By month · Seasonal

National Park visitation by month.

Network-wide recreation visits by month — every NPS unit, summed by calendar month, five-year mean.

By Nicholas Major · Last updated

The National Park Service network's busiest month is July, with a five-year mean near 43.97M recreation visits — about 3× the quietest month, January. Summer dominates: roughly half of the network's annual visits land in June through September. The shoulder months — May and October — each carry meaningful traffic but at noticeably lower intensity. Winter at the network level is dominated by warm-weather units (Everglades, Grand Canyon, Big Bend, the National Recreation Areas in the desert Southwest); the cold-weather marquee parks (Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain) close most of their interior to wheeled vehicles November through April, which compresses their visits into the summer window and shapes the network's seasonal curve. The parks-only subset is more seasonal than the network as a whole because the warm-weather backfill units that flatten the curve are mostly not National Parks but National Recreation Areas and National Monuments.

The network's seasonal shape.

Each row below sums Recreation Visits across every NPS unit that reports data, for that calendar month, averaged over the 2021-2025 window. The bar widths are proportional to the busiest month.

January13.67M
February14.78M
March23.45M
April27.40M
May32.57M
June40.05M
July43.97M
August38.67M
September32.55M
October29.38M
November20.04M
December17.09M

National Parks specifically (the 63 units with the official "National Park" designation) follow the same shape but with sharper summer compression — the marquee parks are mostly seasonal:

MonthNetwork totalParks onlyParks share
January13,668,6552,818,25021%
February14,781,2483,112,71421%
March23,452,1515,179,44422%
April27,397,4325,955,35822%
May32,571,1528,325,77326%
June40,054,11011,138,51728%
July43,972,79912,767,44229%
August38,674,37911,175,34529%
September32,551,0449,652,38230%
October29,377,1268,046,24827%
November20,043,7584,549,30723%
December17,091,7353,709,78622%

How to read the curve

The peak-to-quietest ratio at the network level (~3×) understates how seasonal individual parks actually are. Yellowstone's ratio is closer to 40×; Glacier's is higher still. The network curve flattens because warm-weather units fill in the winter months. For per-park month-by-month curves, see the best-time-to-visit pages — Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon are linked below.

For year-over-year network totals see visitation by year. For the season's effect on specific parks see best time to visit.

Methodology

Visit counts are official "Recreation Visits" from the NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025. The five-year average column averages 2021-2025 to reduce single-year noise; the latest-year column shows the most recent complete calendar year. Some NPS units publish other statistic types (Tent Campers, Recreation Visit Hours) that are not used here. Independent site, not affiliated with the National Park Service. Monthly aggregation uses the 5-year mean from the per-unit monthly visitation dataset. Some units don't yet have a complete five-year window of monthly data; those units' contributions are smaller until the next annual refresh.

Adjacent reading

Independence

Independent site. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the National Park Service. Data comes from the official NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025; editorial analysis is ours. The NPS Arrowhead and other NPS marks are not used.

Last updated · 2026-05-19