Hunting & Fishing License Dashboard

The Hunting & Fishing License Dashboard helps characterize license buyers and trends over time. No two states’ license structures are the same and as such the methodology standardizes licenses across states to make them comparable. This is currently the only up-to-date source for state, regional, and national hunting and fishing license sales; and it includes additional metrics such as demographics (gender and age), license rate, new recruits, churn rate, and daily/monthly purchases. If you are looking for hunting and fishing license totals submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, please visit their Funding Sources Page. If you want to see the most recent survey data of participation, please see the 2022 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation.

Summarization Process

Introduction

The R3Dashboard.org application collects daily license sales transaction data, and reports license holders and license purchases by time period, sport, and certain demographic characteristics.

Current Characteristics

The current values used for summarization and reporting are:

Time Period:

• Daily
• Monthly
• Annually

Sport

• Hunting
• Fishing
• Bowhunting
• All Sports

Demographics

• Gender (Male, Female, Other, All)
• Age Range (18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 18-64)
• Residency (Resident, Non-Resident, All)

Reported Licenses

The application collects transaction data for a broad range of licenses, but currently only reports data for licenses that grant primary privileges. Licenses that grant primary privileges are those that enable an individual to participate in a sport (hunting or fishing) without the need for any additional license or permit.

Example: A permit to hunt a specific animal or within a specific geographic region within the state, that requires the holder to also hold a general hunting license, would not be considered as granting a primary privilege, and would not be included.

The specific privileges granted by each license are defined by each state. Licenses that grant privileges for multiple sports, such as combination hunting/fishing licenses, are included in each sport’s summarizations. Some licenses that are not specifically combination licenses might still be counted for multiple sports. For instance, bowhunting licenses that grant primary privileges are included in the summarizations of both the Bowhunting and Hunting sports.

Example: A Combination Hunting/Fishing license would be counted in both the Hunting and Fishing sports summarizations (as well as in All Sports) for the applicable time period.

Secondary, or ”add-on” hunting privileges specifically designated for Deer, Upland Gamebird, Migratory Bird/Waterfowl, and Turkey are collected with the intention of future reporting, but not currently reported. Similarly, Saltwater Angling license/permit sales data are also collected but not currently reported.

Age Ranges

Due to the variety of ways that different states administer junior and senior licenses (paid, discounted, free, no license needed, etc.), the application reporting does not include licenses for individuals who were under 18 years of age or over 64 years of age for the time period being reported.

Multi-Year and Lifetime Licenses

Licenses which are valid for multiple years are counted in all time periods between the effective date of the license and the expiration date of the license, inclusive of those dates.

Lifetime licenses are counted in all time periods going forward from the effective date of the license, however, historical license data in the application goes back at most to 2013. As such, lifetime licenses purchased prior to 2013 are not accounted for in the application’s reporting.

Sales Transactions

Within the application, a sales transaction represents the purchase by an individual of a particular license. Multiple licenses purchased at the same time are identified within the application as multiple individual sales transactions.

The application does not report individual sales transactions. Instead, those sales transactions are summarized into counts of License Purchases and License Holders for reporting purposes.

License Purchases

For the purposes of this application and its reporting, a License Purchase represents an individual who purchased one or more licenses granting primary privileges during the applicable time period and for the applicable sport. The effective and expiration dates of the individual licenses are not considered when summarizing purchases.

Example: An individual who purchases a license on October 15, 2021 would be included in the license purchase summarizations for October 15, 2021, the month of October 2021, and the year 2021, regardless of when the license becomes effective or expires.

License Holders

For the purposes of this application and its reporting, a License Holder represents an individual who holds one or more licenses granting primary privileges that are valid on at least one day during the applicable time period and for the applicable sport. Validity is determined by comparing the reporting date(s) to the effective and expiration dates of the license.

Example 1: An individual who purchases a license on September 15, 2021 that is valid from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022 would be included in the license holder summarizations for every day and month between October 1, 2021 and September 30, 2022, inclusive, as well as for both years.

Example 2: An individual who purchases a license on September 15, 2021 that is valid from September 15, 2021 through September 21, 2021 (i.e., a one-week license) would be included in the license holder summarizations for every day between September 15, 2021 and September 21, 2021, inclusive, the month of September 2021, and the year 2021.

In some cases, licenses are sold after their on-record effective dates. For instance, some states sell annual licenses year-round that have an effective date of January 1. In these cases, the effective date of the license for our reporting purposes is the purchase date, as the purchaser was not technically a license holder until the license was purchased.

Example 3: An individual who purchases a license on March 15, 2021 that is valid from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2021 (i.e., a calendar-year license) would be included in the license holder summarizations for every day and month between March 15, 2021 and December 31, 2021, inclusive, and the year 2021.

Unique Purchaser Constraint

The application collects data on individual sales transactions. Because the reporting focus of the application is on licensed individuals, the application does not simply count up these sales transactions. All summarizations are performed under a Unique Purchaser constraint. That is, an individual is only counted once regardless of the number licenses purchased in the applicable time period for the applicable sport.

So, if an individual buys multiple primary privilege licenses on the same day for the same sport, that individual will be counted only once as a purchase for that day. Likewise, if an individual holds multiple primary privilege licenses on the same day for the same sport, that individual will be counted only once as a license holder for that day.

It should be noted, however, that because of this Unique Purchaser constraint, monthly summarizations are not merely sums of the applicable days, nor are annual counts merely the sums of the applicable months. A purchaser/license holder may be counted in the reporting for multiple individual days in a given month, but that purchaser will still be counted only once for that month, and only once for that year. Likewise, if a purchaser buys both hunting and fishing licenses, that individual will be counted once in each of those sport categories, but will only be counted once in the reporting of the All Sports category.

Example: An individual buys a hunting license on the 3rd of March, a hunting/fishing combination license on the 20th of the same month, and a bowhunting license on October 10th of the same year. That individual’s transactions will show up as only one purchase in each of the following summarizations:

• Hunting and All Sports purchases on March 3rd
• Hunting, Fishing, and All Sports purchases on March 20th
• Hunting, Fishing, and All Sports purchases for the month of March
• Hunting, Bowhunting, and All Sports purchases on October 10th
• Hunting, Bowhunting, and All Sports purchases for the month of October
• Hunting, Fishing, Bowhunting, and All Sports purchases for the year

Where the individual shows up in the License Holder reporting will depend on the effective and expiration dates of the licenses, but will be subject to the same constraints for overlapping licenses.

Annual Integrations

In some cases where states are as yet unable to implement a nightly integration with the R3Dashboard application, they will instead periodically (typically annually and/or semi-annually) send manual data extracts which will be ingested into the application and summarized in the same manner as outlined above. These states’ data will be presented in the Dashboard visualization as soon as it is available, but for consistency of reporting, the data will not be available in the Daily Purchases or License Holders visualizations until after the close of the year.