Are Burmese Pythons Legal? The Federal Ban a Court Narrowed

Are Burmese Pythons Legal? The Federal Ban a Court Narrowed

Ask about a Burmese python and almost everyone reaches for the same answer: it is banned, federally, because of the Everglades. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the half that matters to an owner.

What the 2012 Listing Did

On 23 January 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a final rule listing four large constrictors as injurious wildlife under the Lacey Act: the Burmese and Indian python, the Northern African python, the Southern African python, and the yellow anaconda. The petition behind it came from the South Florida Water Management District in 2006, worried about the population in Everglades National Park.

The Lacey Act's injurious wildlife provision, 18 U.S.C. § 42, does two things: it prohibits importation into the United States, and it contains a shipment clause. It has never prohibited ownership. Somebody who already had a Burmese python in 2012 could keep it, breed it and sell it inside their own state, and that never changed.

What the 2017 Ruling Took Away

The shipment clause was read for years as barring interstate transport of a listed species. On 7 April 2017 the D.C. Circuit disagreed, in United States Association of Reptile Keepers v. Zinke.

FWS states the holding in its own implementation guidance: "18 U.S.C. § 42(a)(1) does not prohibit transport of injurious wildlife between States within the continental United States."

What survives is specific, and worth getting right:

• Import into the United States is still illegal without a permit.
• Shipment between the listed jurisdictions is still prohibited. That means transport between the continental US, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and US possessions. Hawaii to California is still barred. Guam to the US Virgin Islands is still barred.
• Interstate movement among the 49 continental states is no longer statutorily prohibited, unless a specimen is subject to conditions from a permit issued earlier.

So the federal picture today is: you cannot bring one into the country, you can move one from Texas to Oklahoma, and nothing federal says anything about whether you may keep it.

That is why the state map matters, and why thirty jurisdictions on it still have no rule of their own.

Where Burmese Pythons Actually Stand

Two States Ban It Without Naming It

Alabama and Wyoming are the most efficient entries on this map, and they are worth knowing because they change with federal law rather than with a state rulemaking.

Alabama's rule bars possession of "any species of bird, mammal, fish, crustacea, mollusk, reptile, or amphibian listed as injurious wildlife under the Lacey Act (18 U.S.C. 42) from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service." Wyoming's cold-blooded wildlife chapter says an importation or possession permit "shall not be issued" for "injurious wildlife listed in 50 CFR § 16."

Neither state has ever had a Burmese python debate. The federal listing did the work in 2012, and the reticulated python and green anaconda arrive in both states by exactly the same route. If FWS adds a species tomorrow, Alabama and Wyoming ban it tomorrow.

Ohio Measures the Animal

Ohio is the only state on this map that answers by length rather than by species, and it produces a genuinely odd result.

Ohio defines a "restricted snake" as any of a list of constrictors "that are twelve feet or longer," and the Burmese python is on that list. So a hatchling is unregulated. The same snake, three or four years later, is a restricted snake, and the keeper needs a restricted snake permit, liability insurance and caging that meets the rules.

A healthy Burmese python passes twelve feet routinely. Ohio's rule is therefore not an exemption for small animals, it is a deadline, and the sensible reading for anyone in Ohio is to treat it as a permit requirement with a delayed start date.

Missouri does something similar at a lower threshold and with a lighter consequence: a dangerous reptile over eight feet must be registered with the county law enforcement agency. No state permit, no fee, just the registration, and failure to register is the offense rather than possession.

Florida Is the Strictest, and the Most Personal

Florida is where this animal's reputation comes from, and its rule is written accordingly.

The Burmese python is a prohibited non-native species. The grandfathering, at 68-5.007, is narrower than most on this site: only a person in lawful possession before the species was listed may hold one, for that animal's life, under a Conditional/Prohibited/Nonnative Species permit, with the animal PIT-tagged and no further specimens acquired.

That is a closing window by design. The permit does not transfer, it does not renew into new animals, and when the snake dies the permit has nothing to attach to.

Louisiana's January 2025 rewrite took the same approach with a shorter fuse: registration within 365 days of the rule taking effect, no breeding, no further acquisition.

What This Adds Up To

Thirty jurisdictions have no state rule reaching the Burmese python. Ten ban it. Eight require a permit. Three attach a condition, one of which is a tape measure. One is unresolved.

The gap between what people believe and what the law says is the widest on this site. A federal injurious wildlife listing sounds like a ban and is not one: it never touched ownership, and since 2017 it does not touch movement between continental states either. Meanwhile the states that do ban this animal mostly did it themselves, and two of them did it by pointing at the federal list rather than by writing their own.

None of which is a recommendation. A Burmese python is a large constrictor with a serious husbandry and safety profile, and legality is the easiest of the questions it raises.

The boa constrictor legal guide covers the species FWS considered in the same rulemaking and explicitly declined to list, and the ball python legal guide covers the python that is legal nearly everywhere. The tiger salamander legal guide walks through a more recent injurious wildlife listing and what it does and does not do, and the exotic pet legal hub explains how state rule structures differ.

To see this at a glance, our interactive map of Burmese python laws shades every state and clicking one gives you the rule it comes from.

Sources & Further Reading