Half Dome Permit Lottery Statistics

This chart shows Half Dome preseason lottery applications by day of the week.

On this page, you can find various statistics relating to the Half Dome permit lotteries to help you make an informed decision when you apply for the lotteries. While the statistics give you a sense of which days have lower or higher odds, they don't necessarily predict success rate this year.

The chart to the right shows the distribution of the preseason Half Dome permit lottery requests by day of the week.

The set of bar graphs below show how many permits have been requested for each date during the last Half Dome season. This graph shows actual number of permits requested for each day (225 permits are available each day). This graph shows the worst-case scenario for each day because each application will have only one of its permit dates filled (applications can have up to seven different dates requested).

 

Preseason Lottery Requests per Day

 

 

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Daily Lottery Success Rate per Day

 

 

Other Statistics for 2020

Season

June 5 through October 13, 2020 (delayed start due to park closure)

Preseason Lottery

Applications: 23,239 (34,098 in 2019)
Application success rate: 36% (28% in 2019)
Weekday choices success rate: 3.2% (2.6% in 2019)
Weekend choices success rate: 2.2% (1.6% in 2019)

Note: Application success rate was calculated based off entire application (all choices). Weekday & weekend success rate was calculated based on all individual choices in every application.

Daily Lottery

Applications: 31,928 (20,167 in 2019)
Application success rate: 7.3% (23% in 2019)
Weekday success rate: 9.5% (27% in 2019)
Weekend success rate: 4.3% (16% in 2019)

Note: 2020 quota was lower and cables were closed for two weeks in September due to hazardous air quality (smoke)

 

Yearly Summaries