Maine Hunting License Cost: $26.00 and Up

A resident hunting licence in Maine is $26.00, sold as the Big Game Hunting (16 and older). Maine is one of eleven in this reading where the tags come with the licence rather than on top of it, which makes the price on the fee page the price of the hunt. 39 of the 50 states are built the other way, and in those the licence is the smaller half. A Maine resident buys a $26.00 big game hunting licence, which already covers an antlered deer statewide, then adds permits for whatever else is on the list, $20 for turkey, $10 for bear, $12 for an antlerless deer permit that is drawn first and sold later, and there is no hunter education birth year cutoff because the course is required of anyone who has not held an adult licence before. Maine prints its licence prices without a sentence beside them saying when the licence stops working. The fee is on the page and the clock is not, so the expiry is a question for the agency rather than an answer on its website. 2 of the 50 states read here leave the clock off the fee page, while 9 run to 31 December and 9 give a full year from the day of sale.

Everything a Maine licence holder needs for the species it names is in the licence itself. That is unusual: 39 of the 50 states read here sell the animal separately from the right to hunt it, and Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and West Virginia do not.

Maine prints its licence prices without a sentence beside them saying when the licence stops working. The fee is on the page and the clock is not, so the expiry is a question for the agency rather than an answer on its website. 2 of the 50 states read here leave the clock off the fee page, while 9 run to 31 December and 9 give a full year from the day of sale.

Maine requires hunter education, and it sets the requirement without a birth year cutoff, so the test is what the applicant has done rather than when they were born. 29 of the 50 states read here use a birth year instead, and those years run from 1949 to 1986. Maine ties the course to licence history rather than to a birth year: an adult firearms applicant must show either an approved hunter safety course or an adult firearms hunting licence held in any year from 1976 onward, and archery applicants need an archery course or an adult archery licence held in any year after 1979. Maine also issues an apprentice or mentored licence, which is a different document with its own conditions and its own page at Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

$115.00 for the Nonresident Big Game Hunting (16 and older), against $26.00 on the other side of the residency line. Tags are priced separately for nonresidents too, and both figures are in the table on this page. Maine defines a resident in its own words rather than by a count of days, and the definition is quoted below because the price on one side of it is rarely close to the price on the other.

Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife issues it, and sells it through the licensing system linked at the top of this page. Prices, tags and the licence year all come off that agency's own pages, which is also where a fee change appears first.

Every figure here was read on 23 September 2026 off Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife's own fee pages and links back to the page it came from. Fees are set by statute or by a commission and move between seasons, so the link beside each price is what governs on the day.