National Parks by Popularity 2024

Posted by:

Ken Crane

On:

April 19, 2025

Solitude is a major draw for national park visitors. And yet with each passing year the parks paradoxically grow in popularity because of this very reason. In 2024 alone, the National Park Service recorded 94,287,567 individual visits across the 63 national parks, nearly 2 million more visits than 2023. Just as transportation is growing increasingly cheaper, remote parks are become more accessible with the further growth of the U.S. interior.

Even though its number of visits dropped in 2024, Great Smoky Mountains National Park continues to maintain the title as most-visited park with 12,191,834 individual visitations, just over two times more than Zion National Park, the second most-popular park. Gates of the Arctic National Park, remains the least-visited park despite gaining almost 1,000 more visitations in 2024 than 2023. In general the most-visited and least-visited parks tend to hold their ground with not much upset, while the parks in the middle of the bell curve jostle for position from year to year.

However among these stable positions, a few jumps are worth noting. Redwood National Park gained 200,000 more visitations than the previous year, yielding a 150% increase and jumping up 9 positions. Conversely, North Cascades National Park reported less than half of the visitations of its previous year, resulting in a 50% decrease in park attendance and losing 5 positions becoming the second least-visited park in the nation. This drop is most likely due to a devastating wildfire season in 2024 closing the main park road during prime summer months.

Below is the breakdown for each park and its rank by visitation in the 2024 calendar year.

2024 Annual Visitations per National Park

Rank	National Park	Annual Visitors
1	Great Smoky Mountains	12,191,834
2	Zion	4,946,592
3	Grand Canyon	4,919,163
4	Yellowstone	4,744,353
5	Rocky Mountain	4,154,349
6	Yosemite	4,121,807
7	Acadia	3,961,661
8	Olympic	3,717,267
9	Grand Teton	3,628,222
10	Glacier	3,208,755
11	Joshua Tree	2,991,874
12	Cuyahoga Valley	2,912,454
13	Indiana Dunes	2,705,209
14	Gateway Arch	2,563,052
15	Bryce Canyon	2,498,075
16	Hot Springs	2,461,812
17	New River Gorge	1,811,937
18	Shenandoah	1,720,211
19	Mount Rainier	1,620,006
20	Arches	1,466,528
21	Death Valley	1,440,484
22	Hawai’i Volcanoes	1,433,593
23	Capitol Reef	1,422,490
24	Sequoia	1,309,573
25	Badlands	1,094,245
26	Saguaro	946,369
27	Canyonlands	818,492
28	Mammoth Cave	747,042
29	Everglades	741,983
30	Glacier Bay	736,282
31	Theodore Roosevelt	732,951
32	Haleakala	732,477
33	White Sands	702,236
34	Kings Canyon	699,389
35	Redwood	622,883
36	Big Bend	561,458
37	Petrified Forest	559,254
38	Biscayne	512,213
39	Crater Lake	504,942
40	Wind Cave	489,399
41	Mesa Verde	480,065
42	Denali	466,227
43	Carlsbad Caverns	460,474
44	Great Sand Dunes	437,661
45	Virgin Islands	423,029
46	Kenai Fjords	419,468
47	Lassen Volcanic	357,651
48	Pinnacles	354,076
49	Black Canyon of the Gunnison	335,862
50	Channel Islands	262,581
51	Congaree	242,049
52	Guadalupe Mountains	226,134
53	Voyageurs	199,030
54	Great Basin	152,068
55	Dry Tortugas	84,873
56	Wrangell-St. Elias	81,670
57	Katmai	36,230
58	Isle Royale	28,806
59	National Park of American Samoa	22,567
60	Lake Clark	18,505
61	Kobuk Valley	17,233
62	North Cascades	16,485
63	Gates of the Arctic	11,907