Arizona draw deadlines and results dates

Arizona never publishes a results date

It is the question most people come to this page for, and the department does not answer it in advance. None of the three current booklets carries a results date. Neither does the Big Game Draw page. What each booklet gives instead is a “hunt permit-tags mailed out by” date, which in all three 2026 cycles fell more than a month after results actually posted, and is not the same fact.

Results appear in your AZGFD portal account, which the department states is the only place they are posted, and a bulletin goes out the same day. There is no advance notice, and the automated phone service that used to give results has been withdrawn.

So rather than estimate a date, here is the record of when the department actually posted each of the last three cycles. This is history, not a schedule. Arizona has never committed to it and nothing here says the next cycle will match.

Spring bulletin, 24 Oct 2025 · pronghorn and elk bulletin, 23 Feb 2026 · fall bulletin, 22 Jun 2026.

There is no separate deadline to buy a bonus point

Wyoming and Utah both sell points in their own window, months away from the draw. Arizona does not. A bonus point in Arizona is a draw application — you submit it against a bonus point hunt number, as your first and only choice, by the same deadline as everyone applying for a tag. Miss the deadline and you miss the point.

A bonus point costs the application fee alone, $13 for residents and $15 for nonresidents, plus a hunting licence valid through deadline day if you do not already hold one. One point per genus per draw, and applying for a bonus point in a genus bars you from also applying for a tag in it — the department rejects both applications as duplicates.

One caveat worth naming. Commission rule R12-4-107 refers to an “extended bonus point period” with a deadline of its own, separate from the draw. No 2026 application schedule publishes one, and the department names no dates for it anywhere we found. The rule contemplates it; the calendar does not.

What Arizona publishes about the draw itself

Arizona Game and Fish publishes point-level draw results, and this site now carries them:Arizona draw odds by hunt number and bonus point level.

The department's 2026 Fall Bonus Point Report runs to 138 pages and prints, for every hunt number and every bonus point level, the first-choice applicants, the second-choice applicants and the permits issued — each of those split resident and nonresident. Companion draw reports give the authorized permits, the nonresident cap and the outcome of each of the draw's three passes. Equivalent sets exist for the midwinter and spring draws, back to 2024, all linked from the department's bonus point process page.

One thing that record will not tell you, whoever publishes it. Arizona's draw is a bonus-point-weighted random draw, not a preference draw: each bonus point buys one more random number, and only the first pass — 20 percent of the tags in each hunt number — is allocated by point order at all. More points shorten the odds. They never make a tag certain, and no table of past results can turn them into a queue position. So the odds pages here give the draw rate at each point level and no "points needed to draw" figure — that figure would be a promise Arizona's draw does not make, and on better than one pool in five its own results contradict it outright.

What Arizona Game and Fish does not state

Named here rather than filled in. Every item below is a gap or a conflict in the department's own publications as of 27 August 2026, not a gap in our reading of them.

• A results date. None of the three current booklets, and no department page read for this page, names one in advance for any of the three draws. The schedule headings run “deadline dates” and “hunt permit-tags mailed out by”, and there is nothing between them.
• An opening date for applications. All three schedules print “(See note 1)” in the acceptance-dates column, and note 1 gives a two-week range — “early to mid-January”, “early to mid-May”, “early to mid-September”. The department states it will post an announcement when the draw opens, which is a commitment to tell you afterwards, not a date.
• The card-update, PointGuard and E-Tag deadline, in advance. The booklets say only that notice will be given “when the deadline to update credit cards is finalized”. For fall 2026 that notice came on 12 June for a 15 June deadline.
• Which species the October draw covers. Three department sources give three lists. The spring booklet's cover names turkey, javelina, bison, bear and raptor capture; that same booklet's application schedule, two pages later, lists turkey, javelina, bison and raptor capture and omits bear. The 2026-2027 regulations list spring javelina, turkey, bison and raptor capture. The Big Game Draw page lists spring javelina, bear, turkey and bison, and omits raptor capture. We are not going to pick one.
• Whether applications are open right now. On the verification date the department's own Big Game Draw page said the 2026 fall results had been released and, two lines below, that “applications are being accepted” with a deadline of Tuesday, June 2 — a date almost three months past. One of those two statements is stale and the page does not say which.
• Any 2027 date at all. No 2027 spring booklet, no 2027 schedule, nothing beyond “in October” and “available in early September”.
• Dates for the extended bonus point period. Commission rule R12-4-107 provides for one and sets a deadline for it; no published application schedule contains one.

Elsewhere on this site

Deadlines tell you when to apply. What it takes to draw is a different question, answered from each state's own published results rather than from a projection — and only for the states whose numbers we have checked.

Deadlines are re-checked against the department's documents each cycle and never carried forward. When the 2027 booklets are published, this page is rebuilt from them rather than edited.