The Average American Can No Longer Afford to Visit Their National Parks
How America’s most affordable vacation became a luxury escape for the wealthy.
It was once the most American of vacations.
You didn’t need a booking window or a credit card or a six-month plan.
You just went. Pitched a tent. Made sandwiches. Drove slow. Let the country unfold in front of you.
That idea is vanishing.
Today, the average American family can no longer afford to visit their national parks.
A weeklong trip to Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Glacier now easily runs north of $6,000 for a family of four. That’s more than a month’s take-home pay for most U.S. households, and that’s assuming you drive, not fly. Sleep in a roadside motel, not a lodge. Pack food in a cooler, not eat out. Win the permit lottery. Don’t miss the booking window.
Once you're inside, it doesn’t get easier:
In-park lodging at Glacier runs $766 a night.
Campground reservations are layered with “processing fees” that don’t go to the parks. They go to Booz Allen Hamilton.
Popular trail access now requires a paid lottery just to enter.
What was built as a public good now functions like a luxury resort. Corporations manage the bookings. Contractors collect the fees. Visitors navigate a web of apps, lotteries, and credit card forms just to reach what they already own.
It’s still called public land. But access is being rented back to us one fee at a time.
And none of it is accidental.
What it Really Costs to Visit a National Park Now
The myth is that national parks are still cheap.
The reality is that everything around them has become part of a high-cost machine. Lodging, food, bookings, permits, and processing fees have turned a once-affordable road trip into a major financial lift.
Here’s what it actually costs for a family of four to take a one-week trip to a premier park like Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Glacier:
Lodging: Most in-park or gateway lodging now runs between $275 and $575 per night. That adds up to $1,650 to $3,450 for six nights. At Glacier, some lodge rooms now go for $766 a night.
Food: Dining near national parks is priced like a resort town. Even keeping it modest with one or two meals out per day, the weekly total comes in between $1,000 and $1,400.
Gas: Depending on your distance and vehicle, gas alone often costs between $300 and $500 for a round-trip drive.
Entrance Fees: $35 per vehicle is now the standard just to enter the park. That doesn’t cover anything else.
Permits, Tours, and Trail Access: Popular hikes like Half Dome or Angel’s Landing require entering a paid lottery. If selected, you pay again for the permit. Add in rental gear or tours and the total often hits $200 to $300.
Reservation and Processing Fees: Every campsite, permit, and cabin booking comes with extra charges. These typically range from $6 to $10 and go straight to a federal contractor, not the Park Service.
All told, the trip easily runs north of $6,000.
That figure doesn’t include flights, gear, emergencies, or missed wages. It also assumes you manage to book everything on time and avoid the surge pricing that hits in peak season.
This isn’t how it used to be.
National parks were designed for spontaneity, not spreadsheets.
Today, a family has to treat them like a high-cost, tightly scheduled vacation package with the uncertainty of lotteries, digital gatekeeping, and non-refundable fees at every turn.
This is what it costs now.
Not just in dollars, but in access, in flexibility, in freedom.
The Math Broke
The median U.S. household earns about $75,000 per year before taxes. After federal, state, and payroll taxes, that leaves closer to $58,000 to $62,000 depending on where you live. That’s roughly $4,800 to $5,200 per month in take-home pay.
Now subtract the basics:
Housing: $1,800 for rent or mortgage (median in 2024)
Groceries: $1,000 for a family of four
Transportation: $700 including gas, insurance, and car payments
Utilities and internet: $400
Health insurance and medical costs: $600
Childcare or school costs: $300 to $1,000 depending on age
Even on the low end, that leaves many families with less than $500 per month in discretionary income. Often much less. And that assumes nothing goes wrong. No car repairs. No dental work. No emergency bills.
Now line that up against a national park trip that easily runs north of $6,000.
A trip like that is not just a stretch. For millions of families, it would take six months to a year of saving every leftover dollar. No takeout. No movies. No new clothes. No margin for error.
And even then, they still might not get in. Not if the campsites are booked. Not if they miss the reservation drop. Not if the permit system locks them out.
Some still make it work. But they plan like accountants. They drive instead of fly. They bring all their own food. They pack for every scenario and skip every upgrade. The trip becomes a project. A logistical mission squeezed into the corners of an already overloaded life.
Others just stop trying.
It’s not because they don’t want to go. It’s because the math broke.
What used to be a spontaneous, affordable rite of passage now reads like a luxury itinerary.
