Arizona
Arizona draw odds
What actually happened at each bonus point level, hunt number by hunt number, 2024 to 2026: how many applications sat at that level, and how many of them drew a tag. Resident and nonresident kept apart, and all three of Arizona's draws kept apart from each other.
By species
Your application goes through the draw three times
Arizona runs the Big Game Drawing in three phases, in order: the bonus point pass, the first-second choice pass, and the third-fourth-fifth choice pass. Before each one, something happens that almost no summary bothers to explain.
Before each of the three passes in the drawing, each application is processed through a random number generator program. One random number for the application plus an additional random number for each group bonus point … is generated for that application.The lowest random number generated for an application is used in the drawing process. An application receives a new random number for each Pass of the Big Game Draw.Arizona Game and Fish Department, Draw Process
So a point is not a rung on a ladder. It is another ticket in the same hat, and holding ten of them means you get eleven numbers and keep the best one. And you get a fresh set for each pass — last round's bad luck does not follow you.
The first pass is the only one that looks like a queue. Twenty per cent of the authorized permit-tags in each hunt number may be issued here, sorted by bonus points descending and then randomly within each point grouping. Two things about it matter more than its existence: applications with zero bonus points are excluded from it entirely, and any permits left unissued return to the pool for the passes that follow.
One exception trips people up. For bighorn sheep and buffalo the 20 per cent is calculated across all hunt numbers combined, not per hunt number as it is for deer, antelope, elk, turkey, javelina and spring bear. If you have read that “20 per cent of every Arizona hunt goes in the bonus pass,” that is wrong for the two hardest species on the board.
The second pass is where four out of five tags are actually decided. For every valid application that missed in the bonus pass, new random numbers are generated — and then, in the department's words, “the valid application file for each species is then sorted in random number sequence only.” Not by points. This is what makes Arizona unlike Wyoming, and it is why a points-needed figure cannot mean here what it means there. Nonresidents are capped at 10 per cent, and that cap holds through the bonus pass as well.
How points work, and the three ways people misunderstand them
Bonus points accrue for deer, antelope, elk, turkey, javelina, bighorn sheep, buffalo and bear. You earn one by submitting a valid application into a drawing for that species and being unsuccessful and not rejected — that distinction does real work, as a rejected application earns nothing at all.
Drawing a tag zeroes your species points, but not everything: your Hunter Education bonus point carries into the next drawing, and so does your Loyalty bonus point for that species, provided you keep applying.
The Loyalty point is the only thing in Arizona with a use-it-or-lose-it clock.You earn one per species by submitting a valid application at least once a year for five consecutive years — for a tag or for a point — and keep it as long as you keep applying annually. Your accumulated species points do not work this way, so “Arizona points expire if you skip a year” is a claim you will see and should ignore.
There is no separate point-purchase season. Unlike Wyoming and Utah, Arizona has no summer window for buying a point without entering the draw: a bonus-point application is a draw application, submitted against a bonus-point-only hunt number by the same deadline, and applying for a point in a genus bars you from also applying for a tag in it. This is not a fringe option — in the 2026 fall cycle,23,395 deer applications went to bonus-point-only hunt numbers.
One last mechanic, because it changes what these tables count. Two to four people can apply on one application, and the group's points are averaged — added across the members, divided by the number of applicants, and rounded. So a row sitting at six points might hold a pair who individually have four and eight. Everything here countsapplications, not hunters. There is no way to count hunters from what Arizona publishes.
One table that looks like it disproves points, and does not
Add up every deer hunt in the 2026 fall draw and the draw rate does something strange. It climbs from 9.19 per cent at zero points to 19.44 per cent at two and 20.58 per cent at four — then falls. At ten points it is 5.57 per cent. At twenty, 5.21. At twenty-seven points, one applicant drew out of 131: 0.76 per cent.
Points are not backfiring. The people are different. A hunter sitting on twenty-seven deer points is not applying for the same hunts as a hunter with two; they are spending a decade of patience on the hardest tags Arizona issues, while the two-point crowd applies broadly. Move down that table and you are not watching points stop working, you are watching the hunt list change underneath you.
Within a single hunt, more points wins and wins reliably: of 1,375 pools with four or more occupied levels, the top third of levels beat the bottom third in1,198 of them — 87.1 per cent. So points help. The statewide curve is a fact about where experienced applicants aim, not about whether patience pays.
Three things about Arizona's numbers that change how to read them
The draw rate here is a share of applicants, not a share of a quota.Arizona publishes how many permits a hunt number was authorized, but it never publishes how many of them were available at any one point level. So every percentage on these pages is the share of the applications at that level which drew — not the share of a quota, and not comparable with a quota-based figure from another state.
The two permit columns are cumulative, and adding them double-counts.Arizona draws in three passes. The first — the bonus pass — hands out 20 per cent of a hunt's permits in point order, and is closed to anyone holding no points at all; it reads zero on about four rows in five. The second pass then draws first and second choices by random number. The department reports the bonus pass on its own and again folded into the running total, which is why these pages show one figure for permits drawn and name the bonus-pass subset separately rather than beside it as an equal.
The applicant counts are first and second choice only. Arizona's third pass covers third, fourth and fifth choices and the department publishes no point-level breakdown for it. So the applicant totals on these pages are not the whole pool who wanted that hunt, and nothing here presents them as though they were.
Where these numbers come from
8 Arizona Game and Fish reports — a Bonus Point Report and two per-pass Draw Reports for each draw cycle — giving 68,736 point-level rows across 1,385 hunt-and-cycle records. Every page links the exact report each of its figures was read from.
Nothing was stored before the reports agreed with themselves. Each row's resident and nonresident counts must sum to its total, its first and second choice applicants must sum to the combined figure the department prints beside them, and a hunt's permits summed across every point level must reproduce the total its Draw Report states independently. That last check is the one that matters: the others cannot see a page that went missing, and it can.
Where two Arizona documents disagree with each other, both figures are carried and the disagreement is named on the hunt page rather than resolved in our favour.