How to Read a Montana Hunting District
You open Montana's deer and elk regulations expecting a guide, and what you get looks like a phone book. Columns of district numbers. "HD 380." A permit code you have never seen. Somewhere in those pages is the unit you are allowed to hunt and the season you are allowed to hunt it in, and you have an evening to figure it out.
So you do what every hunter does. You go looking for a map. The map you find shows a state carved into shapes with numbers printed across them, and it explains exactly none of what the numbers mean.
Here is the part nobody bothers to tell you. The numbers are not random, and they are not a secret. Montana built its hunting districts on one simple rule, and once you can see the rule, the phone book turns back into a map. This page teaches you that rule. By the end you will be able to read a district number you have never encountered and know, before you look up anything else, which part of Montana you are dealing with.
It is a small skill. It saves a season.
Quick facts, before the explanation
- Montana is divided into seven administrative regions, numbered 1 through 7, each with its own FWP regional office (FWP 2026 Deer/Elk/Antelope Regulations, "How to Use These Regulations," p.5).
- A hunting district's number tells you which region it belongs to. Region 1 districts start with 1. Region 7 districts start with 7.
- Districts run into the hundreds. FWP publishes no single statewide count, so anyone quoting you one exact total is guessing.
- A general license covers broad areas. A limited-entry permit is usually tied to a specific district.
- What you may hunt in a district, and when, is set by the FWP Commission and can change every year. Every date in this article is 2026.
The rule that unlocks the whole system
Montana's regulations state the numbering rule in one line, and it is worth quoting exactly. From the FWP 2026 Deer/Elk/Antelope Regulations, page 5: "Region 1 hunting districts start with 1 or 001, Region 2 starts with 2 or 002 etc."
That sentence is the key to the map.
The seven FWP regions run in a rough band across the state, each with an office that administers the districts inside it.
| Region | Office | District series |
|---|---|---|
| R1 Northwest | Kalispell | 100-series |
| R2 West-central | Missoula | 200-series |
| R3 Southwest | Bozeman | 300-series |
| R4 North-central | Great Falls | 400-series |
| R5 South-central | Billings | 500-series |
| R6 Northeast | Glasgow | 600-series |
| R7 Southeast | Miles City | 700-series |
So the number is not a label. It is an address. A district numbered 316 is a Region 3 district, and a district numbered 700 sits in Region 7, all without looking either one up. That is the entire point of the design.
FWP confirms it on the region pages themselves at fwp.mt.gov/aboutfwp/regions, where each office lists the districts it covers. The region is the administrative layer, and the district is the unit you actually buy a tag for.
The one caution is that the number places the district but does not describe it. The prefix tells you the region every time, and the regulations are the only authority on where the boundary actually runs. Treat the number as your index, not your map.
A worked example: District 700
Take the number 700.
By the rule, it belongs to Region 7, the Southeast region administered out of Miles City. Now look up what the regs call it. FWP names District 700 "Missouri Breaks–Prairie."
That name is doing real work. It tells you two things about the country in one breath. "Missouri Breaks" tells you broken river-canyon terrain, the kind of ground that holds mule deer and sits near bighorn country. "Prairie" tells you the rest of the unit opens into the dry grassland where eastern Montana pronghorn live.
Compare that to the other districts the regs name outright. District 150 is a Region 1 unit, District 280 is Region 2, and District 316 is a Region 3 unit the regs tag as backcountry. In each case the first digit places the district and the name tells you what lives there.
That is the difference between reading the regulations and being able to use them. One gives you a number. The other gives you a place.
If you want the country behind District 700's name, start with our guide to the Missouri Breaks, which is its own landscape with its own history and reputation. FWP files the Breaks bighorn herds in Region 6, against the district series there.
What a district actually controls
Here is where most first-timers go wrong. They treat the district number as one more piece of paperwork, when it is actually the thing that decides what you can hunt.
Montana splits its hunting opportunity into two very different systems, and the district sits at the center of both.
General licenses are valid across broad areas. FWP's own Montana Outdoors publication put it plainly in 2022: roughly 80% of the state is open to general-tag hunting. If you hold a general deer or elk license, you can hunt a wide swath of Montana without entering a draw for a district at all.
Limited-entry permits work the other way. These are the draws, and they are usually district-specific. The list runs from Deer Permit and Elk Permit through Deer B and Elk B, pronghorn, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, and bison. When you apply, you are applying for a specific unit, and the district number on the application is the district you are committing to.
That distinction has real money attached to it, and the money depends on who you are.