And when a trip to the Grand Canyon costs more than a month of groceries, the question stops being whether families want to visit their national parks.
The question becomes how many actually still can.
It wasn’t always like this
In 1995, a trip to a national park wasn’t something families saved for all year. It was the fallback vacation. The cheap option. The American default.
Here’s what a one-week trip for a family of four looked like back then:
Lodging: Around $65 a night. That’s $390 for six nights.
Food: About $60 a day if you ate out once and packed the rest. Roughly $420 total.
Gas: $1.15 a gallon. A 1,000-mile round trip cost around $100.
Entrance fee: $10 per car, good for seven days.
Permits and extras: Mostly free. Ranger talks, backcountry hikes, scenic drives. No paid lotteries or apps required.
The full week came out to about $1,000 to $1,200.
And that was at a time when the median household income was around $35,000 per year.
So a national park trip cost around 3 to 4 percent of a family’s annual income.
Today, that same trip easily runs north of $6,000 and hits closer to 10 percent of income for many households. That number climbs even higher if you fly or stay in-park.
And that doesn’t account for the added barriers.
There were no timed-entry systems. No $10 lottery fees. No separate charges for permits and processing. You didn’t need to out-click thousands of other families on Recreation.gov just to book a place to sleep.
You just went.
Gas was cheap. Campsites were first-come, first-served. The parks were still crowded in summer, but you could make it work. Even if you didn’t have much money. Even if you didn’t plan ahead. Even if you’d never done it before.
The system was built for access. Built for normal people. Built for use.
Now it has been recoded. Not all at once, but over time.
Prices ticked up. Concessions got privatized. Reservations became required. The cheap trip was slowly replaced by a high-friction, high-cost experience that feels less like a public service and more like a tightly controlled tourism product.
The math changed. The system changed. The idea of who parks are for changed.
But most people didn’t notice. Not until they tried to go back.
The Privatization Pipeline
If national parks feel more expensive, more rigid, and more corporate than they used to, that’s because they are. Slowly and quietly, core pieces of the park experience have been handed over to private companies.
Start with lodging.
Most in-park hotels and restaurants are no longer run by the government. They are controlled by concessionaires like Xanterra, a holding company owned by a billionaire who also has oil, rail, and coal interests. Xanterra runs large portions of Yellowstone, the South Rim of Grand Canyon, Glacier, Zion, and more. Room rates have soared. In Glacier, some lodges now charge $766 a night.
Just 2 percent of that revenue goes back to the Park Service.
Next, the reservation systems.
If you’ve tried to book a campsite, a hiking permit, or a timed entry ticket, you’ve probably used Recreation.gov. It looks like a federal site. It’s branded like a federal site. But it is actually operated by Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest defense contractors in the country.
Every time you pay a processing fee or enter a permit lottery, that money does not go to the parks. It goes to Booz Allen.
From 2018 to 2022, the company invoiced over $140 million for running the system. That does not include what they made in fees.
Then there’s the tours. The “experiences.” The guide services.
Basic ranger talks and walk-up trail access are being replaced by paid photography safaris, jeep tours, luxury camps, and commercial shuttle packages. These third-party operators are approved by the Park Service, but they are not part of it. They set their own prices. They sell their own access. And in many cases, they are the only way to reach popular areas during peak season.
What began as an effort to manage crowding has quietly turned into a business model.
One where corporations manage the lodging.
Contractors control the reservations.
And the public is left to navigate a maze of fees, rules, and redirection to reach what used to be freely available.
This is not a glitch in the system. This is the system.
The death of the default
It used to be simple. You picked a park, picked a weekend, packed the car, and went.
Maybe you didn’t get the best campsite. Maybe you didn’t see every highlight. But you still got in. You still got to go. That was the default setting for national parks. Open access. Low barriers. No special status required.
That default is gone.
Now, a trip to a national park means researching reservation windows months in advance. It means setting alarms and logging on at the exact moment bookings open. It means crossing your fingers and hoping that the website loads, that the campsites aren’t gone in sixty seconds, and that you didn’t miss some obscure permit requirement buried in a PDF.
Miss the window, and you’re out.
No entry. No campsite. No appeal.
What was once a spontaneous family road trip now requires the timing and precision of a flight reservation. And the burden of planning falls hardest on the people with the least flexibility.
Single parents. Shift workers. First-time visitors. People without fast internet. People without credit cards. People who don’t speak government website.
