Draw odds / Pennsylvania

How the Pennsylvania draw works

The draw is how Pennsylvania Game Commission hands out its limited elk 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 Pennsylvania Game Commission’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-12.

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

The system

Elk — All applicants

Flat lottery: one entry each.

One application per year selecting up to five season/sex/zone combinations, drawn for at most one licence. 2026-27 allocation is 155 licences (80 antlered / 75 antlerless) across archery and three firearms seasons. Nonresidents are capped at 10% of the allocation (§ 143.203(d)) — one pool with a hard cap, not a separate NR draw. From 1 Jan 2026 an antlered winner is permanently ineligible for future antlered licences (once-in-a-lifetime, non-retroactive), which drains the antlered pool of its winners every year. Elk is zoned by the 14 elk hunt zones, NOT by WMU; zone 7 is closed. No odds are published.

Points: bonus. Elk only — no other Pennsylvania opportunity uses points of any kind. Each unsuccessful application generates one bonus point, and the next application "will also include one random number entry for each bonus point held by the applicant" (58 Pa. Code § 143.203(b)) — so entries are 1 + N, flat, never squared. Points are removed only on drawing a licence, and only count in a year the hunter actually applies. From 2026 the three former per-season point balances (archery / regular / late) are merged into ONE consolidated pool, so any model keyed to per-season pools is invalid from 2026 forward and legacy balances must be summed to migrate.

Parties: not allowed. Pennsylvania has no party or group application mechanic anywhere — verified by reading all of 58 Pa. Code Ch. 143 Subchapter K (§§ 143.201-143.208). The controlled hunts let a single drawn permittee bring guests (Middle Creek goose up to 3, Pymatuning deer +1), but that is a guest allowance on one permit, not a party application: no points are pooled and no averaging occurs.

Elk: 155 licences for 2026-27, nonresidents limited to 10% of the allocation. Antlerless deer allocations ARE published per WMU — 1,469,000 statewide for 2026-27 against 1,312,000 the prior year — but they are purchase quotas consumed first-come across the rounds, not draw quotas, so the meaningful user-facing quantity is sellout risk per WMU per round rather than draw odds.