A change in how New Mexico will round total quotas for 2020 tag allocations will have a meaningful impact on nonresident and outfitter draw odds in some cases.

By state statute New Mexico residents are required to receive a minimum of 84% of the total big game permits issued in the drawing. The remaining permits are issued to outfitters (10%) and nonresidents (6%).

Historically however, the manner in which they were rounding tag numbers to meet these allocation percentages would sometimes result in them adding an additional tag to the established total quota. And in many cases when they did that, the end result would be that technically New Mexico residents may not be getting the minimum 84% of permits issued. This was a problem.

For example, a hunt with a total tag quota of 60 would have been allocated in the following manner in 2019:

Because of the +1 added for nonresident rounding, 61 tags were issued. But as a result, the residents now only received 83.6% of the permits issued.

In 2020 and beyond, any rounding up that results in additional tags being added to the original overall quota will not be allowed. So in our example above the nonresident total tags issued would be 3, not 4. And as a result, it is extremely likely that nonresident draw odds for this hunt will go down in 2020.

To further illustrate how rounding will work in 2020, here is another example with a total tag quota of 165:

That's a lot of math to keep track of if you are researching, so if you are a PEAK member we have added some notes to the 2020 hunt dates table on each unit page to assist. EXAMPLE:

We have also added the total quota from 2019 to the hunt dates table for a quick compare and to make sure you are comparing apples to apples when evaluating if the new rounding rules are likely to impact the draw odds for 2020.

Under the new rules, the likely minimum number of total quota must be at least 7 (vs. 5 in 2019) in order for an outfitter to draw a tag, and a minimum of 13 (vs. 10 in 2019) for a nonresident to be eligible for a tag.

To give you an idea of the overall impact on total tags issued, we did a quick analysis on 2020 hunt codes and total quotas. The following table shows the # of tags that potentially WILL NOT be issued in 2020 using the new rounding rules, that would have been issued using the rounding rules from 2019. Note that this assumes demand is greater than the quota for all hunt codes which in practice isn't necessarily true for every hunt.

It should also be pointed out that the Drawing Quotas section on page 13 of the 2020 - 2021 NM Rules & Info book states that "up to" 10% of tags will go to outfitters and "up to" 6% of tags will go to nonresidents. According to the sources we spoke with at the NMGDF, these "up to" percentages, after applying the new rounding rules, are actually dedicated quotas for the respective applicant types assuming there is sufficient demand. This is different than say Arizona, where "up to" literally means no tags are specifically set aside to meet nonresident objectives.

And in addition, if you are reading this, that means you are probably a step ahead of the average applicant who might not be paying attention. So for that, we wish you good draw karma! Best of luck this application season!