Written by HLRBO Staff|
Last updated
Every state has a recreational use statute limiting what a landowner owes a hunter who gets hurt on the property, and in a good number of states that protection ends the moment money changes hands. That is the whole problem with a handshake lease. Most landowners assume the statute covers them, and most have never read the sentence in it that decides whether it does.
What a recreational use statute actually does
These laws exist to open ground up. Beginning with a 1965 model act from the Council of State Governments, states passed them to take the fear out of letting the public walk in. The National Agricultural Law Center sums up the result plainly: they "protect qualifying landowners from persons injured because of a landowner's negligence, if the injured persons were given free access to the land for recreational use." All 50 states have one, and the center keeps the statutory text for every state in a free compilation.
What the statute takes away is duty, and duty is where liability starts. Wisconsin's version is a clean example: an owner owes a recreational user no "duty to keep the property safe," no "duty to inspect the property," and no "duty to give warning of an unsafe condition." Strip those three away and an ordinary negligence claim has nothing to stand on.
One thing before going further. This is general information, not legal advice, because the only statute that matters to you is your state's, legislatures amend these laws, and courts keep reinterpreting them. Talk to your own attorney and your own insurance agent before you price a season or sign anything.
The fee question, and why it splits the country
Here is the sentence that decides it. Michigan's statute, MCL 324.73301, says a cause of action does not arise for injuries to a person on the land of another "without paying to the owner, tenant, or lessee of the land a valuable consideration" for hunting and other outdoor recreation. The protection is built around the absence of payment. A lease check is not a detail. It is the trigger. Michigan then treats farmland differently, which matters because a great deal of leased hunting ground is farmland: subsection (5) of the same statute says no cause of action arises against the owner, tenant, or lessee of a farm used in the production of agricultural goods for injury to a paying hunter or angler unless the injury came from a condition involving an unreasonable risk of harm that the owner knew or had reason to know about, failed to make safe or warn of, and that the injured person did not know or have reason to know about.
Most states are built the same way, and the extension literature is blunt about it. University of Missouri Extension states that Missouri's recreational user law "does not apply to lease hunting," and that a paying hunter becomes an invitee owed a duty of "ordinary and reasonable care," which means inspecting the premises and either warning of hidden dangers or fixing them. Penn State Extension notes that Pennsylvania's act "does not protect landowners who charge a fee." Georgia writes it into the statute: OCGA 51-3-25 preserves liability "on a date when the owner of land charges any individual who lawfully enters such land for recreational use," and the only lease carved out of that charge rule is land leased to the state.
The states that went another way are the reason no landowner should generalize. Ohio wrote the exception into the definition: under Ohio Revised Code 1533.18, a recreational user is someone granted permission without paying a fee "other than a fee or consideration paid to the state or any agency of the state, or a lease payment or fee paid to the owner of privately owned lands." A private hunting lease payment in Ohio does not cost the landowner recreational user status. Wisconsin sets a dollar line instead of a rule, revoking immunity only when the aggregate of recreational payments received in the year of the injury "exceeds $2,000." Texas sets a ratio: as Texas A&M AgriLife Extension explains, a landowner qualifies by keeping total recreational charges under 20 times the previous year's ad valorem taxes, or by carrying liability insurance in the amounts the statute sets. Those amounts sit in their own section, Civil Practice and Remedies Code 75.004, which says the liability of an owner of agricultural land used for recreation "is limited to a maximum amount of $500,000 for each person and $1 million for each single occurrence of bodily injury or death and $100,000 for each single occurrence for injury to or destruction of property."
Those caps sound generous until you run them against real rates. Forest Resource Consultants' 2026 pricing guide puts Midwest hunting leases at $15 to $75 or more per acre per year. At that range a Wisconsin landowner crosses the $2,000 ceiling somewhere between about 27 and 133 leased acres, which is to say almost immediately. Texas runs the other way. A ranch paying $4,000 in ad valorem taxes has room for $80,000 in charges before the ratio breaks.
Same framework, opposite practical answers. Wherever your ground sits, that is the fact to confirm this week, against the current statute rather than against something a neighbor told you.
What no statute forgives
The protection, where it applies, covers ordinary negligence. It is not a shield for knowing about a hazard and saying nothing. Georgia's exception comes ahead of the fee rule: nothing in the act limits liability "for willful or malicious failure to guard or warn against a dangerous condition, use, structure, or activity." Wisconsin strips immunity for injury "caused by the malicious failure" to warn of an unsafe condition the owner knew about. Michigan keeps liability alive for "gross negligence or willful and wanton misconduct," and Texas does not limit the liability of an owner "who has been grossly negligent or has acted with malicious intent or in bad faith."
In practice that means the uncapped well, the washed-out crossing, the rotting ladder stand a previous group left hanging. Know it is there, let hunters walk past without a word, and no statute in the country is built to cover you. Write the hazards down, mark them on the map, hand the map over.
What the lease is for
A lease does not change your state's statute. What it does is allocate everything the statute leaves open, which is most of it. Iowa State's agricultural law center lists the standard terms: the parties, whether guests are allowed and whether rights transfer, a property description with maps, permitted seasons and weapons, party size, grounds for termination, a liability waiver, an indemnification clause putting damages on the hunters, and tree stand safety requirements. Penn State Extension adds the operational half: inspect the land with the lessees, put known hazards in writing, restrict ATVs and stands where you need to, and require hunter education certificates.
Insurance belongs in the document too. Mississippi State University Extension states that "most hunting leases should be undertaken only with a written agreement," and its sample lease requires the hunter to carry a $1,000,000 public liability policy with the landowner named as insured. The waiver alone will not do that job. University of Maryland Extension puts it flatly: many landowners require a signed waiver, "but this will not protect the landowner in the event of an accident." Worth having. Not a substitute for coverage.
The gap in the farm policy
This is the part that surprises people. University of Maryland Extension states that "general farm insurance usually does not cover fee hunting or hunting leases in which a fee is charged," because the arrangement counts as a business relationship, "so special coverage is needed." University of Missouri Extension gives the operational version: review your policy, ask your agent about a hunting endorsement, and require the lessee to carry coverage naming the landowner as an additional insured.
Hunt lease policies are a mature product at this point. The National Deer Association's program, one of several run through conservation groups and specialty underwriters, carries $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate, covers stands and ATVs, and adds the landowner as an additional insured at no cost to the policyholder. Note the condition on that last part. The land has to be under a lease agreement, so the coverage does not exist without the paper.
What the paper does that the statute does not
Nothing on a marketplace changes what your legislature wrote. HLRBO cannot make Michigan's statute read like Ohio's, and no platform should pretend otherwise. What it can do is make the controllable parts harder to skip, with a written agreement instead of a text thread, a documented payment instead of cash in a truck, free state-by-state lease templates to take to your attorney, and hunting lease insurance surfaced before a claim rather than after one. Hunters carry the mirror image of this exposure, worth reading as the same deal from the hunter's side.
Every extension publication cited here lands in the same place. The landowners who get hurt are the ones who never wrote anything down, never called their agent, and assumed their state's answer to the fee question without reading it. Ohio, Wisconsin and Texas show that the answer is sometimes yes. Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Missouri show that it is often no, and guessing wrong is the expensive outcome. Make the calls before the season, not after the accident, and make them to your own attorney and your own insurer.
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