Draw odds / Missouri

How the Missouri draw works

The draw is how Missouri Department of Conservation hands out its limited deer, elk and black bear 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 Missouri Department of Conservation’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-10-02.

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

The system

Deer — All applicants

Bonus: every applicant holds points + 1 lottery entries.

Managed deer hunts — about 140 a year on conservation areas, county and state parks, national wildlife refuges and city land, by archery, muzzleloader, historic methods or firearms, some for youth or hunters with disabilities only. Apply July 1-31, free; results from August 15. Residents and nonresidents draw from one pool. A drawn hunter buys a Managed Deer Hunting Permit ($19.50 resident, $360 nonresident), and deer taken there do not count toward the statewide limits. ⚠️ ODDS ARE PER HUNT, AT THE POOL LEVEL. MDC publishes each hunt's quota, applicants and hunters drawn, but never how many applicants held how many points, so the figure shown is the hunt's overall draw rate — not your odds at your point level, which run higher with more points. ⚠️ MDC RENUMBERS ITS HUNTS EVERY YEAR. Hunt 32 this season is not hunt 32 last season, so the codes here (MO-001 and on) are OpenHunt's own: one code follows one hunt — the same area, method and place in that area's calendar — from season to season. Apply with MDC's number for the current season, shown on its managed-hunt list.

Elk — Resident

Pure random draw: tags ÷ applicants, points play no part.

Five antlered permits a year in the elk zone — Carter, Reynolds and Shannon counties, outside the refuge portion of Peck Ranch — with at least one reserved for approved landowners there. Missouri residents only, a pure random drawing with no points. Apply May 1-31 ($10, nonrefundable); results by July 1; the permit is $50. Archery October 17-25 and firearms December 12-20 in 2026. A hunter drawn for an antlered permit cannot apply again for ten years. MDC has reported the applicant count for most years: 19,215 in 2020, then 9,714, 9,684, 8,562 and — after a year with no count found — 8,409 in 2025, all for the same five permits.

Black bear — Resident

Pure random draw: tags ÷ applicants, points play no part.

Black bear permits are drawn per Bear Management Zone — 2,000 in 2026 (1,000 in Zone 1, 750 in Zone 2, 250 in Zone 3), up from 600 in 2025 and 400 in 2021-2024 — with harvest quotas of 30, 22 and 8 bears. Residents only, a pure random drawing with no points; at least 10% of each zone's permits go to resident landowners there. Apply May 1-31 ($10); results from July 1; the permit is $25. The season runs October 17-30 in 2026 or until a zone's quota is reached, south of the Missouri River only, lone bears only. ⚠️ ODDS ARE STATEWIDE. Each applicant names one zone, but MDC publishes applicants only for the whole state, so no zone's odds can be computed. And with permits more than tripled for 2026, the 2025 odds shown here (600 permits for 5,249 applicants) understate this year's chances.

Points: bonus. Managed deer hunts only — elk and bear have no points of any kind. MDC calls them "preference points", but they work as bonus points: "your name will be entered into the drawing once for the current application year and once for each preference point that you have earned", so a hunter with four points holds five entries. One point is earned for each unsuccessful year, points last for life whether or not you apply, and they reset to zero when you are drawn. Applying for more than one hunt in a year disqualifies the application and earns no point. Spring managed turkey hunts are drawn too (apply in February, results from March 15), but MDC does not say whether they use these points, and it publishes no statistics for them, so they carry no odds here.

Parties: allowed — averaged points round to the nearest whole point (.5 rounds up). Parties of up to 6. Managed deer hunts take groups of up to six (youth-only hunts: alone or with one other youth). A party's points are averaged — MDC's example is 0, 5, 5 and 6, which averages to 4, so the party is entered five times. MDC does not say how a fractional average is rounded.