Yellowstone visitation by year.

Yellowstone by the year.

Each row is the park's total recreation visits for that calendar year, drawn from the official NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025 (Statistic = TRV, summed from monthly to annual). The full 1979-2025 history is shown — 47 years. Bar widths are proportional to the all-time peak; the orange bar marks the peak year and the teal bar marks the lowest year in the full window.

What the trend says

Yellowstone's annual recreation visits trace a multi-decade growth arc against a 47-year baseline. The dataset begins in 1979 at roughly 1.89 million visits — also the lowest year in the full series. The 1980s ran in the 2.2-to-2.6 million range with a 1980s decade mean near 2.34 million. The 1990s drifted upward into the high 2.8 to low 3.1 million range, helped by international interest in the park's wolf reintroduction and a longer post-Reagan-era growth in domestic outdoor travel. From 2007 onward visits broke above 3 million for the first time and stayed there.

The 2010s established what now reads as Yellowstone's first sustained peak era: visits crossed 4 million in 2015 and held in the 4.0-to-4.3 million range through 2019, with a 2010s decade mean near 3.78 million. The pandemic year 2020 dipped to 3.81 million — operationally disruptive but cushioned by domestic-only travel. The all-time peak in the full 1979-2025 history is 2021 at 4.86 million, the first full reopening summer when most international travel was still restricted and demand surged toward marquee parks. The June 2022 flood (NPS communications) scarred the trace at 3.29 million the following year — the park's northern loop closed for weeks and forced a phased reopening across the rest of the summer.

Recovery since 2022 has been steady. 2023 returned to 4.50 million, 2024 reached 4.74 million, and 2025 came in at 4.76 million — the second-highest year in the dataset and within striking distance of the 2021 peak. The 47-year mean is roughly 3.17 million; 2025 sits about 1.6 million visits above that long-term mean and within a few percent of the all-time record. Read across the full window, the structural story is the climb from a sub-2-million 1979 baseline to a 4-to-5-million 2010s-2020s plateau; year-to-year movement on top of that plateau is driven almost entirely by single-event disruptions (closures, weather, road access) rather than by underlying demand shifts. For seasonal shape — when within the year these visits actually land — see the per-park month-by-month curve on the best-time-to-visit page.

Methodology

Annual recreation visits come from the official NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025 on NPS IRMA Stats. The statistic shown is Recreation Visits — the NPS visitor-count category that excludes Tent Campers, Backcountry Campers, and Recreation Visit Hours. Annual totals are computed by summing the twelve monthly TRV (Total Recreation Visits) values for each year. The window displayed here is the full 1979-2025 history available in the NPS dataset. Independent site, not affiliated with the National Park Service.