Draw odds / Maine
The draw is how Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife hands out its limited moose tags: you apply by the deadline, and the system below decides who is drawn. Everything here — the rules, the dates and the odds for every hunt — comes from the agency's own published material.
Rules from Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-16.
Maine hunting units — public land, access and harvest for every unit →
Moose — All applicants
Bonus: every applicant holds points + 1 lottery entries.
Applications open 1 April and close 18 May. Permits are allocated per WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT DISTRICT, per season, and by permit type — bull-only (BOP) or antlerless-only (AOP) — which is exactly the granularity the harvest series carries, so a district's permits and its kill line up season for season. ⚠️ NO PER-DISTRICT ODDS ARE SHOWN, because MDIFW publishes no applicant count per wildlife management district, in any year, for either lottery. Odds are applicants against permits, and without the first number there is no honest figure to print for a district. MDIFW does publish the statewide picture — applicants split resident and nonresident every season since 1980, with permits and selection rates beside them — and the per-district permit ALLOCATIONS. What Maine unit pages carry today is that allocation, which is the real number of tags a district gets.
Points: bonus. Points accrue on an ESCALATING schedule — one a year for the first five years of applying, two a year through year ten, three through year fifteen, and ten a year from year sixteen. Twenty years of applying is worth eighty points, not twenty. They are spent, not weighted: one point is one chance in the drawing. The escalation lives in the accrual, not in the draw. The balance resets to zero on drawing a permit, and ALSO on failing to apply in two consecutive years — the second is the expensive one, since it can cost a balance built over decades.
Parties: allowed — averaged points round to the nearest whole point (.5 rounds up). Parties of up to 3. MDIFW permits group applications for the moose lottery. The published material read here does not state how a group's points are combined, so no combination rule is claimed; re-check before anything is built on it.
Statistics ingestion for Maine is pending — the explainer and calculator above run on the encoded rules meanwhile.
Point calculator
The field — applicants at each point level:
At 3 points your first-choice odds are 11%
Same formulas as the published odds tables (expected-value-v1) — see methodology.
MDIFW — Moose permit lottery (points, chances, caps)
MDIFW — Moose permit lottery winners
MDIFW — Antlerless deer permit lottery winners
Methodology: expected-value-v1, with published backtests.