How much does a hunting lease cost in Montana?

A 300-acre hunting lease in Montana typically asks about $4,200 per year, with most comparable properties falling between $2,557 and $6,579. Smaller parcels cost more per acre and larger ones less.

What is the average price per acre for hunting land in Montana?

About $14.00 per acre per year for a 300-acre property, which is 19% below the national median of $17.32. Per-acre rates fall as properties get larger, so this figure is quoted at a fixed 300 acres to stay comparable between states.

Are these Montana lease prices what hunters actually pay?

No. Every figure here is an asking price — what landowners list at, not what a lease finally closes for. The model is fit on listing data, so it reflects what a property is likely to be advertised at.

How reliable is the Montana estimate?

Too few listings to stand on their own, so this rate leans heavily on the national median. It rests on 8 filtered lease listings from Montana. Across all states, roughly half of real listings fall inside the range shown, and state and acreage together explain about a quarter of the variation in asking price.

Hunting Lease Prices in Montana

$4,200

per year · 300 acres · Montana

Comparable properties list $2,557–$6,579, or about $14.00 per acre.

That is 19% below the national median of $17.32 per acre, ranking Montana 37 of 48 states by price.

What this rests on

Thin data

8 Montana listings

Too few listings to stand on their own, so this rate leans heavily on the national median.

By property size

Typical Montana lease prices

Yearly asking prices for a property with no amenities or premium habitat specified. Adding food plots, a cabin or a trophy species raises the estimate; the calculator below accounts for those.
Property size	Typical asking price	Usual range	Per acre
40 acres	$2,311	$1,479–$3,558	$57.76
100 acres	$3,032	$1,941–$4,669	$30.32
250 acres	$3,979	$2,547–$6,128	$15.92
500 acres	$4,887	$2,585–$8,029	$9.77
1,000 acres	$6,003	$2,625–$10,520	$6.00
2,500 acres	$7,877	$2,678–$15,038	$3.15

The market

Hunting Montana

Around a third of Montana is public hunting land, and its Block Management program pays private landowners to open ground to public hunting — a state-funded competitor to the private lease market. Rates sit well below the national median as a result. The private leases that do command money are typically river-bottom whitetail ground or ranches holding elk.

Nationally, Montana has more public hunting ground than most states — ranking 11 of 50 states at 32.3% public, and very few whitetails per square mile at 0.2 bucks taken per square mile. Neither figure feeds the estimate above; both are the ground truth a lease is negotiated against.

Elk
Mule deer
Whitetail deer
Pronghorn

Context, not price drivers — see the methodology note below.
Public hunting land	32.3% of the state 30,065,000 acres · 11 of 50
Bucks harvested	26,677 0.2 per square mile · 2022 season
Leased for	Elk, Mule deer, Whitetail deer, Pronghorn

Within the state

Where Montana prices differ

The $14.00 per-acre figure above is a Montana average. These are the sub-markets it averages over, and they do not trade alike:

Directional, not measured — the estimate is fitted at state level and has no sub-state resolution.
Eastern plains and river breaks	Whitetail in the bottoms and mule deer on the breaks; the conventional lease market.
Western valleys	Elk and whitetail ground, fragmented and closer to population.
Mountain front	Largely public; private value is about access to it rather than the acreage itself.

Your property

Price your own Montana land

The table above assumes nothing about your land beyond its size. Add your game species, habitat, forage and amenities for an estimate that reflects the property you actually have.

Calculate a Montana lease price

Nearby markets

How Montana compares

States whose hunting lease markets are priced closest to Montana.
State	Per acre	vs. Montana
New Mexico	$13.62	lower
Colorado	$13.91	lower
Washington	$13.96	lower
Idaho	$14.11	higher

Methodology

How we estimate Montana lease prices

The estimate comes from a model fit on 979 filtered hunting lease listings across 48 states. A state's rate and the way price scales with acreage are both measured from that data. 8 of those listings were in Montana, so the Montana rate is pulled most of the way back toward the national median, which is what the model does when a state cannot support its own estimate.

Three things are worth knowing before you quote these numbers:

These are asking prices. They are what landowners list at, not what a lease closes for.
State and size explain about a quarter of the variation. Roughly half of real listings fall inside the range shown, which is what two features can support — it is the honest width of the answer, not a rough edge waiting to be tuned out.
The land and deer figures above are context, not inputs. They come from Backcountry Chronicles (public hunting acreage) and the National Deer Association's 2024 Deer Report (2022 buck harvest). Neither feeds the estimate, and both correlate only weakly with what states actually charge.
Habitat, game and amenity adjustments are expert judgement, not fit from data — the listing feed does not carry those fields. They are set to be neutral on an average property, so they nudge the estimate rather than drive it.