Afraid to Lease Your Land to Hunters? Here’s What Actually Protects You

If you’ve read AHLA’s article on landowners who want to make money leasing access to hunters but are afraid of being sued, you already know that fear is common — and it’s a legitimate one. It’s the single biggest reason otherwise willing landowners turn down a paying hunter or hunt club: what happens if someone actually gets hurt on my land?

That article made the case that the fear shouldn’t be the thing that stops you from leasing access to your land. This one goes a step further and answers the question sitting underneath it: what, specifically, protects you if something does go wrong? For a lot of landowners, the honest answer is “less than you think,” because most people who feel protected are leaning on a law they’ve never actually read: their state’s recreational use statute.

Leasing access to your land should not be something that brings you anxiety and fear. AHLA was created to protect you hunters and landowners from liability. 

The Protection You're Probably Counting On

Every state has some version of a recreational use statute — sometimes called a recreational land use act or a landowner liability act. In general terms, these laws exist to encourage landowners to open their property for recreational activities like hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping by limiting the landowner's liability when someone is hurt while using the land for one of those purposes.

That's the version most landowners have heard about, usually secondhand — from a neighbor, a hunting buddy, or a line item in a hunt club's contract. What fewer landowners have actually done is read the statute in their own state closely enough to see how narrow that protection typically is once a lease and a paycheck enter the picture.

Where Recreational Use Statutes Stop

Two things typically limit how far a recreational use statute reaches, and either one can leave a landowner exposed in exactly the situation a hunting lease creates.

The specifics vary meaningfully from state to state — how “fee” is defined, what counts as gross negligence, whether guests of a lessee are treated the same as the lessee. That level of detail isn't something a landowner should try to eyeball from a blog post; it's worth reading your own state's statute directly or talking with an attorney before you assume you're covered. The National Agricultural Law Center maintains a compiled reference of state recreational use statutes if you want to start there, and we'll be walking through several of the most-searched states in more depth later in this series.

What This Can Look Like in Practice

Picture a fairly ordinary lease season. A landowner has leased forty acres to a small group of hunters for a few thousand dollars a year, the same arrangement they've had for a while. One afternoon, a guest of the lease holder — someone the landowner has never met — climbs into an aging tree stand left over from a previous tenant, and it gives way. The fall results in a real injury and, eventually, a claim against the landowner.

In that moment, several questions determine what happens next, and none of them have a single, simple answer: Did the state's recreational use statute even apply, given that a fee was paid for access? Was the condition of the stand something a court would call ordinary negligence, or something closer to a known hazard the landowner should have addressed? Was the guest hunter someone the lease agreement actually accounted for, or an unnamed visitor the landowner never agreed to allow on the property? A landowner who assumed the statute made this scenario a non-issue can find out, only after a claim is filed, exactly how much daylight existed between what they believed and what the law actually says.

So What Actually Protects You?

If a recreational use statute is a partial shield rather than a full one, two other things do the rest of the work landowners often assume the statute is already doing on its own.

A real, written lease agreement. A handshake deal or a casual permission slip doesn't define who's responsible for what. A proper written lease sets guest limits and requires that every guest be named or accounted for, spells out what conduct is and isn't allowed on your land, includes indemnification language making the lessee responsible for their own conduct and their guests' conduct, and can require the hunter or hunt club to carry — or be added to — their own coverage as a condition of the lease. None of that is optional detail; it's what a court and an insurer both look to first when a claim is evaluated, and it's the difference between a lease that only feels protective and one that actually is.

Hunting lease insurance. This is the piece a recreational use statute was never designed to fully provide on its own — coverage specifically underwritten for the exposure that comes with leasing access to hunters, sitting behind your written agreement and whatever protection your state's statute offers. It's the layer that responds when a claim exceeds what the statute shields, when the statute's fee exception knocks its protection out entirely, or when a claim simply falls outside what the statute was ever meant to cover in the first place. In the scenario above, it's the difference between a landowner absorbing legal costs and a settlement out of pocket, and a landowner who has a policy built specifically to respond to exactly that kind of claim.

You're Not Just “A Piece of Land”

It's easy to think about a hunting lease in terms of the acreage, the deer sign, or the check that shows up every fall. But the moment you sign a lease, the real exposure sits with you — the landowner — not the property itself. Whether this is your first season leasing, or you've had the same hunt club on your place for ten years without ever pricing in what happens if something goes wrong, the risk you're carrying is personal, not just something attached to the land.

That's the identity AHLA builds its landowner content around: not a parcel on a map, but a person who took on real financial exposure the moment they signed a lease — and who deserves a straightforward answer about what actually protects them, not just a comforting assumption about a law they've never read.

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Where to Go From Here

A recreational use statute was written to encourage landowners to open their land — not to make a landowner untouchable, and especially not once a lease and a fee are involved. The most reliable way to close that gap is to pair a solid written lease with hunting lease insurance built specifically for this exposure, rather than hoping your state's statute covers more than it actually does.

None of this is a reason to walk away from leasing access to your land. Landowners across the country lease successfully, season after season, without ever facing a claim — and the ones who come out of a bad situation in the best shape are almost always the ones who treated the lease as a real legal and financial arrangement from the start, not an informal handshake backstopped by a law they'd never actually read. Understanding exactly where your state's statute stops is what lets you make that decision with your eyes open instead of hoping for the best.

For a fuller look at what to line up before you sign your first (or next) lease, start with The Landowner's Guide to Hunting Lease Insurance, which walks through every stage of the landowner journey covered in this series.

Ready to see what coverage looks like for your land? Get an AHLA quote and find out what it actually costs to close the gap a recreational use statute leaves open.