Kentucky's Deer Harvest, 1999 to 2025: Up 52.8% to 145,483

Kentucky's deer harvest is up 52.8% since 1999: hunters checked 145,483 deer in the 2025 season against 95,227 in 1999, according to the harvest app of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR). The high point of the app's 1999 to 2025 series is 2015 at 155,720, and seven of the last eight seasons have topped 140,000. The gain was uneven, with the Southeast region up 111.4% and the Northeast up 6.2%, and antlered bucks (+73.0%) grew faster than does (+38.1%). Because the counts record deer checked in, they describe what hunters took, and the size of the herd needs a separate estimate.

Kentucky hunters checked 95,227 deer in 1999 and 145,483 in 2025, a gain of 50,256. The climb came in steps. From 2004 through 2011 the count stayed between 110,376 and 124,752. It passed 130,000 for the first time in 2012 (131,395) and reached 144,408 in 2013. The 2015 season set the high point at 155,720, after the largest one-season rise (16,822 over 2014) and before the largest fall (16,272 the following year).

Since 2018 every season has landed between 132,327 and 149,919, and 2021 is the only one of those eight that missed 140,000. The 2025 count sits 10,237 (6.6%) below the 2015 high and ranks fifth of the 27 seasons, behind 2015, 2024, 2019 and 2018.

The table picks ten of the 27 seasons. KDFWR's deer report for the 2024-25 season calls its harvest "the second highest harvest on record", and the app agrees on the rank: 2024-25 is second in the 1999 to 2025 series, at 149,919. The report prints 149,868 for the season, which is 51 fewer, a gap covered under the limits below.

Antlered bucks outnumber does in each of the eight rows from 2009-10 on, after trailing them in 1999-00 and 2004-05. The two sex columns leave out male fawns, which KDFWR's report counts as a third category, so they fall short of each season's total.

The harvest app sorts counties into five regions, and they did not grow alike. The Southeast went from 12,721 deer checked to 26,890, up 111.4%. The Purchase (+62.0%), Green River (+61.2%) and Bluegrass (+43.0%) came next, and the Northeast added 1,055 deer, up 6.2%. The five regions sum to the statewide total in both seasons, 95,227 and 145,483.

A percent and a count tell different stories. Green River added the most checked deer, 15,094, and the Southeast came second with 14,169; together they supplied 58% of the state's 50,256-deer gain, while the Northeast supplied 2.1%. The Southeast's share of all deer checked rose from 13.4% to 18.5%, and the Northeast's fell from 17.8% to 12.4%. In 1999 the Northeast had the third-largest count of the five regions. By 2025 it had the smallest.

KDFWR's history of deer management is a story the page says was first published in 1998, with a note that some of its information may be dated. Its restoration timeline records that in 1979-81 "restoration efforts end in all regions of the state except for southeastern Kentucky." It says that in 1984 the department began "a high-density stocking program in eastern Kentucky, where poaching, lack of suitable habitat and free-roaming dogs have kept deer densities low." It dates the phase-in of the one-buck limit to 1989 through 1991. The 2024-25 report adds "Active restoration efforts concluded in March of 1999", the year our series begins.

That is history, and we do not claim it as a cause. The timeline says "southeastern" and "eastern" Kentucky, and we have not matched those phrases to the app's regional borders. Every event on it comes before the series or at its start, so the counts here cannot show whether any of them shaped the regional gaps.

Antlered bucks checked rose from 43,011 in 1999 to 74,426 in 2025, up 73.0%. Does, meaning female deer, rose from 45,792 to 63,220, up 38.1%. In 1999 does outnumbered antlered bucks by 2,781, and in 2025 bucks led by 11,206. Antlered deer went from 45.2% of the deer checked to 51.2%, passing 48.6% in 2015, while female deer fell from 48.1% to 43.5%, with 45.1% in 2015.

KDFWR's report describes the same drift in its own words: "the proportion of the harvest that is female has steadily declined in the last decade". Our paper on the buck-to-doe mix covers four other states and argues the ratio can only be read against a state's own past, which is how we read Kentucky's here. We tested no explanation for it.

Harvest reflects hunter numbers, seasons and bag limits as well as deer, so it is not a herd count. KDFWR's report credits an average mast drop and "desirable hunting weather during most of the season" for the 2024-25 total. Its population estimate "shows a stable to increasing trend" and, the report says, "is generated from harvest and age structure data", so the harvest line and that estimate are not independent checks on each other.

The app counts deer checked in, and the report says even resident landowners hunting their own property must telecheck any harvested deer, so those deer are in the totals. Because the app keeps taking late check-ins, its season totals drift upward from KDFWR's printed ones: 149,919 against 149,868 for 2024-25, and 145,483 against 145,433 in the January 2026 summary for 2025-26. Regions are the app's own assignments, and our series starts in 1999, so nothing here reaches back into the restoration years. We label a season by the year it opens, so the 2025 season is 2025-26, and we keep KDFWR's labels, such as 2024-25, where we cite its report.

We believe a statewide gain hides more than it shows, so hunters should judge a place against its own history and not against the 52.8% headline. Check your region's change first and your county's after that. The Northeast's 6.2% and the Southeast's 111.4% come from the same state, and level matters as much as growth: the Southeast's 26,890 deer checked in 2025 is still below the Bluegrass (40,822) and Green River (39,743).

Expect single seasons to swing. Since 2018 the change from one season to the next has run from 2,639 to 12,188 deer in either direction, so a year that moves a few thousand is ordinary. Every season in that stretch has fallen between 132,327 and 149,919, which makes that band the local yardstick. Harvest trends in seven other states are the subject of our county-level look at whether the deer decline is real.