How many recreation visits do U.S. national parks get each year?

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325,000,000 visits. The National Park Service logs around 325 million recreation visits a year across 400+ sites — roughly one visit per American, though a handful of parks take most of them. Great Smoky Mountains alone draws more than twice as many visits as the Grand Canyon. Use the per-capita check in the explanation: roughly one visit per American per year. Population times a per-person frequency is the standard route, and a frequency of about one is plausible for a category most people engage with occasionally rather than never or weekly. The distribution is where the real information is. A handful of parks take most of the visits, and the explanation gives the example: one park receives more than twice the visits of the most famous one. Accessibility drives visitation far more than fame — parks near population centres and free to enter dominate, while remote ones with spectacular scenery do not. Note the unit: recreation visits, not people. Someone entering a park three times in a week counts three times, and the figure covers over four hundred sites rather than only the sixty-three carrying the national park designation from this site's companion question. Both the numerator and the denominator are wider than they look.

Source	U.S. National Park Service
Figure refers to	2023
Last checked	September 1, 2026
Unit	visits

How many recreation visits do U.S. national parks get each year?

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