Oregon Elk Draw Odds, 2025: 73 of 152 Hunts Drew at 50% or Better, 10 Under 5%

In Oregon's 2025 elk draw, 73 of the 152 any-legal-weapon hunts with 100 or more first-choice applicants drew at 50% or better, and 16 drew every first-choice applicant. Ten hunts drew under 5%, and the hardest of them, Mt Emily Unit No. 2 (254Y1), drew 0.7% of 8,621 applicants. Each figure is a hunt-wide average across all point levels, with residents and nonresidents combined, so none of them is the odds for a hunter with a given number of points.

Across the 152 Oregon elk hunts we ranked, 73 drew at 50% or better in 2025, and 16 of those drew every first-choice applicant. At the other end, ten drew under 5%. The figure below shows how the rest fall between.

The hunts are the any-legal-weapon elk hunts in ODFW's 2025 elk preference point draw report, an Excel workbook posted on the agency's point summary reports page. We counted first-choice applicants only, with residents and nonresidents added together, and defined odds as tags drawn divided by first-choice applicants. The workbook has 252 hunts of that kind. We ranked the 152 with at least 100 first-choice applicants, because in a small applicant pool one tag moves the percentage too far to compare.

Counting hunts makes the draw look kinder than it feels, since applicants do not spread evenly across them.

The ten hunts under 5% are 10 of the 152, but they attracted 18,081 of the 81,892 first-choice applicants, or 22.1%, and drew 205 tags in all. Two of them do much of that work. Mt Emily Unit No. 2 (254Y1) attracted 8,621 first-choice applicants and Wenaha Unit No. 2 (256Y1) attracted 4,169. That is 12,790 people, or 15.6% of everyone in the ranking, and together the two hunts drew 96 tags.

For scale, Mt Emily Unit No. 2 alone attracted more first-choice applicants than the 15 easiest hunts combined, 8,621 against 6,278.

Below the top two, the tag counts get small quickly. Glass Hill Youth (252T2) drew 3 tags for 227 applicants, and Saddle Mtn Unit (210), Trask Unit (214), Wilson Unit (212) and Melrose Unit (223A) each drew exactly 10. The table stops at 7.8%, so all 15 of the hardest hunts issued tags to fewer than one first-choice applicant in twelve.

Hunt names repeat across the two tables with very different results. Saddle Mtn Unit (210) drew 10 tags for 707 first-choice applicants, or 1.4%, and Saddle Mtn Unit Youth (210T) drew 10 for 132, or 7.6%. Saddle Mtn Unit No. 1 (210X) and Saddle Mtn Unit No. 2 (210Y) sit in the easiest table, where all 1,278 and all 1,064 of their first-choice applicants drew. The draw data does not say what separates the four, and we did not read the hunt rules, so compare hunt codes and treat the name as a label.

The table lists 15 of the 16 hunts that drew everyone, largest applicant pools first; the sixteenth had fewer applicants than the last row. A result of 100.0% means every person who listed the hunt first drew a tag in 2025. That rests on one year's crowd, and next year's applicants can move any of these hunts down the list.

Every percentage here is 2025 tags drawn divided by 2025 first-choice applicants, taken from ODFW's draw workbook. It is a hunt-wide average over every point level, and it combines residents and nonresidents. The workbook reports the two groups separately, and the split can be lopsided: for Mt Emily Unit No. 2 it lists 56 tags for 8,127 resident applicants and 1 tag for 494 nonresident applicants.

The workbook also breaks each hunt out by preference point level. Nothing in this paper gives odds for any point level, and an individual hunter's chances depend on their points, on where they ranked second and later choices, and on next year's demand.

ODFW's applicants by hunt choice report also counts second through fifth choices, which we left out. It differs from the workbook by two applicants on one hunt, 266X (N Malheur Rvr No. 1), where the workbook shows 787 first-choice applicants and the report 789, and we used the workbook's count. Only any-legal-weapon hunts are ranked, and archery and muzzleloader hunts are separate draws. The 100 hunts with fewer than 100 first-choice applicants are left out. Odds describe who got a tag and say nothing about the elk you would find there.

Rank your candidate hunts by hunt code, with the hunt-wide odds beside each one. A name is a weak guide, as the Saddle Mtn hunts show.

For any hunt under 5%, treat the hunt-wide figure as a description of the crowd, and find your own point level in the workbook before you decide. A 0.7% average blends people with very different point totals.

A hunt at 100.0% is worth a look only if its rules and season fit your plan, since the percentage says only that everyone who listed it first drew a tag. These are 2025 results, so check ODFW's newest reports before you apply.

For elk harvest in other western states, see our papers on Wyoming elk hunt areas and Montana elk and mule deer.