The Most-Visited National Parks in the United States

The 15 busiest national parks, ranked by official 2025 National Park Service recreation visits.

Great Smoky Mountains is the most-visited national park in the United States, with 11,527,939 recreation visits in 2025, according to the National Park Service. That is more than twice the total of the runner-up, Zion, at 4,984,525. Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Yosemite complete the top five, each with between 4.2 and 4.8 million visits, and eight of the top 10 are in the West.

This ranking lists the 15 busiest national parks among parks covered on BriefGeo, ordered by 2025 recreation visits from the NPS Annual Park Ranking Report, published in March 2026. Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, which ranked 15th among national parks with 2,209,028 visits, is not yet covered here, so the list continues to Bryce Canyon, the 16th. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10,000 visits, and a visit is not the same as a visitor, as explained below.

#	Place	Why it's here
1	Great Smoky Mountains National Park Tennessee, North Carolina	11.53 million recreation visits (2025). Straddles Tennessee and North Carolina and charges no entrance fee.
2	Zion National Park Utah	4.98 million recreation visits (2025). Utah's oldest national park, established in 1919.
3	Yellowstone National Park Wyoming, Montana, Idaho	4.76 million recreation visits (2025). Established in 1872, the first national park in the world.
4	Grand Canyon National Park Arizona	4.43 million recreation visits (2025). The canyon runs 277 river miles / 446 km through northern Arizona.
5	Yosemite National Park California	4.28 million recreation visits (2025). Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 ft / 739 m in three sections.
6	Rocky Mountain National Park Colorado	4.17 million recreation visits (2025). Trail Ridge Road climbs to 12,183 ft / 3,713 m, the highest continuous paved road in the U.S.
7	Acadia National Park Maine	4.08 million recreation visits (2025). Cadillac Mountain, 1,530 ft / 466 m, is the tallest peak on the U.S. Atlantic coast.
8	Grand Teton National Park Wyoming	3.80 million recreation visits (2025). The Grand Teton rises to 13,775 ft / 4,199 m above Jackson Hole.
9	Olympic National Park Washington	3.58 million recreation visits (2025). Spans glaciated peaks, temperate rain forest and more than 70 miles of wild Pacific coast.
10	Glacier National Park Montana	3.14 million recreation visits (2025). Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, 6,646 ft / 2,026 m.
11	Cuyahoga Valley National Park Between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio	3.03 million recreation visits (2025). Ohio's only national park, along the Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron.
12	Joshua Tree National Park California	2.93 million recreation visits (2025). Sits where the Mojave and Colorado deserts meet in Southern California.
13	Indiana Dunes National Park Southern shore of Lake Michigan, Indiana	2.63 million recreation visits (2025). Became a national park in 2019 after 53 years as a national lakeshore.
14	Hot Springs National Park Hot Springs, Arkansas	2.49 million recreation visits (2025). Protects 47 hot springs on the edge of downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas.
15	Bryce Canyon National Park Utah	1.97 million recreation visits (2025). Holds the largest concentration of hoodoos on Earth.

How visits are counted

The National Park Service counts visits, not visitors. A recreation visit is one person entering park land or water for recreation, and someone who leaves and returns on a different day is counted again. Through traffic, commuters, park employees and other non-recreation visits are left out, which matters in parks crossed by highways.

Most parks do not count people one by one. Traffic counters at entrances and on main roads record vehicles, and each park multiplies that count by a persons-per-vehicle factor that can vary by season, location and vehicle type. Arches, for example, uses 2.4 people per vehicle from September through January and 2.9 from February through August. Each park follows its own written counting instructions, and changes to those methods can shift a park's numbers from one year to the next.

Questions people ask

What is the least visited national park?

Kobuk Valley, north of the Arctic Circle in northwest Alaska, had 7,786 recreation visits in 2025, the fewest of any national park. Gates of the Arctic, often named as the least visited, was next with 14,923. No roads reach either park, so most visitors fly in on small planes. In the Lower 48, the least visited was Isle Royale, with 29,091.

What is the most visited site in the National Park System?

Not a national park. The Blue Ridge Parkway led the whole system in 2025 with 16,533,753 recreation visits, followed by Golden Gate National Recreation Area with 15,748,676. Great Smoky Mountains ranked third overall.

Why does Great Smoky Mountains get so many visits?

It sits close to the big population centers of the East, between Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Cherokee, North Carolina, and it charges no entrance fee. Since 2023, visitors who park for more than 15 minutes need a parking tag, but entry itself is still free.

How many visits did the national parks get in 2025?

The National Park System as a whole recorded 323,014,305 recreation visits in 2025 across 406 reporting units, down 2.7% from the record set in 2024. The units titled national parks accounted for 29% of that total, with parkways, recreation areas, memorials and historical parks making up most of the rest.

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