How long doFresh clamslast in the fridge?
Why the freezer is not an option here
The USDA marks the freezer as not recommended for this item, so the whole answer is a single field: 5 days to 10 days in the refrigerator from the day of purchase. It is not a warning: food held at 0 °F stays safe, so a not-recommended is a verdict on what would come out of the freezer.
Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item
The refrigerator is the only place the USDA gives this item a storage time, as it does for 64 of the 466 foods the USDA lists. Within Seafood it is filed under Shellfish.
- In the freezernot recommended
- Unopened · in the fridge5 days to 10 days
Turning the range into a date
One row, one deadline: 10 days in the refrigerator from the day of purchase, counted from the day it went in rather than the day it was made.
- Unopened · in the fridgeUse by5 days to 10 days after the day you bought it
Is this window about safety or about taste?
The answer at the top of this page reads 5 days to 10 days in the fridge. What decides that is the food and not the shelf the source files it on: Fresh clams, mussels, oysters is an animal food, or made with one. Past it, throw it out rather than taste it: a perishable food can carry enough bacteria to make you ill while it still looks and smells fine.
Every figure assumes the food was sound when you stored it, that your refrigerator holds 40 °F or below and your freezer 0 °F or below, and that the package was handled normally.
It is past the date. Now what?
Say the calculator above puts Fresh clams, mussels, oysters past its 5 days to 10 days in the fridge window, or the container sat out on the counter overnight. Throw the container out without tasting it, and count any hours it already spent out of the refrigerator as part of that window rather than on top of it.
The USDA's limit for perishable food standing at room temperature is 2 hours, or 1 hour when the kitchen is above 90 °F, and that clock runs whatever the storage figure says. The FoodKeeper entry this page is built from prints storage times and nothing else, so anything past them here is USDA and FSIS guidance rather than a figure from the source. The whole rule, including the cases the source does not cover, is set out under what to do when the date has passed.
Is that a long time?
2 items in the Seafood list keep exactly as long as this item, 10 days, so they all share place 3 of 17 rather than being put in an order the data does not support. Among the 340 foods the USDA also gives a refrigerator figure, it keeps longer than 48% of them.
Items that behave the same way
Every one of the 6 nearest items keeps the same or less, 3 days to 10 days against the 10 days of this item, which makes it the durable end of the cluster.
- Shucked clams, mussels, and oysterskeeps exactly as long
- Cooked fish, allkeeps 3 days in the fridge
- Crab legs, king, dungeness, snowkeeps 2 days sealed in the fridge
- Cooked shellfish, allkeeps 3 days in the fridge
- Fishkeeps 3 days in the fridgeraw but headed and gutted
- Shrimp, crayfishkeeps 1 day sealed in the fridge
Products the USDA rates in the same places
14 other products are rated in exactly these places — refrigerator from the day of purchase — out of the 466 in the file, so this is an uncommon shape of record. The nearest of them by keeping time are Bean sprouts, Rhubarb and Cream cheese. They are listed below with their own answers, closest first, which is why this list differs from the one on their pages. Of the 8 shown, 5 keep longer than this one. The longest-keeping of them is Cream cheese at 2 weeks.
- Bean sprouts5 days sealed in the fridge
- Rhubarb3 days sealed in the fridge
- Cream cheese2 weeks sealed in the fridge
- Dips2 weeks sealed in the fridge
- Commercial brand vacuum-packed dinners2 weeks sealed in the fridge
- Cucumbers4 days sealed in the fridge
- Lettuce1 week sealed in the fridgeiceberg, romaine
- Radishes10 days sealed in the fridge
The rest of the Shellfish shelf
Nothing else on the Shellfish shelf keeps longer outside the freezer than this one. The other 10 products there run down from Shucked clams at 10 days to Fresh whole lobster at 1 day, and the ones nearest this product by window are Shucked clams, Crab legs and Cooked shellfish. That makes this page the top of its own shelf rather than a middle entry. The order counts the longest window outside the freezer, so this item sits here at 10 days rather than at the 5 days sealed in the fridge its own answer prints.
- Shucked clams10 days3 days sealed in the fridge
- Crab legs4 days2 days sealed in the fridge
- Cooked shellfish4 days3 days in the fridge
- Scallops3 days1 day sealed in the fridge
- Shrimp, crayfish3 days1 day sealed in the fridge
- Squid3 days1 day sealed in the fridge
- Crab meat3 days1 day in the fridge
- Fresh lobster tails3 days2 days sealed in the fridge
If it has to keep longer than this
If it has to keep longer than 10 days, Seafood offers 2 products that hold at least twice as long outside the freezer. The nearest step up is Caviar at 4 weeks against this one's 10 days, and the rest are Herring. A short list like this one is itself the finding: the category has few longer options. In the other direction, 13 entries in the category keep half as long or less, Cooked fish and Crab legs among them. The largest step the category offers is Herring at 6 months.
- Caviar4 weeks2 days in the fridge once opened
- Herring6 months4 months sealed in the fridge
The record this page is built from
This page is built from a single FoodKeeper row, record 160 — the source’s own number for it, not a position — one of the 661 rows in the snapshot. That row fills 1 of the nine storage slots with a time, and the source prints its binding figure in days, so the window at the top of this page is the source's own number untouched. 1 slot is marked not recommended, which is an answer rather than a gap. It is filed under Shellfish inside Seafood, which is where every shelf comparison on this page comes from.
Where these numbers come from
Every range on this page is published by the USDA FoodKeeper and reproduced unchanged. The multipliers, the rankings, the percentages and the dates are ours, computed from those ranges. Where the source gives a span such as 3 to 5 weeks, comparisons use the upper figure, and the full span is always printed.
Rankings cover only the items the USDA gives a usable figure for, and identical ranges share a place rather than being ordered arbitrarily. Neighbors are chosen by nearest storage time within the same category, never alphabetically: two foods filed next to each other by name usually have nothing to do with each other. The freezer is excluded from ranking because it flattens almost everything.
Where the USDA lists several kinds under one name, they share one page here and every kind keeps its own windows: the source prints them as separate rows, and a page that merged them would be inventing a figure the source never published. Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for the kind the plain name means — the shell egg for eggs, the can for tuna — which is settled name by name rather than by the order the source lists its rows in, and the page names it. Where the plain name means no single kind, the page prints no single figure at all and lists the kinds instead.
Source: USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026. This site computes every comparison on this page and takes responsibility for it. Found a figure that does not match the source? Tell us on the contact page, with the page and the row — the parsing is mechanical, so a mismatch is our bug and we want it. How the whole site is built, which figures are ours and where the source can be checked is on the method page.
USDA index terms: clam, clams, Fresh clams, mussel, mussels, oyster, oysters
KeepsUntil is an independent reference built on public USDA data. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration. Whether a given window is a safety limit or a quality window is stated on the page that prints it.