Six animals.Six ways yourground earns.

Whitetail is the animal the American lease market is built around. Nearly every hunting club in the Southeast exists because a group of people wanted deer ground, and nearly every per-acre price you will ever be quoted is a whitetail price with everything else thrown in free.

Lease range

$5 – $45/ac

Peak movement

The rut

Elk is where the tag matters more than the ground. Public-land opportunity keeps contracting as states move away from over-the-counter licenses, which makes two things valuable at once: private ground that holds animals, and the landowner allocation that gets you a license to hunt them.

Guided range

$5k – $12k

Archery season

2 – 30 SEP

Turkey is the season that keeps a lease earning after deer closes. It is also the clearest example of value a landowner already owns and almost never charges for — most Southeastern deer leases include spring turkey at no additional cost, on ground that other people would pay separately to hunt.

Season

Spring

GA private opener

27 MAR

Waterfowl is the only access product on this list where the landowner is selling infrastructure rather than ground. Pumps, levees, water control structures, and planted moist-soil units are what make a rice field or a flooded timber block worth leasing — and every one of them is an annual operating cost.

Priced by

Blind or gun

Framework

Federal

Upland is the value nearly every deer lease gives away. Dove fields, quail cover, and pheasant ground exist on property already leased for deer, in a season that does not overlap, for hunters who would happily pay separately — and almost none of it is charged for.

TX dove opener

1 SEP

Daily bag

15 birds

Hogs are the only species on this list a landowner genuinely wants fewer of. That inverts the usual economics: access is cheap, it runs year-round, and the landowner's real motivation is damage control rather than revenue. It also makes hogs the most reliable way to keep a property earning in the eight months nothing else is open.

Season

Year-round

Guided day rate

$350 – $900