A Montana resident buys general deer and elk licenses over the counter. The 2026 figures: General Deer $16 for ages 18–61, or $8 for senior and youth hunters; General Elk $20, or $10 for senior and youth. Everyone also needs a Conservation License ($8 resident / $10 nonresident) and a Base Hunting License ($10 resident / $50 nonresident).
A nonresident cannot buy a general deer or elk license over the counter at all. They enter the Combination drawing instead, and in 2026 the options are the General Big Game (Deer & Elk) Combination at $1,312, the General Deer Combination at $760, and the General Elk Combination at $1,112. Each includes general deer and/or elk, upland game bird (turkey excluded), and a season fishing license, and you may hold only one Combination per year.
Read the district numbers on your permit the way you would read the address on a deed. It is the specific ground the document entitles you to.
There is one more layer inside a district worth knowing. Landowner Preference reserves 15% of a district's quota for qualifying landowners within that district. For deer, Deer B, and pronghorn the bar is 160+ acres of primarily agricultural land, and for elk and Elk B it is 640+ contiguous acres. Separately, 2,000 sponsored nonresident Deer Combination licenses are set aside statewide, and a landowner holding 640+ acres may sponsor up to two hunters.
None of this changes the numbering rule. It just means two hunters standing in the same district can be operating under entirely different sets of rules.
The points, because the district decides them too
Draw systems are where districts start to feel like a lottery, and Montana's is more predictable than it looks once you know the mechanics.
Bonus points add chances the way extra raffle tickets do, and FWP squares them before the draw. Their own worked example: 10 bonus points become (10 × 10) + 1 = 101 entries. You may buy one bonus point per license year per permit type, and points accumulate until you draw. That is the whole math, and it is why a decade of points on a hard unit is worth far more than ten single entries. We walk through the full mechanics in Montana bonus points, explained.
Preference points are a different animal, and the internet gets this wrong constantly. They apply only to the nonresident Combination drawing, where 75% of licenses go in preference-point order and 25% go to a random draw among zero-point applicants. Points max out at 3, cost $100 each, are lost if you skip a year, and are used up if you draw. They are not a loyalty ladder, and they do not carry over to any other permit.
Now the part that should shape how you pick a district. FWP states that "the odds of being drawn for many of the lotteries… are greater than 100 to 1." The West Garnet moose permit sits at roughly 2%. The East Fork Bitterroot mule deer buck permit awarded 4 permits in 2021: 80 residents at maximum points produced 1-in-20 odds, while 1,334 residents at zero points produced exactly one winner, or 1-in-1,334.
Those are the marquee units, and they are marquee for a reason. But the same regulations that hide a 2% moose permit also list draws that are genuinely achievable. Many pronghorn either-sex and Elk B antlerless drawings run at double-digit success rates. If your goal is to hunt Montana this fall rather than to wait a decade, that is where a district number gets you somewhere.
The land inside the district is the other half
A district is a legal boundary. It is not a habitat, and it is not an access guarantee.
Montana holds more than 30 million acres of state and federal land, nearly a third of the state (FWP Hunter Access). That breaks down roughly as 16 million acres of USFS national forest, 8.3 million acres of BLM (Montana/Dakotas), and 5.5 million acres of state school trust land — and hunting that last category requires a Conservation License.
The remainder is private, and Montana's rule there trips up visitors more than any other. Every hunter must have landowner permission on private property regardless of whether it is posted. There is no assumption of access and no forgiveness for not knowing.
This is why two districts with identical habitat can offer completely different hunts. One may be mostly national forest with trailheads and room to roam. The other may be a checkerboard of private ranchland where the public sections are reachable only if you know which corners connect. The district number is the same size on the page. The experience is not.
Block Management is the state's answer to that problem, and it is the most useful access program for a hunter who does not own land. Landowners enroll private ground in exchange for payment, and the public gets free hunting access in return. In 2025 the program carried 1,326 cooperators covering 6.81 million acres, with $12.5 million paid to participating landowners. FWP publishes the Hunter Access Guide by August 15 each year, and it tells you which properties are open, under what rules, and whether you sign in at a box or call ahead.
We cover the sign-in rules and how to use the guide in Block Management Areas, explained.
One correction while we are here. Montana has no program branded "Walk-In" the way Wyoming and Colorado do. If you read about a Montana walk-in program, it is either a Block Management sign-in area or the Upland Game Bird Enhancement Program's "Open Fields" walk-in bird hunting.
Where the official maps live
FWP publishes the maps. Not a third-party app, not a forum screenshot. FWP.
