Draw odds / California

How the California draw works

Most California deer zones are general tags you just buy from CDFW — no application, no points. The draw is for the premium hunts — the X zones, the few high-demand zones whose applicants outnumber their tags, the additional and archery deer hunts, and every elk, pronghorn and bighorn tag; those are the hunts on the odds pages.

Rules from California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-04.

California hunting units — public land, access and harvest for every unit →

The system

Deer — All applicants

Hybrid: 90% of tags award by point rank, the remaining 10% through a flat random draw over everyone still standing.

Premium deer hunts only — the majority of CA deer tags (~280k of ~300k in 2026) are unrestricted/restricted zones that never touch the draw. 90% preference / 10% Draw-By-Choice per hunt; hunts with fewer than 10 tags award exactly one by DBC; apprentice hunts split 50/50 (§708.15). Preference round first, then DBC over the remaining applicants.

Elk, Pronghorn — All applicants

Hybrid: 75% of tags award by point rank, the remaining 25% through a flat random draw over everyone still standing.

75% preference / 25% Draw-By-Choice for quotas of 4+; carve-outs below that (1 tag → all DBC; 2 → 1/1; 3 → 2/1) (§708.15, Digest p. 21). The DBC round runs FIRST for these species — max-point holders are in the random round too; our preference-first expected-value model differs negligibly at published field sizes and the published per-hunt quota splits are used exactly. Nonresidents may apply (individually): exactly ONE nonresident tag per species per year statewide (FGC §331(d)/§332(e)).

Bighorn sheep — All applicants

Hybrid: 75% of tags award by point rank, the remaining 25% through a flat random draw over everyone still standing.

Same 75/25-with-carve-outs shape, DBC round first. Once-in-a- lifetime (no prior CA ram tag, §708.9(b)(5)). Fund-raising tags (≤3, ≤15% of total, FGC §4902(d)) sit outside the drawing quotas — excluded when normalizing, as are elk/pronghorn/deer fundraising tags (FGC §332(d)/§331(c), CCR §360(d)).

Points: preference. One preference point per species per year for an unsuccessful first-choice application by the deadline (or a point-only application, same deadline). Points reset to zero on drawing the FIRST choice only (CCR §708.14); a second-choice award keeps all points AND still earns the year's point. Five consecutive years without applying purges the species' points; the 2026 maximum balance is 24 (Digest pp. 9, 67-68).

Parties: allowed — points average across the party and the fraction survives, ranking between whole-point levels. Parties of up to 6. Parties draw on "the average preference point value of all party members... Point averages shall not be rounded" (CCR §708.14(e)) — the UNROUNDED mean, competing directly against integer holders (the half-point buckets in CDFW's published statistics are these parties). NOT lowest-member. Size and eligibility differ per species — see per-draw overrides.

Nonresident participation per species: premium deer open to nonresidents; elk and pronghorn capped at exactly one nonresident tag statewide per year (FGC §332(e)/§331(d)); bighorn nonresidents capped at 10% of general tags (§708.9(b)(10) — at 30 tags in 2026, at most 3). Published drawing statistics are per-hunt with residency noted where it binds.