New Mexico draw odds

The number this state publishes instead

New Mexico prints something neither Wyoming nor Utah does: a choice rank on both sides of the draw. For every hunt code it gives the number of applicants who ranked that hunt first, second and third — and separately, the number of winners who were awarded it as their first, second, third or fourth choice, each split across the three residency pools the state draws separately.

So the honest per-hunt number here is the first-choice draw rate: of the people who put this hunt first, what share got it. Both figures are exact integers printed in the same row of the same report, and they describe the same group of people. That is the headline on every hunt page.

Three other numbers were available and every one of them would have been wrong. Licenses is the quota offered, and 35 of the 893 hunts in the 2026 report issued fewer than that — one issued none at all. Dividing a pool's total licences by its first-choice applicants counts winners who ranked the hunt second, third or fourth against a denominator that excludes them; on one 2026 deer hunt that arithmetic reads 2,933 per cent. And the department's own R% / NR% / O% columns are each pool's share of the offered quota — an allocation split fixed in state law, which reads 100% on most hunts and is not a draw chance at all. All three appear on the hunt pages, labelled as what they are.

Species

Bear and turkey are drawn in February, in a separate draw with its own deadline. The other eight share a single March deadline.

Who you are competing against

New Mexico splits every draw hunt's licences three ways by state law: a minimum of 84% to residents, 10% to applicants of any residency who apply through a New Mexico registered outfitter, and 6% to nonresidents applying without one. Residents absorb whatever the other two pools do not fill, so across the 597 hunts that issued twenty or more licences in 2026 the split actually landed at about 87 / 6 / 7.

The three pools are drawn separately and are kept separate here, on every row of every table. A nonresident's chance on a hunt is not the hunt's chance, and averaging the three would hide the only distinction that matters to most people reading this.

The column that looks like odds and is not

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is the reason to read a New Mexico table here rather than the department's own.

The department's reports carry a column headed R% / NR% / O%. It is not draw odds. It is each pool's share of the licences offered — an allocation split — and on most hunts it simply reads 100.

How do we know? Because it is exact to two decimal places on2,679 of 2,679 values in the 2026 reports. Draw odds do not come out exact to two decimals 2,679 times in a row. Allocation percentages do, because they are computed rather than observed. A reader who mistakes that column for their chances of drawing will conclude that most New Mexico hunts are a formality. They are not.

How we chose the number, and the three we threw away

New Mexico's choice-rank data makes four different figures computable, and each has an honest-sounding name. Three of them are wrong.

The one that fails most spectacularly divides winners at every rank by applicants at the first rank. On at least one hunt that arithmetic produces a draw rate of2,933 per cent — because the winners include people who named the hunt second and third, and the denominator does not.

So: first-choice winners over first-choice applicants, and nothing else. Stated once here and once on every table.

The fourth choice, which has no denominator and cannot have one

You will see the column and wonder why it has no percentage beside it. New Mexico lets deer and elk applicants name a fourth choice — but a fourth choice is not a hunt code, it is one of four quadrants of the state. Which means a fourth-choice winner appears inno applicant column on the row where their licence was issued. There is no field anywhere in the report counting how many people asked for that quadrant.

It is not a rounding-error column either: in 2026, 29 deer hunts carry fourth-choice winners, and on one of them they took 77 of the pool's 88 licences. So we show the count and compute no rate from it. A rate would need a denominator the department does not publish, and inventing one is the exact failure this site exists to avoid.

Two practical things about reading a hunt code

The middle digit tells you the weapon. 1 is any legal big-game arm, 2 is bow only, 3 is muzzleloader, crossbow or bow. Two hunts in the same unit in the same season with wildly different draw rates are frequently the same hunt with different equipment rules.

And the species comes from the code prefix, never the heading. The department has headed the same animal PRONGHORN ANTELOPE, ANTELOPE andPRONGHORN in different years — while the ANT- prefix has never changed once. Our pages take the species from the code, which is why you will not find one animal split across three differently named boards here.

One more thing, because you may have searched for the old name: the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish became the New Mexico Department of Wildlife on 1 July 2026, under Senate Bill 5 of the 2025 session. Its documents still carry both names. Same agency, same draw, same reports.

What is here, and what is not

1,339 hunt codes across 8 published years, 2019 to 2026. Unlike Utah, New Mexico is current: the 2026 draw closed on March 18, results posted on April 22, and the department published the complete report for it. What does not exist yet is anything for 2027 — no rules booklet, no calendar entry, no dates. This site will not extrapolate one.

The February draw stopped publishing part of its report. From 2024 the department's bear and turkey report gives only the residency split of who drew, with no breakdown by choice — so a first-choice draw rate cannot be computed for those years by anyone, including the department. Those hunts show applicant demand and licences issued for every year, and a first-choice rate only through bear 2022 and turkey 2022.

Coverage starts at 2019 because that is the oldest report on the department's index. Six hunt rows across all eight years are not shown at all, each for a stated reason — three javelina rows in 2019 where the department's post-draw table names a different hunt than its pre-draw table on the same line, two where a residency pool is recorded as drawing a licence on a choice nobody in it made, and one whose winners do not sum to their own published total. The 2023 bear and turkey report is excluded entirely on the same grounds.