Draw odds / Oregon
The draw is how Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hands out its limited deer, elk, pronghorn, black bear, bighorn sheep and mountain goat 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 Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-15.
Oregon hunting units — public land, access and harvest for every unit →
Deer, Elk, Pronghorn — All applicants
Hybrid: 75% of tags award by point rank, the remaining 25% through a flat random draw over everyone still standing.
Applications close 15 May; results by 12 June. Up to five hunt-number choices per series, with points considered on the FIRST only — the other four are drawn at random among applicants who listed them. 75% of each hunt's tags go to the first-choice applicants with the most points; the remaining 25% are drawn at random from every first-choice applicant, so a zero-point hunter always has a real chance at a quarter of the tags. Nonresidents are capped at 5% of tags in controlled deer and elk hunts and 3% in pronghorn, so the two residencies draw from different quotas.
Black bear — All applicants
Hybrid: 75% of tags award by point rank, the remaining 25% through a flat random draw over everyone still standing.
Spring bear runs its own, earlier window: applications close 10 February with results by 20 February. Same 75/25 split and the same 5% nonresident cap as deer and elk.
Bighorn sheep, Mountain goat — All applicants
Pure random draw: tags ÷ applicants, points play no part.
ALL TAGS DRAWN AT RANDOM. Preference points play no part in these hunts, so there is no curve to show and no threshold to trend — a first-time applicant and a twenty-year applicant stand identically. Party applications are not offered. Nonresidents take no less than 5% and no more than 10% of the tags. Oregon's once-in-a-lifetime species; the point-creep chart is deliberately absent here rather than empty.
Points: preference. One preference point a year, per hunt series, for each year a hunter fails to draw their FIRST choice. Points weight the 75% preference phase of deer, elk, pronghorn and spring bear draws; they do nothing at all in the 25% random phase, nothing for choices two through five, and nothing for sheep, goat or premium hunts. THE POINTS RESET TO ZERO on drawing a first choice — whether or not the tag is purchased. Pioneer and qualifying disabled-veteran licence holders aged 65 and over reset to one instead. Nothing else in this registry set behaves that way, and a hunter carrying a Colorado mental model will expect a balance that spends down rather than an account that empties.
Parties: allowed — averaged points round to the nearest whole point (.5 rounds up). Parties of up to 4. A party draws as a unit — everyone gets a tag or nobody does — and the members' preference points are combined and averaged, so adding a low-point hunter to a high-point party lowers the whole party's standing. Party applications are NOT offered for bighorn sheep, Rocky Mountain goat or premium hunts, which are the hunts where a party would matter most. ODFW does not publish a maximum size in the rules text read here; four is recorded as the working figure and should be re-checked at the next verification.
Point calculator
The field — applicants at each point level:
At 3 points your first-choice odds are 1.5%
Drew out at 6 points with this field.
Same formulas as the published odds tables (expected-value-v1) — see methodology.
ODFW — Controlled hunt applications and tags (allocation, points, choices, caps)
ODFW — Controlled hunt navigation
ODFW — Preference point summary reports (the statistics behind this registry)
Methodology: expected-value-v1, with published backtests.