Legislators should increase entrance fees to fund national parks

On August 4, 2020, the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) was signed into law. Among other things, the law funnels up to 50 percent of all revenue from energy development on federal lands and waters into an account called the Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF). This fund is supposed to help address deferred maintenance mostly at national parks but also deferred maintenance on other public lands.

The GAOA authorized the LRF through September of 2025, and some legislators now want to reauthorize the law.

Deferred maintenance is the routine maintenance on federal lands that gets postponed. When routine maintenance is consistently postponed, the amount of necessary maintenance builds up. At the end of FY2025, the National Park Service estimated that $24 billion was needed to address the deferred maintenance backlog for the National Park System.

National parks have alternative revenue sources available that they should tap into. Specifically, greater reliance on entrance fees and other user fees could help national parks to address the backlog of deferred maintenance while moving parks toward self-sufficiency.

Entrance fees vary across the National Park System. The majority of National Park Service sites are free to visit. Among sites that charge entrance fees, there is no uniformity in cost, entrance pass duration, or visitors covered by the pass.

Many of the most popular national parks charge $35 for a seven-day vehicle pass for domestic visitors. This is an extremely low price that is subsidized in large part by taxpayers, including many who will never visit a national park. Appropriately priced user fees would help ensure that those who benefit most from national parks bear a larger share of their operating costs.

While the Department of Interior has recently increased fees for international visitors, it has not done so for domestic visitors.

The National Park Service last increased the weekly entrance fees for cars of domestic visitors in June 2018 from $30 to $35 in several national parks. Just to, at a minimum, keep pace with inflation, these entrance fees would need to be increased again from $35 to $46.25. Also, 80 percent of the revenue from entrance fees stays in the park where it is collected.

Beyond increasing entrance fees for inflation, parks could adopt other pricing mechanisms to help raise revenue.

Since entrance fees are often charged on a weekly basis, visitors are incentivized to get their money’s worth and stay longer than they otherwise would. This likely exacerbates deferred maintenance issues by creating overcrowded parks that put stress on park resources. By contrast, daily pricing would allow visitors to pay only for the days they plan to visit. This could increase revenue if priced appropriately while helping to address the overcrowding that some popular national parks experience.

National parks should charge appropriate fees for their visitors that, consistent with the law, reduce reliance on taxpayer funding and other sources.