These systems reward people with flexible jobs, high-speed Wi-Fi, and the free time to micromanage a vacation six months in advance. They reward people who already know how the game is played.
Everyone else is left behind.
This is how public access disappears without technically being removed. The trails are still there. The parks are still open. But access is no longer automatic. It is gated by software, filtered through rules, and sold to the people who can pay in time, money, or both.
This country hasn’t completely closed the door on its public lands.
But it’s sure made them a lot harder to walk through.
Who are parks for now
The parks are not for everyone.
Not anymore.
They are first and foremost for people with money, and lots of it.
They are for people with time (and money).
For people who can take a week off without missing a paycheck, who can front the cost of reservations months in advance even if it doesn’t work out, who can pay $300+ a night like it’s nothing.
What was once built for everyday Americans has been repackaged for the one percent.
Not officially. Not explicitly.
But look at who gets to go and who doesn’t. The line is not blurry.
The families that could once make this trip on a modest income have been boxed out.
The barrier isn’t a law or a fence. It’s a $6,000 price tag, a clunky online lottery, and a system that makes you feel like you did something wrong just for being late, poor, or new to it all.
These places were meant to belong to everyone.
But they are being handed over to those with the resources to turn public wonder into a private experience.
Sold by the night, booked through a contractor, layered with fees.
Managed not for access, but for scarcity and control.
It is not a coincidence.
It is not just “unfortunate”.
It is working exactly as intended.
The system is not broken.
It has been redesigned to serve fewer people and make more money doing it.
The parks are still open. But for millions of Americans, the message is clear.
This isn’t for you anymore.
What we need to do
This is not a misunderstanding. It is not a market quirk.
It is a theft.
Piece by piece, public access is being stripped from the people it was promised to and resold to the highest bidder. Not all at once. Not with fanfare. But through contracts, quiet price hikes, and bureaucratic hurdles no average person has time to fight.
If national parks are to remain public, then the public must be able to reach them.
That means fully funding the agencies tasked with managing them. Not starving them and then pretending privatization is the only option.
That means ending the junk fees, cutting out the contractors, and bringing the core functions – reservations, permits, access – back under public control.
That means regulating the concessionaires who price-gouge inside park boundaries while giving almost nothing back to the system they profit from.
That means capping costs, guaranteeing first-come access at every park, and ending the false scarcity that props up this pay-to-play model.
That means building a system for actual people. Not just the ones who plan six months out. Not just the ones who can afford to lose money. Everyone.
Because the land belongs to the people, or it belongs to no one.
And if the only ones who can reach it are those with power, connections, or cash, then it has already been taken.
This can be fixed. But it won’t be fixed politely.
It will take pressure. Naming names. Refusing to accept this as normal.
It will take people who understand that losing public access is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a permanent loss.
We refuse this
We refuse a system that locks people out of what they already own.
We refuse to call this normal.
We refuse to accept that public land should only be accessible to those who can pay thousands to see it.
We refuse to let this go quietly.
Because this is not just a pricing issue. It’s a question of who the country is for.
And we’re not going to sit still while the answer becomes fewer and fewer of us.
If this hit you in the gut, send it to someone.
Share it with your city council.
Post it in your group chat.
Email it to your member of Congress.
This doesn’t change unless more people start paying attention.
This is still our land.
And we’re not done fighting for it.
Until next time,
Will
My dad was a teacher. We had little extra. We had glorious summers off and traveling through parks. I’m so grateful. This saddens me immeasurably
Our national parks were conceived of as a fundamentally democratic idea. These citadels of beauty were intended for everyone to experience and enjoy. Today, however, we are governed by an administration which believes America is comprised of two groups - the rich and the rest. And their policies are designed for the benefit of the rich so the rest be damned. It’s pay to play! Thomas Jefferson, however, secure in his understanding of the core principles of democracy, once wrote, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves.” Through your tireless advocacy, More Than Just Parks has educated the people regarding the existential threat posed to our democracy by an administration which does not recognize the rule of law. It was another of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who - emerging from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 - was asked by a lady, “Well Doctor, what have we got - a republic or a monarchy?” His astute reply was, “A republic - if you can keep it.” Today, that republic is under assault by the man who would be king. It’s up to us to act on this clear and present danger. Either our elected representatives uphold the Constitution of the United States and faithfully safeguard the interests of the vast majority of Americans who aren’t billionaires or, in the words of that former host of NBC’s ‘The Apprentice,’ “you’re fired!”