America’s National Parks Set a Visitation Record in 2024
March 06, 2025 | Source: Outside | by Frederick Dreier
The National Park Service (NPS) this week revealed that a record-breaking number of visitors toured its sites in 2024. According to the agency’s annual report, the 404 out of the 433 NPS sites that that report data—including all 63 national parks—saw 331,863,858 individual visits last year.
That’s 6.36 million more visits than in 2023 and approximately one million more than the previous record, which was set in 2016 when the park service recorded 330,971,689 visits.
The report went up on the NPS website on Wednesday, March 5; however, the data was not distributed to media in a press release as in previous years. On Thursday, March 6, The New York Times reported that the NPS asked staff in an internal memo not to push the information via a release or social media to the public.
Outside reached out to the NPS for comment but did not hear back by the time this story was published.