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How Minnesota Defines a Lake
Asked: How does Minnesota define a lake for official counts? Quote the legal or agency definition
The 10-acre rule behind the official count
10 acres
Minnesota's official lake size cutoff
Bodies of water 10 acres or larger count as lakes in the state's official tally [1][4]
Compare by size cutoff
Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources counts a body of water as a lake only if it is more than 10 acres in surface area [3]. The same 10-acre threshold appears in reporting on the state's official count: Minnesota defines a lake as a body of water with an area of at least 10 acres [4].
Good to know
10+ acres [1]
Minnesota cutoff
No minimum
Wisconsin cutoff
11,842 [1]
Minnesota lakes
Wisconsin lists 15,074 lakes because it counts everything, down to half-acre farm ponds [3]. Applying Minnesota's 10-acre standard to Wisconsin drops it to 5,898 [3].
There is no official definition of a lake: the National Hydrography Dataset uses 54 overlapping terms, and a limnologist calls the lake-versus-pond line arbitrary [3].