Montana
Montana draw odds
Every drawing statistic Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks has published, 2006 to 2026: how many people put each licence first, how many of them drew it, and what the rate was at each bonus point level. Four drawing pools, kept apart the way the department draws them.
Montana runs two point systems that have nothing to do with each other. Bonus points cover every drawn species and both residencies and are a lottery: they are squared and added to your application as extra chances. Preference points exist only on nonresident combination licences, cost $100, cap at three, and are a queue — state law sends three quarters of that quota out in point order. Confusing them produces a wrong answer on both, so this site keeps them on separate pages.
By species
The nonresident combination licence
The one Montana figure that is a guarantee rather than a rate, because this drawing is a queue. FWP publishes the band of preference points it took to draw with certainty, the band where some drew and some did not, and the separate random pool for applicants holding none.
The squaring is the whole mechanism
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks does something no other state on this site does. It takes your bonus point total, squares it, and adds the result to your current application as extra chances.
Three points, then, are not three chances. They are nine plus the one you already had:ten. Ten points are a hundred and one — the department's own worked example. Which means the returns on patience in Montana accelerate rather than accumulate: going from nine points to ten adds nineteen chances; going from one to two adds three.
We did not take that on trust. Checked against FWP's own 2026 antelope results — district 007-20, nonresident regular pool — the draw rate at each point level relative to the zero-point rate runs 2.55, 6.07, 10.7 and 17.1 against the 2, 5, 10 and 17 chances the rule predicts, then flattens as the pool runs out of licences. Pooled across 2024 to 2026, the median advantage at one point is 1.96 times the zero-point rate against a predicted 2.0. The rule is real, it is FWP's, and it holds.
Which is exactly why no number of bonus points gets you a tag
Extra chances in a lottery are still chances in a lottery. A hundred and one tickets is a lot of tickets and it is not a place in line, and the results say so out loud.
Take every Montana hunt-year-pool from 2024 to 2026 carrying three or more occupied bonus point levels — 2,869 of them — and find the lowest level where every applicant drew. Then ask whether anyone holding more points than that went home empty.303 times, 10.6 per cent, the answer is yes. On 147 of the hunt pages here you can read the case in that hunt's own numbers, in the formevery applicant at 19 points drew, and 2 of 2 at 20 did not.
Where the guarantee is real, and the part that will surprise you
Everything above stops applying to the nonresident combination licence. Under MCA 87-2-115,75 per cent of that quota is issued in order of points held, and the remaining 25 per cent goes to a random drawing among applicants holding none at all. FWP publishes the guarantee itself, labelling the top band “the range of preference points it took to guarantee a successful draw.” So we publish it too — not because this site has a house rule about points-to-draw figures, but because the draw mechanism supports one here and does not there.
Look at the 2026 big game and elk combination licence:
| Points held | Drew |
|---|---|
| 2.2 – 3 | 100% |
| 2 | 75.77% |
| 0.2 – 1.8 | 0% |
| 0 | 53.61% |
An applicant with no preference points had better than even odds. An applicant holding anything between 0.2 and 1.8 had none whatsoever. That is not an error and not a quirk of one year: the 25 per cent random pool is reserved for applicants at zero. Buy a single point and you leave that pool without yet being high enough in the queue to reach the 75 per cent — you have purchased your way into the worst position available. FWP says as much itself and tells applicants to read prior years' statistics rather than assume.
A preference point costs $100 and you may hold a maximum of three. Given that table, the maximum is not the constraint people think it is; whether to hold one at all is the real decision, and the published bands answer it year by year.
Four pools, drawn in order, and never averaged
Whichever half you are in, Montana sorts applicants into four categories and draws them in sequence: resident landowner, nonresident landowner, resident, nonresident.Landowner preference is the first stage of the drawing, not a tiebreak at the end. Resident landowners may take up to 15 per cent of the overall quota. Nonresidents are capped at 10 per cent overall — and that 10 per cent covers nonresident landowners and regular nonresidents together. The caps are not additive, which is the most common misreading of Montana's allocation.
Although the nonresident quotas are set at 10%, that entire quota may not be drawn by nonresidents. The random drawing determines how many residents/nonresidents are selected within the quota amount, but the 10% is the maximum amount for nonresidents.
There is an exception to the 10% rule for nonresidents. If all residents who applied are successful in drawing, nonresidents may be allocated over 10% of the drawing quotas.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks
A ceiling that is not a floor, and that can be exceeded. It is why every column of that kind on this site is labelled a pool cap rather than a quota, and why no figure on any Montana page is averaged across two of those four pools. They are four separate competitions that happen to share a district.
Where these numbers come from
295 Fish, Wildlife & Parks reports, fetched from the department's own drawing statistics search and parsed one by one: 49,120 pool rows and 168,510 bonus point rows. Every page links the report each of its figures was read from, with the date the document states about itself and the date it was fetched.
Every figure was checked against arithmetic the documents publish about themselves before it was stored: each row's total drawn against the eight columns that make it up, each district's printed total against its own point rows, and each report's column totals against the sum of its rows. Where FWP's own figures disagree with each other, both are shown and the disagreement is named rather than resolved.