Drawglass

Guide

Hunting Montana as a nonresident

A Montana resident walks into a license office and buys a general deer or elk license off the shelf. You cannot. As a nonresident you get a general deer or elk license only by drawing a combination license, and the drawing happens once a year, in April, for a hunt that starts in September. Here is the whole sequence.

What a nonresident actually buys

Montana sells nonresidents three general hunting packages through a random computer drawing. The General Big Game Combination carries a general deer license and a general elk license. The General Elk Combination carries the elk license only. The General Deer Combination carries the deer license only. All three also authorize fishing and upland game bird hunting, turkey excluded.

The caps are the part worth memorizing. The Elk Combination is issued inside the 17,000-license quota for the Big Game Combination, so those two licenses share one pool. The Deer Combination has its own pool of 4,600 licenses. You may apply for one combination license per year, and one only.

FWP's own wording is blunt: most nonresidents cannot buy a general elk or deer license over the counter at any price. The drawing is the door.

When and how to apply

Applications open online March 1, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. MST. The deadline is April 1, 2026 at 11:45 p.m. MST. The drawing runs in mid-April. Miss April 1 and your next chance is a returned license, covered below.

Montana runs two separate point systems, and nonresidents applying for a combination license use the second one. Bonus points are extra raffle tickets, squared before the drawing, and they apply to Montana's other drawings. Preference points are the combination-license system: 75 percent of nonresident combination licenses go to applicants in order of how many preference points they hold, and the other 25 percent go by random drawing to applicants holding none. A preference point costs $100, you may hold at most three, and you lose all of them if you draw or if you skip a year. FWP notes plainly that zero-point odds are sometimes better than pointed odds, depending on how many people buy in that year, and tells you to read the prior year's drawing statistics before deciding.

What it costs

The General Big Game Combination is $1,312. The General Elk Combination is $1,112. The General Deer Combination is $760. None of those is the full number. A conservation license ($10 for nonresidents), the base hunting license fee ($50), and an Angler AIS Prevention Pass ($7.50 for nonresidents, required because the combination includes a fishing license) are all bought separately, and every application carries a nonrefundable $5 fee. Add those four to the Big Game Combination and the cash out the door is $1,384.50 before a single preference point.

If you don't draw

Two doors stay open. The Alternate's List resells nonresident combination licenses that buyers return; you sign up through MyFWP from May 1 to June 1, 2026, pick one list only, and pay nothing until your name comes up. FWP says the odds vary greatly by year and that returns peak between early fall and the late-October general opener.

The other door is B licenses. A B license is an antlerless-only tag good in one district or group of districts, and it does not require a combination license. Nonresident Deer B is $75 and Elk B is $270, both by drawing with a June 1 deadline, both also sold over the counter once surplus opens. The surplus list for Deer B and Elk B takes sign-ups June 15 to July 15, 2026. A nonresident holding a combination license may add up to two Deer B licenses; a nonresident without one is capped at a single Deer B.

What the numbers mean

Switch this site to Nonresident and Montana columns change to the nonresident cohort's own rate: hunters afield and animals killed, nonresidents only, from the FWP harvest report. Nonresident rates usually read higher than resident rates. In the 2025 Montana deer data behind this site, nonresident success beat resident success in 110 of the 138 districts that report both cohorts. In HD 426 the split is 35.6 percent for residents and 56.3 percent for nonresidents.

FWP publishes the counts and not the reason, so treat any explanation as a guess and the gap as a fact. What matters when you plan is that the number you compare across districts should be the number for your own cohort. Every Montana unit page carries a Success by residency table with both columns and both hunter counts.

One limit: point-class rates, the 4-plus-point buck filters, are all hunters. FWP does not break point class out by residency, so those rows do not change when you switch the toggle, and the site says so on screen.

Sources

  1. Montana FWP — Nonresident License Fees — combination prices, application window and deadline, preference point price, Deer B and Elk B fees, $5 application fee. Accessed September 2026.
  2. Montana FWP — Hunt by Species: Elk — the 17,000 Big Game Elk/Deer Combination quota, what the Elk Combination includes, and that most nonresidents cannot buy a general elk license over the counter. Accessed September 2026.
  3. Montana FWP — Hunt by Species: Deer — the 4,600 Deer Combination quota and the one-combination-per-year rule. Accessed September 2026.
  4. Montana FWP — Applications, Drawings, and Bonus Points — the mid-April drawing date for combination licenses. Accessed September 2026.
  5. Montana FWP — Bonus and Preference Points — the 75/25 split, the three-point cap, and the loss of points on a successful draw or a skipped year. Accessed September 2026.
  6. Montana FWP — Hunting Requirements — the $10 nonresident conservation license and $50 base hunting license fee. Accessed September 2026.
  7. Montana FWP — Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention Pass — the $7.50 nonresident Angler AISPP. Accessed September 2026.
  8. Montana FWP — Nonresident Alternate's List — the May 1 to June 1, 2026 sign-up and how returned licenses are resold. Accessed September 2026.
  9. Montana FWP — Surplus Licenses — the June 15 to July 15, 2026 surplus sign-up and the nonresident Deer B holding limits. Accessed September 2026.
  10. Montana FWP — Harvest Reports — the hunter and harvest counts by residency behind the 110-of-138 comparison and the HD 426 rates. Accessed September 2026. See the Data page for the per-unit sources.

Glass Montana as a nonresident