Draw odds / North Dakota
The draw is how North Dakota Game and Fish Department hands out its limited deer, pronghorn, elk and 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 North Dakota Game and Fish Department’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-16.
North Dakota hunting units — public land, access and harvest for every unit →
Deer, Pronghorn — All applicants
Bonus with a cliff: 2×points + 1 entries through three points, then points³ + 1 from the fourth — the year the odds curve turns vertical.
Applications for the 2026 deer gun season closed 3 June 2026. The lottery runs as four sequential drawings, one per choice on the application, starting with first choice; bonus points weight the FIRST choice only. Residents and nonresidents are drawn from separate pools against separate allocations — the per-unit tables publish a "Nonresident Deduction" taken off the top before the resident drawing, and NDGF publishes the two sets of statistics separately. Gratis licences (landowner) are deducted before either. Pronghorn runs the same per-point publication as deer and is carried here with it (2018-2024; its 2017 table prints success PERCENTAGES rather than counts and cannot join a counts series). The weighted lottery also covers muzzleloader deer, swan and spring and fall turkey, which are not ingested yet.
Elk, Moose — All applicants
Bonus with a cliff: 2×points + 1 entries through three points, then points³ + 1 from the fourth — the year the odds curve turns vertical.
⚠️ AGGREGATE ONLY, AND THAT IS THE PUBLICATION. Elk and moose are the two species whose lottery summaries carry no point breakdown at all — the tables are Unit, Type, Available Licenses, Total Applicants and stop there, where deer and pronghorn publish applicants and successes at every level. So these artifacts hold one level per hunt and its odds are the hunt's realised rate. A zero point level here means "NDGF does not say", not "hunters with no points". The weighting above is still the state's real system; it simply has no distribution to act on in these two species' data. Nine seasons, 2017-2025. ⚠️ BIGHORN SHEEP IS DELIBERATELY ABSENT. North Dakota draws it STATEWIDE rather than per unit — the published table is Year, Licenses Available, Applicants and carries no unit column at all (8 licences against 21,221 applicants in 2025). There is no unit to key it to, so it is not ingested here rather than being attached to an invented one.
Points: bonus. One bonus point for each year an applicant fails to draw their FIRST choice in the first lottery. Points are retained as long as the hunter applies in the first lottery at least once every two years, and reset to zero on drawing a first choice; drawing a second choice costs nothing. The entries they buy are doubled through three points and cubed from four — see the table above. A hunter one point short of four is not slightly behind, they are an order of magnitude behind, and that is the number worth planning around in this state.
Parties: not allowed. NDGF's lottery documentation describes no party or group application for the deer gun draw — each applicant is drawn individually. Recorded explicitly because several states here do offer one and its absence is a real difference rather than an unchecked field.
Point calculator
The field — applicants at each point level:
At 3 points your first-choice odds are 3.2%
Same formulas as the published odds tables (expected-value-v1) — see methodology.
NDGF — Weighted lottery FAQ (the entries table this encodes)
NDGF — Deer lottery summaries, resident (2017-2025)
NDGF — Deer lottery summaries, nonresident (2019-2025)
NDGF — Pronghorn lottery summaries (2018-2024)
NDGF — Elk lottery summaries (2017-2025)
NDGF — Moose lottery summaries (2017-2025)
Methodology: expected-value-v1, with published backtests.