Ask a Chesapeake waterman, a Carolina crabber and a Louisiana crabber to draw a crab pot and you'll get three different drawings. Some of that is tradition. Most of it is regulation. Every state writes rules about trap size, funnel size, ring count and placement, and those rules shape the pot more than any builder's preference does. Here is how the regions differ and why.
Chesapeake (Maryland, Virginia)
The classic: a 24" cube of vinyl-coated hex wire, two chambers divided by an inverted-V "stairs," four funnels low, a wire bait box in the middle, a hinged harvest door on top held by two hooks and rubber bands. Built for a tidal bay with mud and grass bottom and a fleet that pulls daily.
What the rules do to it: Maryland wants a 2-3/16" and a 2-5/16" ring in side or top panels; Virginia's Bay side wants two 2-3/8" rings in opposite side panels of the upper chamber. That's why a Maryland pot and a Virginia pot look identical and are not interchangeable. Recreational Maryland pots also carry a TRD in each funnel. Peeler pots, built of fine mesh to hold shedding crabs, are exempt from ring rules in both states.
Delaware Bay and New Jersey
Same Chesapeake-style cube, sometimes a little larger; New Jersey caps it at 30" a side with oval funnels no bigger than 7" x 4". Neither state requires cull rings. Instead they attack the derelict-pot problem from the other end: New Jersey requires a biodegradable panel on every non-collapsible pot and terrapin excluders in narrow water, and Delaware requires excluders on recreational pots. A Jersey pot has a door or side panel lashed with jute or light untreated wire that rots out in a season.
Carolinas and Georgia
Chesapeake-derived, usually with a full divider. North Carolina's rule shapes the upper chamber: three 2-5/16" rings, two on opposite panels and one tucked within a mesh of the divider corner, which is where undersized crabs pile up trying to get out. South Carolina's 2025 law and Georgia both want 2-3/8" rings on vertical walls, South Carolina's within 2" of the partition or floor. Georgia recreational traps get a lime-green float; you can tell a rec pot from a commercial one at a hundred yards.
Florida
Capped at 2' x 2' x 2', so the Chesapeake cube fits exactly. Three 2-3/8" rings, one adjacent to each chamber on a vertical outer surface, plus a degradable panel over 3" x 6" in jute, light wire, or untreated pine. Recreational traps got 2" x 6" bycatch reduction throats in 2023. Florida also rotates ten-day regional trap closures for derelict cleanup, so a Florida pot has to come out of the water on schedule whether it's fishing or not.
Gulf: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana
Alabama allows a bigger box, up to 27 cubic feet, and is the only Gulf state on the 2-5/16" ring, two per pot, one per chamber. Mississippi wants two 2-3/8" rings, one per chamber, on the vertical outside walls. Louisiana has the most detailed placement rule on the coast: three 2-3/8" rings, two in the upper chamber flush with the baffle, one in the lower within a mesh of the floor, and since 2022 every ring within a mesh of a corner. Louisiana pots are built around those ring positions. Both Mississippi and Louisiana let you block the rings during defined peeler seasons; Alabama requires a permit to do it.
Gulf pots also lean toward a plastic bait box with a snap lid, and Louisiana traps are often fished on trotlines of pots rather than individually buoyed, which the rules specifically address.
Texas
Smaller: 18 cubic feet maximum, with two 2-3/8" vents in every crab-retaining chamber, so a two-chamber Texas pot carries four vents. Degradable panel required, striped white 6" cube buoy required, and a ten-day February closure every year when every trap comes out of the water.
New York
Few commercial pots, and they need a 6" x 4" oval or rectangular escape vent rather than rings. Terrapin excluders in creeks and harbors. Most New York crabbing is handlines and collapsible traps, and a 4-1/2" crab.
Recreational gear, everywhere
Beyond the wire pot: collapsible traps (Maryland caps them at 20" x 15" and bans spring-loaded ones), ring nets, star or pyramid traps, trotlines with chicken necks or bull lips, and the handline and dip net, which need no license almost anywhere. Recreational pots in most states are the same commercial-style cube, with the extras the state adds: TRDs in Maryland and Delaware, BRDs in Florida, excluders in New York and New Jersey.
What it means if you build or buy pots
The wire, funnels and door are the same from Texas to the Chesapeake. What changes is the ring size and where it goes, the excluder, and the degradable panel. Those three things decide whether a pot is legal in the water it's fishing. We mold the 2-5/16" ring, the door hook, and soon a Maryland TRD. We don't make everything a pot needs and won't pretend to. The parts guide covers the rest, and the state table tells you which ring goes where.