Bony fishes live in various marine habitats that can be broadly classified as demersal (contacting the bottom occasionally but also venturing into open water), pelagic (swimming continuously in open water), and benthic (touching the bottom most of the time, interacting with different substrates). Due to these differences, swimming and likely vertebral morphology differ between the habitat parameters. A large contributor to body mechanics is the vertebral column, consisting of hourglass shaped vertebrae with a canal through the middle called the notochordal foramen. Internal morphological features of the vertebrae may contribute to overall body mechanics, but they have rarely been studied. We hypothesize that pelagic fish should be stiffer than others due to their more constant open water swimming, and smaller foramina would be more advantageous for this. Thus, we measured the diameters and angles of each vertebral cone, the notochordal foramen diameters, and the centrum lengths for 82 actinopterygian fish species found in various habitats using micro-computed tomography scans from oVert downloaded from Morphosource and OSF databases. These measurements were taken along the length of the body at equidistant points, standardized by the body length of each respective species. To test whether vertebral morphology differed for species in different habitats, controlling for phylogeny, we ran phylogenetic generalized least squares tests. We found that the notochordal foramen diameter and posterior cone angle of the pelagic habitat species were significantly smaller than those in benthic or demersal habitats. This pattern of pelagic fishes having smaller foramen diameters and posterior cone angles may contribute to a stiffer vertebral column that supports their lifestyle of swimming in open water.