Colorado Elk and Deer Draws, 2023 to 2025: The Gaps in First-Choice Odds

The percentage shown for a first-choice hunt addresses a tightly limited question. Colorado's reports released after its draws make that limit clear. During the primary draws held in 2023, 2024 and 2025, adults applying as Colorado residents received their top-listed hunt at rates of 51.7% for elk and 53.1% for deer. Licenses went to 18.8% of applications naming an elk hunt in the second slot and 9.9% of those naming a deer hunt there. The third and fourth slots had still lower rates. These backup calculations use every listing of a hunt as the denominator, even listings submitted by people who already received a license. That makes each calculated rate a floor for applicants who remain eligible. Hunts that awarded no licenses at second choice also accounted for most backup listings.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) releases recaps for all hunt codes. Its statistical report pages explain that applications submitted before the draw occupy the left side, with results after the draw on the right. Preference point levels separate the first-choice figures. Each later slot, second, third or fourth, gets a single total. That format is consistent with CPW's rule that points count only at the first choice. We calculate each draw rate reported here by dividing CPW's printed license total for that choice by its printed application total.

The first-choice portion requires care: a hunter can request only a preference point. For elk, that code is EP99999P; deer uses DP99999P. Both appear in the recaps with applicants but no drawn licenses, matching CPW's description of its point-only code. Together, the three draws recorded 115,200 resident adult applications under the elk code and 97,636 under the deer code. These make up 33.5% of all first-choice elk applications and 29.7% of their deer counterparts. Including that code would put elk's first-choice percentage at 34.4%, rather than 51.7%. Our first-choice calculation excludes it and relies on the report's Total Choice rows. CPW also explains on its page that hunters requesting only a point in the first slot may still name hunts in slots two through four. Their applications therefore remain in the backup totals.

The reports place adults applying as nonresidents in a separate column, which we keep separate from resident totals. Their percentages follow a similar downward pattern. For elk, the first slot is 53.5%, followed by 18.5% in the second, 4.5% in the third and 2.1% in the fourth. Deer starts at 39.9%, then falls to 7.0%, 1.7% and 1.2% across the remaining slots. Over the five draws spanning 2021 to 2025, resident elk's second-slot percentage ranged from 18.6% to 21.2%. The deer percentage ranged from 9.6% to 13.8%.

The recaps reveal two features of this decline without measuring either feature's share. Progressively fewer applications use the later slots. Across all elk applications from resident adults, including point-only requests, 51.2% named another hunt in the second slot, 23.8% in the third and 14.3% in the fourth. For deer applications, those shares were 53.1%, then 25.8%, then 15.8%. Some hunts also exhaust their licenses earlier in the process. For elk hunt EF061O4R, the 2025 report lists Choice 2 under Drawn Out At. That hunt awarded licenses to 10 among its 166 resident adults who listed it second.

The primary draw in Colorado limits hunters to a single license for each species. Receiving a license for the top-listed hunt therefore rules out another award in the second slot. That successful hunter may still have named a second hunt, however, and our combined 18.8% calculation includes that listing among the applications counted. We calculated 18.8% directly from the report: 33,153 licenses awarded in the second slot divided by 176,317 applications from resident adults naming a second elk hunt.

The report does not identify how many of those 176,317 applications came from the 118,433 people who received their first-listed hunt. An exact percentage for everyone else therefore cannot be calculated, although limits can. With no first-choice recipients naming another hunt, the percentage remains 18.8%. If all of them named one, the licenses would come from at most 176,317 less 118,433, leaving 57,884 eligible listings and a percentage of 57.3%. For deer, the overall percentage is 9.9%, with an upper limit of 33.4%. These limits come from math applied to combined printed totals; they do not describe an observed range. The subtraction uses all applicants who received their first-listed hunt, rather than restricting the calculation to unsuccessful hunters, since point-only applicants can also name backup hunts.

Of the full 344,293 elk applications submitted by resident adults, including point-only requests, 34.4 per 100 received the top-listed hunt, 11.7 received a backup hunt and 53.9 received no license.

Resident adults received no elk licenses at second choice in 56.0% of hunt-years. Here, a hunt-year means a single hunt code for a single draw. Those cases made up 57.5% of elk listings in the second slot. For deer, hunt-years with no second-choice licenses issued to resident adults made up 60.8% of all deer hunt-years and accounted for 73.0% of all deer second-choice listers.

The combined elk percentage of 18.8% and deer percentage of 9.9% mix many zero results with hunts that awarded licenses at second choice. Only 6.1% of hunt-years for elk, versus 3.4% for deer, returned percentages of 75% or higher for applicants naming the hunt second.

We tested how the pattern carried across years, limiting the check to hunts where at least 10 resident adults listed the hunt second during each of three consecutive draws. There were 726 elk hunt-years with awards at second choice in both preceding draws. Of these, 656 made such awards again, a rate of 90.4%. Among 1,225 elk hunt-years with no such awards in either preceding draw, 61 awarded some the following year, a rate of 5.0%. For deer, repeat awards occurred in 646 out of 736 cases (87.8%); awards after two years without any occurred in 65 out of 1,251 cases (5.2%). Hunts awarding licenses in just one of the preceding years fell between those groups: elk at 45.3% and deer at 50.5%. A hunt can supply as many as three overlapping forecasts. The counts should therefore be read as a recurring pattern rather than treated as independent trials.

Among these four states, our table supports calculations for individual choices only in Colorado. Utah explains on its odds page that the reports cover selections listed first and nothing beyond them. For Wyoming, our rows for the second and third slots contain applicant totals but show no drawn licenses. In Arizona, the draw considers the first two selections together following a 20% bonus point pass. We therefore did not extend this calculation method to Arizona.

The final column works through the arithmetic for a group with two members. Colorado uses the lower point total of the pair, 3. Wyoming takes an average of 6.5, and its official page leaves treatment of a half point unspecified. Arizona takes 6.5 upward to 7; Utah takes it downward to 6. For first-choice odds examined by individual hunt in another state, read our Oregon elk paper.

We examined 10 recap files from CPW, with both deer and elk covered for 2021 to 2025, totaling 9,609 pages. For each page, adding the four choice rows reproduced the Grand Total row. All 115,308 cells passed that check. Our stored draw records agreed with the printed totals for the second, third and fourth slots in 57,420 out of 57,420 cells for each slot. For the first slot, agreement covered only 56,633 out of 57,420 cells. The 787 discrepancies affect 170 hunt-years among the 460 with point grids extending onto two pages. In those cases, the stored records omit rows from the second page. Without correction, those records would put the elk first-choice percentage at 53.1%, compared with the printed-total result of 51.7%.

These percentages combine many hunts, with application totals determining each hunt's weight. Any individual hunt can differ sharply from that combined result. Because the recaps do not connect an applicant's selections, the totals support no tighter limits than those given above. Draw reports issued in May 2026 have a changed format and are excluded from these calculations. We read every rule shown in the table on September 29, 2026; agencies make changes to those rules.

Before assigning a hunt a backup slot, check its own results for applications naming it second. Hunts with second-choice awards in both preceding draws made such awards again in 90.4% of elk cases and 87.8% of deer cases. Where neither preceding draw produced a second-choice award, a following award appeared in only 5.0% of elk cases and 5.2% of deer cases. Treat such a hunt as a long shot instead of a plan. Those figures combine hunt-years; they are not individual applicants' odds.

You cannot receive a license from a blank choice, so use every slot for which you have a hunt you would honestly choose. Backup slots accounted for 25.3% of elk licenses awarded to resident adults and 14.8% of their deer licenses. When applying with a group, keep in mind that Colorado uses the pair member's lower point total.