Methodology

What the Numbers Are

Each percentage is last draw's result: using the quota, the applicants and their points that the agency published for one draw year, it is the chance an applicant at a given point level had of drawing the hunt as a first choice. It is not a prediction of next year's odds.

Two figures do look ahead, and both are labeled as projections: Years until a sure thing and Cost to draw on hunt pages and in the Hunt Finder. They assume the points needed keep rising at the pace of recent draws, and we only show them when a hunt has at least three draw years on file. The short trend beside the points needed on species pages ("+3 since 2022") compares the first and latest years on file and needs only two.

Data

• Every number comes from an agency's own draw report, fee schedule or regulations, never from another website. Each one is stored with the document's link, the date we retrieved it and the page it is on.
• A state's data goes live only when it all checks out. If any row shows more tags issued than the quota, fewer first-choice applicants than first-choice tags, point-level counts that don't add up to the agency's totals, or no source, nothing from that load is published.
• A blank cell means the agency did not publish that figure. It is never a zero.

Strategies by Draw System

• Preference points (Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Utah): everyone above the point level that drew out is a sure thing and everyone below it misses. At that last level, the chance is the tags it received divided by the applicants at that level, where the state publishes the breakdown; where it doesn't, we show the chance at the cut as unknown rather than guess. Agency tables can show a lower level doing better than a higher one (3 of 4 drawing at 4 points, 14 of 17 at 3) because party applications draw at their lowest member's points, some applicants withdraw or are ineligible, and Colorado's random pool hands a few licenses to applicants below the cut. So a level is never shown with worse odds than a level below it: it gets the best chance of any level at or below it, and the published chance at the cut itself is kept.
• Hybrid preference + random (California, Montana, Oregon, and Wyoming): the points share of the quota is handed out by points as above; the random share is drawn evenly from everyone who missed, so the random chance is random tags divided by the applicants left. This is exact arithmetic on the published numbers, not a simulation. A published band covers every whole point level inside it (Montana's ".2–1.8" row is the 1-point row; Wyoming's "<13" row is everyone from 0 to 12).
• Bonus points (Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington): each applicant gets (points + 1), (points + 1)², points² + 1, points³ + 1 (Texas) or North Dakota's stepped count of entries, per the state's rule; an optional top-points pass awards a share first. We run the draw 4,000 times on the published applicant pools, drawing names weighted by entries, and show the share of runs in which an applicant at each level drew, with a 95% range; very large pools use an exact formula that gives the same answer. Applicants an agency prints with a blank point level ("none" in Montana's 2006–2023 tables) are zero-point applicants and count in full. Without per-level pools we show the unweighted ratio and label it as such.
• Random (Alaska, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Wyoming): tags divided by applicants of the same residency. Where the agency prints how many first-choice applicants drew, we use that exact ratio, and the same for 2nd and 3rd choices.
• Nevada: one random-number order across all five choices (a 2nd-choice application with a lower number beats a 1st-choice one), so every application listing the hunt competes in one weighted pool with (points² + 1) entries.
• Montana: permits use (points² + 1) entries with residents and nonresidents drawn together under a 10% cap; the nonresident combination licenses are a preference draw whose 25% random share goes only to zero-point applicants.
• Common pools with a cap (Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon): residents and nonresidents are drawn from one pool and a residency is capped at its share. In bonus systems we apply the cap the way the agencies do: once a residency has its allowance it is skipped and the tag goes to the next applicant, in both the bonus pass and the random pass. Arizona additionally limits nonresidents to half of their cap in the bonus pass (R12-4-114(G)), which is why a 28-point nonresident can miss the pass while residents draw down to 25. Nonresident "quota" on those pages is the cap, "undersubscribed" means every first-choice applicant drew, and a residency row with no quota and no applicants is a hunt closed to that residency, shown without odds.
• Washington publishes no per-point-level tables since 2020, so its odds are the unweighted permits ÷ applicants ratio and are labeled as such — a 10-point applicant's true chance is far higher than shown, a 0-point applicant's far lower.
• Unpublished point levels (nobody applied with exactly that many points): in an undersubscribed hunt they are 100%. Otherwise, in bonus systems the bonus-pass share follows the published pass cut and the random-pass share is scaled by entry weight from the nearest level that still had applicants in the random pass, under the same residency cap; in preference systems a level between two published levels gets the better chance of the levels below it, and above the drawn-out level it is a sure thing.
• Lower choices: one number per choice rank, from the choice-ordered random pass or the agency's issued-to-other-choices count. A choice nobody listed has no odds (shown as a dash).
• Known limitations: Colorado hunt codes with a 20% hybrid pool are modelled as pure preference draws, so the small random chance at 5–19 points shows only where a hybrid winner appears in CPW's table (7 nonresident and 301 resident code-years). South Dakota's strict 2+/1+/0+ tiers with cubed entries inside each tier are shown as the realised per-level draw rate, not a weighted-lottery probability, so small pools look jagged. Nevada, Washington and Pennsylvania draw every choice on points, but the lower-choice number shown is an average over all lower-choice applicants rather than one per point level.

Guards

• Under five tags the percentage is flagged: one applicant either way swings it.
• All money figures show the fee year used; when a draw year has no fee schedule we use the latest earlier year.
• Back-testing: see below. Where last year's odds were off by more than 15 percentage points in the latest draw (the weighted error below), the state page shows a warning.

Back-Test: How Well Did Last Year's Odds Anticipate the Next Draw?

When you plan with these pages you are betting that last year's odds at your point level hold next year. For every hunt and point level published in two draws in a row, we check last year's number against what the next draw turned out to be.

Error is the average miss in percentage points, counting each point level by how many people applied at it. That matters: at most levels the odds sit at 0% or 100% and barely move, while applicants bunch up right at the cut, where the odds do move. So read the error as "if you are near last year's points needed, last year's number was about this far off." The same error is used for the state-page warning, the species pages and the State of the Draw report. Within 10 pts is the share of hunt and level pairs off by 10 percentage points or less; cut shift is how far the points needed moved on average (positive means it rose).

Coverage

State of the Draw 2026 covers only states with 2026 nonresident results on file. Not in it yet: Alaska (latest 2025), California (latest 2025), Nevada (latest 2025), Pennsylvania (no nonresident results published), and Texas (latest 2025).