Those maps are meant to be read alongside the regulations, not instead of them, and the reason is simple. The map shows you where the boundary runs, while the regulations tell you what you may do once you are standing inside it, what permit you need, and which season applies. Reading one without the other is how hunters end up on the wrong side of a line they did not know existed.
A practical habit is to cross-check the district against its region office before you commit. The seven offices are Kalispell (R1), Missoula (R2), Bozeman (R3), Great Falls (R4), Billings (R5), Glasgow (R6), and Miles City (R7). If your district number starts with a 4, the North-central office in Great Falls is your point of contact, and our Region 4 overview is a reasonable place to start understanding that country.
Then ask the question the map cannot answer. Which animals actually live there? Elk, per FWP's field guide, are "widely distributed in forested and rugged areas… increasing in abundance in eastern regions." A district that looks empty on a boundary map may hold plenty of elk if the habitat is right, and our Montana elk hunting guide covers where the herds concentrate and what tag strategy each region demands.
The map tells you the shape. It does not tell you the animal.
The honest picture
We are going to say the thing that the outfitter brochures and the AI-written blog posts will not.
A district number is not a plan. It is a boundary, a set of rules, and a line on a map. Everything that makes a hunt worth taking — the animal, the access, the season, the crowd, the weather, the work — either sits inside that boundary or fails to, and none of it is printed on the number.
Do not pick a unit off a map alone. A district can look perfect in shape and hold almost nothing you want to hunt. It can hold exactly what you want and still be effectively unhuntable because the public ground is landlocked behind private ownership. The map will not show you that. The Hunter Access Guide and a phone call will.
Do not assume access. Montana's private-land rule is unambiguous: permission is required whether or not the land is posted. A district where most of the ground is private is a district where your tag is only as good as the handshake you can get. If you are not prepared to knock on doors or hunt enrolled Block Management properties, pick units with real public acreage when you are choosing a district, not after.
And do not confuse the number with the odds. Two districts can both sit in Region 3 and offer wildly different chances. The East Fork Bitterroot mule deer permit at 1-in-1,334 for a zero-point resident exists in the same state as antlerless Elk B drawings running at double-digit success. If you are new to Montana, the honest move is to spend your first season in an achievable district and learn how the state works, rather than burning a decade of points on one number because someone on a forum called it legendary.
We would rather tell you that now than have you learn it standing in a canyon at the end of November.
FAQ
How many hunting districts does Montana have? FWP does not publish a single statewide count, so any exact figure you see quoted is unsourced. The districts run into the hundreds, and each region keeps its own series. The number matters less than the prefix, because the prefix tells you where you are.
What does the number on a Montana hunting district mean? It means the region. FWP's own rule: "Region 1 hunting districts start with 1 or 001, Region 2 starts with 2 or 002 etc." A 400-series district is Region 4 and a 700-series district is Region 7, which places the unit on the map before you open anything else.
Do I need a permit for a specific district? It depends on what you are hunting and which license you hold. General licenses cover broad areas, and roughly 80% of the state is open to general-tag hunting. Limited-entry permits, including Deer Permit, Elk Permit, Deer B, Elk B, pronghorn, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, and bison, require an application and are usually tied to a specific district.
Can a nonresident just buy a general deer or elk license and go? No. Nonresidents cannot buy general deer or elk licenses over the counter in Montana. They enter the Combination drawing, with 2026 options at $1,312 for the Big Game Deer & Elk Combination, $760 for the Deer Combination, and $1,112 for the Elk Combination. Only one Combination per nonresident per year.
How do I find out what land inside a district is open to hunt? Start with FWP's Hunter Access Guide, published by August 15 each year. It lists Block Management properties, sign-in requirements, and access rules. Then call the district's region office for anything the guide does not settle. Do not rely on a boundary map alone, because it cannot show you whether the ground is public or private.
Find the district before you find the tag
You now hold the rule. The first digit of any Montana district number tells you its region, and that one fact will let you read a phone book's worth of regulations without losing your place.
What the rule cannot do is tell you which district is worth your points, your fuel, and your one trip. That takes the map.
Our interactive Montana hunting district map lets you layer species, season, public land, and draw difficulty over the same boundaries FWP publishes. Look at a district, then look at what is actually inside it. It is the fastest way to turn a number you cannot read into a trip you can plan.
Start with the district. Everything else follows from there.
If you would rather skip the guessing, the Draw Odds & Deadline Calendar puts every FWP deadline and fee beside the districts that matter, so a unit you pick in spring still fits the season you hunt in fall.