Draw odds / Nevada
The draw is how Nevada Department of Wildlife hands out its limited deer, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, moose 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 Nevada Department of Wildlife’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-15.
Nevada hunting units — public land, access and harvest for every unit →
Deer, Elk, Pronghorn — All applicants
Bonus squared: every applicant stays in the lottery holding points² + 1 entries — more points, better odds, nobody at zero.
The main draw. Applications in spring, results in May-June. Five choices are offered and all five are published in the bonus-point tables. Nonresidents are capped per hunt, so resident and nonresident pools are drawn against different quotas and ship separately.
Bighorn sheep, Mountain goat, Moose, Black bear — All applicants
Bonus squared: every applicant stays in the lottery holding points² + 1 entries — more points, better odds, nobody at zero.
Nevada draws three bighorn herds separately — Nelson (Desert), California and Rocky Mountain — and they normalize onto one species with the herd as a variant, because the fees vocabulary has a single bighorn entry and splitting it would invent a species for what is one animal in three mountain ranges. Moose is Nevada's newest big game species and its draw is tiny: one hunt.
Points: bonus. Bonus points are SQUARED into extra random draw numbers: a hunter with N points holds N squared plus one entries, so ten points is 101 chances against a first-timer's one. They are never a queue — a zero-point applicant draws on luck every year, and no number of points guarantees a tag. Points are lost only on drawing the species, and accrue by applying (or by buying a points-only application in some species).
Parties: allowed — averaged points round to the nearest whole point (.5 rounds up). Parties of up to 2. Nevada allows group applications; the group's bonus points are averaged rather than summed, so adding a zero-point partner drags a high-point applicant down. Party sizes vary by species and are small.
Set per hunt and published in the workbook's Quota column alongside tags actually issued, which differ when a hunt undersubscribes.
main draw application: Spring; see NDOW for the current season's window
results: May-June
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.
NDOW — Bonus point data (per-point applicant and success tables)
NDOW — Hunt statistics (the per-hunt workbook)
NDOW — How do bonus points work in Nevada?
Methodology: expected-value-v1, with published backtests.