This page puts what the Park Service spends to run each park next to how many people visited, from 2018 to 2024. The spending figures come from the annual budget books and are adjusted for inflation. The visit counts are the Park Service's own.
Park base is the operating money Congress appropriates to a unit through Operation of the National Park System. It is not everything spent there: entrance and camping fees stay with the park, construction and land purchases come from other accounts, concessioners and friends groups spend their own money, and regional and national programs serve every park. A visit is one entry counted at a gate, not one person. 2020 and 2021 visits were shaped by closures. The 2024 figure is the annualized continuing resolution, not a final number. Units the budget reports as a group (the Flagstaff monuments, the Cape Hatteras group, the western Arctic parks) are left out because their visits cannot be split the same way.
Sources: NPS Budget Justifications FY2020 to FY2025, Park and Program Table, park base actuals in thousands of dollars; NPS Visitor Use Statistics via the IRMA service; acreage from the same budget books; BLS CPI-U annual averages to restate every year in 2025 dollars. units matched. Data refreshed .
Visits over time, forty-seven years of the same visit counts · What each park charges at the gate on Park Atlas · The budget books themselves at the Park Service