Draw odds / Utah

How the Utah draw works

The draw is how Utah Division of Wildlife Resources hands out its limited elk, pronghorn, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, bison, black bear, turkey and deer 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 Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’s published materials — verified against the cited sources on 2026-08-12.

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

The system

Elk, Pronghorn, Moose, Bighorn sheep, Mountain goat, Bison, Black bear, Turkey — All applicants

Hybrid: 50% of tags award by point rank, the remaining 50% through a lottery at points + 1 entries each over everyone still standing.

Limited-entry and once-in-a-lifetime. Half the permits go to the highest-point applicants first (odd counts round UP into that reserved pool, and a single-permit hunt runs entirely through the regular round); everything left is a linear bonus lottery. Empirically 154 of the 2025 hunts sat at exactly 50.0% reserved, the rest slightly higher purely from small-count rounding. Nonresidents are held to 10% of permits — stated in UDWR's manual and holding at 9.37% across all 591 LE/OIAL hunts in 2025 — but a crossover round (R657-62-18(4)(c)) moves unused permits between residency types, so 10% is a quota, not a ceiling on realized permits.

Deer — All applicants

Pure preference: tags fill from the highest point level down; the last level in is a random subset, everyone below draws nothing.

⚠️ SCHEMA LIMITATION, read before building odds artifacts. This row describes GENERAL-SEASON buck deer, which is pure preference — UDWR's manual: "For general-season hunts (which use preference points), there will be no permit splits. All permits are issued in preference of the number of points an applicant has." Fillmore DB1536 shows the textbook cutoff: 3+ points ~100%, 2 points 82/444, 1 and 0 points zero, and the Bonus # Permits column is 0 throughout. But LIMITED-ENTRY deer exists too and uses the hybrid system above, and `system_for(species, residency)` cannot tell them apart because the distinction is hunt type, not species or residency. The two are published in separate files (`<yy>_deer_odds.pdf` general season, `<yy>_bg-odds.pdf` limited-entry), so an ingest must resolve the system per source file rather than through this registry. No Utah odds artifacts exist yet, so nothing is currently mis-built — but this is the trap waiting for whoever wires them.

Points: bonus. Utah runs BOTH currencies, which this single field cannot express — see the per-draw systems below, which carry the real distinction. Bonus points (R657-62-8(2)(b)) govern limited-entry deer/elk/pronghorn, every once-in-a-lifetime species, limited-entry bear, antlerless moose, ewe bighorn and turkey. Preference points (R657-62-9) govern general-season buck deer, antlerless deer and elk, doe pronghorn, and the upland/ waterfowl draws. Points are forfeited on drawing, but NOT for conservation, expo, sportsman, harvest-objective bear, landowner/CWMU or poaching-reward permits. A point may be bought without applying, for the same fee as an application. Waiting period is five seasons for limited-entry deer and elk.

Parties: allowed — averaged points round down. Parties of up to 4. "Bonus points are averaged and rounded down when two or more applicants apply together on a group application" (R657-62-8(9); R657-62-9(6) says the same for preference points) — rounding DOWN, not to nearest, and the previous draft's max of 6 was wrong: R657-62-18(5) caps a group at four. All members must apply for the same hunt choices (R657-62-7), and the whole group is dropped if the remaining quota cannot seat everyone. Groups are NOT accepted for once-in-a-lifetime species, management buck deer, or management bull elk. Mixed-residency groups fail unless permits of both residency types remain.

Nonresidents are limited to 10% of permits per hunt (UDWR draw odds manual; the regular round is "split between residents and nonresidents (90/10)"). Note this is an agency-publication citation, not a statutory one — R657-62 only says resident and nonresident choices are evaluated separately, so a statute-level source would need a pass through Utah Code Title 23A.