Minnesota's 2025 Gun Season: 44.9% of Firearm Deer Came in Two Days

Minnesota's per-deer registration feed shows that 44.9% of the 146,341 deer registered by firearm in 2025 carry a kill date of Saturday, Nov. 8 or Sunday, Nov. 9, the opening weekend of the statewide firearms season. That share is measured against every firearm deer of the year, including 10,802 registered before the opener from earlier seasons. Adult-male shares of registered deer run from 41.2% to 86.2% across permit areas, which describes the harvest, not the herd's sex ratio. This year's statewide opener is Saturday, Nov. 7.

The registration feed holds one row for each registered deer, with a weapon type, a permit area, a sex and age class and a kill date. Filter to firearm and count by day, and November 2025 has a cliff in it. Firearm hunters registered 44,314 deer with a kill date of Saturday, Nov. 8, the day the statewide firearms season opened, and 21,412 more on Sunday, Nov. 9. That is 65,726 deer, or 44.9% of the 146,341 registered by firearm across the season and 35.3% of all 186,333 deer registered by any weapon.

The fall-off after the first weekend is steep. Opening day alone was larger than the next two days combined: 21,412 on Sunday plus 10,298 on Monday, Nov. 10, comes to 31,710. Tuesday through Friday, Nov. 11 to 14, ran between 5,357 (Wednesday) and 7,650 (Friday). Then the second Saturday, Nov. 15, registered 13,359 deer, the third-busiest day of the year, and Sunday, Nov. 16 registered 9,550.

Weekends matter on their own. Across the season, 68.4% of the firearm deer have a Saturday or Sunday kill date, and the opener fell on a Saturday, so the spike combines an opener effect with a weekend effect that the feed cannot pull apart.

The 146,341 firearm deer cover every firearm season in the data, not only the statewide opener, and 10,802 of them have kill dates before Nov. 8. Almost all fall on Oct. 16 to 19, the dates the DNR's 2025 season list gives for the youth hunt and the early antlerless hunt. So Nov. 8 opened the statewide firearms season, and it was not the first gun day of the year. Set the 10,802 aside and the two days hold 48.5% of the 135,539 firearm deer registered from Nov. 8 on.

The statewide season was not one length everywhere. In the DNR's 2025 list, permit areas in the 100 series plus areas 604, 679 and 684 ran Nov. 8 to 23, and areas in the 200 series plus the other areas the DNR names ran Nov. 8 to 16. A late southeast firearms season ran Nov. 22 to 30 in a list of areas that includes 642 through 649, and muzzleloader ran Nov. 29 to Dec. 14. The DNR says one statewide firearms license now replaces the old A and B licenses. Muzzleloader deer are their own weapon type in the feed.

Firearm accounts for 78.5% of the season's registered deer. With one weapon that dominant, a two-day spike in firearm registrations is a large feature of the whole state's season.

Statewide, 57.1% of the 186,333 registered deer, every weapon combined, were classed as adult males. By permit area the share is far from flat. Among the 59 areas with at least 1,000 registered deer, it runs from 41.2% in area 645 (1,722 deer) to 86.2% in area 197 (1,097 deer).

Read that as harvest composition, not the herd's sex ratio. The share reflects which deer hunters were allowed and inclined to take. The DNR's page says the bag limit in antlerless lottery areas for firearm and muzzleloader hunters is one deer, which must be a legal buck unless the hunter applies for and receives an antlerless permit in the lottery. An area that issues few antlerless permits will tend to register mostly bucks whatever its herd looks like. We did not match each of the 10 areas in the table to its regulation type, so we cannot say which rule produced which share.

One pattern lines up with the season calendar, and we did not test it further. All five of the lowest-share areas (642, 643, 645, 646 and 649) appear on the DNR's 2025 list for both the shorter Nov. 8 to 16 season and the late southeast season. All five of the highest-share areas (110, 156, 171, 178 and 197) are numbered in the 100 series, which ran Nov. 8 to 23. Our paper on the buck-to-doe fingerprint explains why harvest ratios like these read cleanly only against a state's own rules and history.

The data are the Minnesota DNR's per-deer registration records for the 2025 season, 186,333 rows that FDR captured from the state's feed. The Perishable Record explains why capture matters: the feed is a current-season snapshot that the state rewrites each year. Kill dates are as the feed reports them, and late registrations and data corrections can move a few deer between days.

"Firearm" is the weapon type in the feed, and it spans the early hunts, the statewide season and whatever firearm hunts ran later. The counts are registered deer, not hunters afield or success rates, and harvest is not population: a busy day means hunters registered many deer and says nothing about how many were left. The permit-area table uses all weapons and only areas with at least 1,000 registered deer, so smaller areas are missing. Adult-male share is the share of registered deer classed as adult male, and permit rules differ by area.

The DNR's page, read Sept. 29, 2026, lists this year's dates. The 100 series plus areas 604, 679 and 684 run Nov. 7 to 22. The 200 series plus the other areas the DNR names run Nov. 7 to 15. The late southeast season runs Nov. 21 to 29 and muzzleloader runs Nov. 28 to Dec. 13. The opener is Saturday, Nov. 7, and the second Saturday is Nov. 14.

Our rule is to plan around your own permit area's calendar, because the statewide curve blends areas with different season lengths. The 2025 record says the volume is front-loaded: the opening weekend registered 65,726 deer, and the weekdays after it ran far lower. It also says the season does not end after the first weekend, since the second Saturday registered 13,359. In a 200-series area, Nov. 15 and 16 in 2025 were the last weekend of the statewide season. In a 100-series area another week followed. If you can give the woods only two days, the opener weekend is where the record shows the most deer registered, and the feed cannot tell you whether that meant the best hunting or the most company.

Read an area's adult-male share as a rules question. Before you treat a high share as buck opportunity, look up whether the area is an antlerless lottery area. Treat 2025 as a baseline. The DNR's 2026 page also lists the statewide shotgun zone repeal as now in effect, a rule change our 2025 data cannot speak to.