Indiana · Pheasant · 2026 Edition
Indiana Pheasant Season 2026: Dates & Bag Limits
01 — Seasons
| Season | Zone | Dates |
|---|---|---|
| Regular season (cock only) | Statewide | Nov 1 – Dec 15 |
02 — Bag limits
| Daily — statewide (roosters only) | 2 rooster pheasants |
|---|---|
| Possession — statewide | 4 (twice the daily limit) |
03 — Shooting hours
No shooting-hours restriction — legal at any hour during the open season.
Rule: No statewide shooting-hours restriction on pheasant. The only hours Indiana codifies for small game are a February-only exception tied to specific properties for rabbit; nothing in the pheasant rules sets a time of day.
04 — License
Pheasant hunters in Indiana need an Indiana hunting license — an Indiana Gamebird Habitat Stamp ($11, resident and nonresident) in addition to a hunting license — funds habitat and pheasant stocking on public land; not independently confirmed on the official fee page that pheasant specifically requires it, but consistently reported by IDNR program materials and secondary sources
Indiana hunting license cost →
Where to hunt public land in Indiana — WMAs by county & access rules →
05 — FAQ
When does pheasant season open in Indiana?
The earliest 2026 opener is November 1, 2026. See the table above for each segment and zone.
When does pheasant season end in Indiana?
The latest 2026 closing date is December 15, 2026. Individual segments and zones can close earlier — see the table above.
Can I shoot hen pheasants in Indiana?
See the bag limit table above — most states restrict the daily bag to roosters only, but rules vary and this is worth double-checking against Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish & Wildlife before you hunt.
How many pheasants can you shoot in Indiana per day?
2026 bag limits: Daily — statewide (roosters only) — 2 rooster pheasants. Possession — statewide — 4 (twice the daily limit). Limits are set per zone and per permit — check the agency's own regulations before you hunt.
What time can you start shooting pheasant in Indiana?
There is no shooting-hours restriction — pheasant may legally be hunted at any hour during the open season in Indiana. The rule is: No statewide shooting-hours restriction on pheasant. The only hours Indiana codifies for small game are a February-only exception tied to specific properties for rabbit; nothing in the pheasant rules sets a time of day.
Can I hunt pheasant on my own land in Indiana without a license?
Indiana farmland owners (resident or nonresident) and the spouse/children living with them may hunt, fish, and trap without a license on land they own; a resident lessee who actually farms it gets the same right. This applies to farmland only — non-farm acreage doesn't qualify — and a nonresident owner needs to be from a state that grants Indiana landowners the same right, plus carry proof of ownership.
Verified · Indiana Department of Natural Resources · Last verified 2026-08-15
Publisher's note. Direct in.gov requests returned ECONNREFUSED to the automated fetcher used for this project, so this PDF (the official 'Indiana 2026-2027 Hunting & Trapping Seasons' one-page chart) was read via a text-extraction proxy (r.jina.ai) instead, fetched twice with consistent results. The chart states plainly: 'Pheasant (statewide-cock only) Nov. 1 – Dec. 15, 2026', daily limit 2, and a separate possession-limit note elsewhere on the chart applying to pheasant/quail/rabbit/squirrel/frogs/turtles of 'two times the daily bag limit' (so 4). The chart does not carry a shooting-hours column for pheasant specifically (only deer, turkey, migratory birds, and waterfowl have stated hours on this document) — general small-game shooting hours of sunrise to sunset are cited for pheasant by secondary aggregators (eRegulations-style sites) but that was not independently confirmed against an official Indiana source in this pass, so shootingHours is omitted here rather than guessed. Indiana's Gamebird Habitat Stamp fee ($11, resident and nonresident) was confirmed on the official in.gov license-fees page (via the same proxy), but that page's raw content did not itself list which species require the stamp — the pheasant/quail/turkey/dove requirement comes from IDNR program pages and secondary sources, not directly from the fee-table page. Indiana's wild pheasant hunting is nominally statewide, but wild birds are realistically concentrated in a handful of northern grassland-managed Fish & Wildlife Areas (Willow Slough, Pigeon River, Kingsbury, Sugar Ridge) and reserved Gamebird Habitat Areas in Benton, Jasper, Newton, Warren, and White counties; Indiana also runs its own put-and-take/stocked-release pheasant program on six other FWAs (Atterbury, Glendale, J.E. Roush Lake, Pigeon River, Tri-County, Winamac) starting later in November, separate from the general wild season captured here — Indiana was not flagged as a 'B' (stocked-designation) state for this build, so no access block was added, but the stocked track exists and should not be confused with the wild season dates above. No youth-only pheasant day was found. SHOOTING HOURS: checked 312 IAC 9-4-8 (Pheasants) directly — it sets season dates only, no time-of-day restriction. Indiana's small game generally carries no statewide hunting-hours rule (confirmed against the squirrel and rabbit regulations too — see those files); the only hours Indiana codifies for small game are a February-only, specific-property exception for rabbit. EXPLICIT shootingHours MARKER (2026-08-27): this file now carries shootingHours.unrestricted = true. Simply omitting the field did NOT work and had been silently wrong on the live page: the season templates read season.shootingHours ?? meta.shootingHours, so an absent block fell through to the state-level default in states.json and the page printed a computed sunrise/sunset window plus a rule the law does not impose - while the licence section right below it said the opposite. The templates now honour the marker and print the no-restriction sentence instead. The original reasoning stands: any offset, including 0/0, would state a restriction the law does not impose.