the problem disappears. The ultralight rod roundup covers the blanks rated for this, and the combo page covers buying the rod and reel matched in one box.

Trout lures for a spinning rod: the setup

Every lure on this page is a spinning-rod lure, and three details in the setup matter more than which one you tie on.

Line: 4 lb monofilament. Light enough to cast a tiny lure, stretchy enough to forgive a hard strike on a short line, and cheap. Braid is thinner and more sensitive but has no stretch, which costs you hooked fish at close range on an ultralight rod.

Reel: a 1000-size spinning reel. A 2500 is the default on the shelf and it is too heavy for an ultralight blank; the combination casts badly and feels dead. Our ultralight reel guide covers the sizing in detail.

A snap, not a knot, on spinners. Inline spinners twist line. A small snap swivel at the lure costs a fraction of the flash and saves you re-rigging twice a day. Tie direct to spoons and minnow plugs, which do not twist.

Trout lures and bait: where the line is

Two of our picks blur the line deliberately. The PowerBait trout worm and the Trout Magnet grub are soft plastics — lures by construction — but they are scented and fished slowly, which is bait behavior. That matters for two reasons.

First, it is why they work when nothing else does. A trout in 38-degree water will not chase a spinner twenty feet, but it will eat a scented grub drifting past its nose. Second, it is a regulations question: some special-regulation waters are lure-only or fly-only, and scented soft plastics are classed as bait on several of them.The rules vary by state and by individual stretch of river, so check your state wildlife agency's regulations for the specific water before you fish it. We do not publish regulation summaries here because they change and getting them wrong costs you a fine.

If you want the pure bait side of this — dough baits, salmon eggs and nightcrawlers — that is a separate page: the best trout bait.

How to fish each type

Inline spinner, in current: cast upstream at roughly 45 degrees and retrieve just fast enough to feel the blade turning. The lure should swing across and below you, not straight back at you. In still water, cast out and count down a few seconds before starting a slow, steady retrieve.

Casting spoon: cast long, let it sink, then lift-and-drop the rod tip through the retrieve. Most takes come as the spoon flutters down, so the pause is the presentation and the retrieve is just moving between pauses.

Sinking minnow plug: count it down to a known depth and retrieve slowly with occasional twitches. Keep a note of the count that produced the take — repeating the depth is the entire point of this lure.

Soft plastics and micro jigs: as slowly as you can bear. Under a small float in still water, or dead-drifted with a split shot in a slow pool. If it feels too slow, slow down again.

What to tie on through the season

Trout-lure demand peaks in April for a reason: water warms, fish start chasing, and spring stocking puts naive trout everywhere. That is the inline spinner's best month of the year and the easiest time to learn on.

Early spring, cold and high: a 1/8 ounce spinner or the countdown minnow, fished deep and slow. Late spring into summer: 1/16 ounce spinners, everywhere, all day. High summer, low clear water: go smaller and fish at dawn and dusk — micro jigs and the smallest spinner you can cast. Autumn: brown trout get aggressive before spawning, so the minnow plug earns its place. Winter: scented soft plastics and patience.

For moving water specifically, our trout lures for rivers and creeks page goes deeper on reading current and fishing pocket water. For still water, see trout lures for lakes and ponds. And if you would rather fish flies than lures, the comparison is laid out in fly fishing vs spinning.

Two pages for buyers rather than anglers: trout fishing gifts covers these lures as gifts in the sizes that actually suit trout, and what gear to use for trout fishing sets out the rod, reel and line sizes to put behind them.

If you also fish a fly rod on the same water, the fly equivalent of this list for the most widely stocked trout in the country is in the best flies for rainbow trout — including the egg and worm patterns that work on stocked fish for exactly the reasons a PowerBait nugget does.

Fishing specifically for rainbows? The best lures for rainbow trout narrows this list to the sizes and blade finishes that work on stocked and wild rainbows, and the trout spinner roundup goes deeper on the one lure category that out-fishes everything on a creek.