Public Hunting Land by State, Measured

Nevada has 55.4 million acres of public land open to hunting. Pennsylvania has 4.1 million. Both of those numbers are real, and the gap between them explains less than you would think — because the more useful question is not how much public land a state has, but who runs it, and that changes what hunting there actually involves.

Here is every state, measured from the boundaries on our map.

The ranking

The number that matters more than the ranking

The top of that list is unsurprising: nine of the first ten states are western, because the federal government kept most of the West. What the acre count hides is that "public land hunting" is a structurally different activity depending on which side of the country you are standing on.

In Nevada, 47.3 million of those 55.4 million acres — 85% — are Bureau of Land Management ground. One federal agency, one set of rules, across an area larger than Utah. Nevada is 79% public land open to hunting; you are more often on it than off it.

In Pennsylvania, 3.6 million of 4.1 million acres — 87% — belong to the state. In New York it is 98% state land, in Oklahoma 88%, in New Jersey 89%. An eastern public-land hunter deals with a state game agency and its game lands, not a federal field office.

And a few states are neither: Missouri's public hunting ground is 96% U.S. Forest Service, essentially all of it the Mark Twain National Forest. Draw a line through Missouri and you have crossed from state game lands to a single national forest without leaving the middle of the country.

That is the practical takeaway. Before you scout a new state, find out which agency owns the ground — it determines the season rules you read, the access permits you need, and who to call. Every state's page on our map (Nevada, Pennsylvania, Alaska) links its wildlife agency's current regulations for exactly this reason.

How this was measured

Every number above comes from PAD-US, the USGS Protected Areas Database, as imported into our own map. Three decisions shaped it, and each one changes the answer:

Area is measured, not summed. PAD-US records overlap — the same refuge can appear more than once with slightly different boundaries, and designations stack on top of ownership. Adding up the acreage column double-counts all of it. These figures are the geometric union of each state's huntable parcels, so overlapping ground is counted once. It matters: Vermont sums to 489,072 acres and measures 454,720, a 7% difference. Bigger states diverge more.

Only ownership records, not proclamation boundaries. A national forest's proclaimed boundary is much larger than the land actually inside it. Counting both would inflate every western state.

Agencies whose land is broadly open. Included: Forest Service, BLM, state wildlife and natural-resource agencies, Fish & Wildlife refuges, and state trust land. Excluded: national parks, historical and military parks, and city and county parks, where hunting is generally prohibited. Marine national monuments are excluded too — Papahānaumokuākea alone is 283 million acres of ocean, and counting it would have put Hawaii first by a factor of seventy.

What this is not

This is a map of where hunting is broadly permitted by land ownership. It is not a legal guarantee about any specific acre, and it cannot be. Unit closures, season dates, weapon restrictions, and permit requirements are set by your state's wildlife agency and they change during the season. State trust land — 8.8 million acres in New Mexico alone — is typically open only with an access permit. National wildlife refuges permit hunting only on designated units.

Read the regulations. This tells you where to start looking, not what is legal where you end up.

Measured August 2026 from PAD-US 4.1. Public land boundaries on our map rebuild weekly; every layer's age is published on our data freshness page.