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Assessment of the risk to aquatic organisms is an important aspect of pesticide registration. This assessment must be based on well-defined exposure assessment goals (EAGs). However, these goals have not yet been defined for the EU authorization procedure. The definition of an aquatic EAG has seven elements, including: type of water body, spatial dimension of this body, spatial population of water bodies, multi-year temporal population of concentrations for a single water body, and the space-time percentile combination to be selected from the spatio-temporal population of concentrations. The seven elements are split into 16 items, three which are within the risk-management domain. The remaining 13 scientific items should preferably be based on consistency with landscape-level approaches. Subdivision of the spatial population of water bodies on the occurrence of exposure routes should be avoided (although this is current practice). The multi-year temporal population of concentrations should be based on all years in rotational crops (including years without applications). Risk managers should be offered a suite of coherent packages of EAGs and effect assessment goals from which they can select the package corresponding to the desired overall level of protection. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry., (© 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.)