Nebraska Duck Season 2026-27: Zones, Dates, and Teal

Nebraska hunts three duck zones for 2026-27, and every one of them is split. Zone 1 runs October 24 through December 6, 2026, then reopens December 19 through January 17, 2027. Zone 2 runs October 3 through December 15, 2026, then January 6-27, 2027. Zone 3 runs October 24, 2026 through January 5, 2027, then January 6-27, 2027. There is also a real separate September teal season, September 5-13, 2026, at six a day in both the Low Plains and the High Plains. Goose season dates are set separately and are not listed here, so read those off Nebraska Game and Parks directly.

Yes, and this is where Nebraska differs from its neighbors. September 5-13, 2026, in both the Low Plains and the High Plains, with a daily limit of six. North Dakota and South Dakota have no separate teal season at all; both take a bonus of two blue-winged teal during the opening days of the regular season instead. So a hunter moving down the Central Flyway from either Dakota has nine days of teal hunting available in Nebraska that does not exist where he came from.

A split season is a way of spending the same number of days across a longer calendar. Nebraska's duck numbers arrive on a front in November and then thin out, but a remnant sits on the Platte and the Missouri into January, so closing in early December would waste real hunting and staying open through it would waste days on empty water. The splits put a gap in the quiet middle and save days for January. It is worth checking your zone's exact gap before planning a trip, because Zone 2 closes for three weeks and Zone 1 for twelve days.

Mid to late November across most of the state. The DuckCast per-region curves put the peak around November 18 in the Rainwater Basin, the central Platte, the Salt Valley and the Republican, with prime conditions from about November 6 to December 3. The Missouri River corridor runs about nine days earlier, peaking around November 9, and the Sandhills, Niobrara, North Platte and panhandle peak on the same mid-November date but fall off sooner, closing their prime window around November 30. Nebraska sits between the Dakotas and the wintering states, so its peak is roughly three weeks behind North Dakota's and six weeks ahead of Arkansas's.

Several thousand shallow playa wetlands across the south central counties, mainly Clay, Fillmore, York and Kearney, and the narrowest point of the Central Flyway funnel. A playa is inches of water over clay: it fills on rain and snowmelt, it locks on the first hard night, and when it holds water the birds using it are concentrated far harder than they would be on a prairie pothole. That is also why a dry autumn changes the hunting more here than almost anywhere. DuckCast treats basin water as its own class, separate from the sandhill lakes and from the reservoirs and rivers, because those three freeze at genuinely different times.

South Dakota, almost entirely, down the Missouri and the James. That makes Nebraska the bottom of a three-state chain DuckCast already scores: one Arctic front can be followed from prairie Canada through North Dakota, then South Dakota, and then here, and it means something different at each stop. Up top it is the end of the season. In the middle it is the arrival. In Nebraska it is the push that fills the Rainwater Basin. DuckCast watches eight South Dakota stations at two latitudes for that reason, because a freeze at 45 degrees north is two or three days out and the same freeze at 43 is about half a day.