Every spring the National Park Service releases the previous year’s attendance figures, and the rankings rarely surprise anyone for long. The same names keep showing up near the top. What changes is the margin between them, and what that margin says about how people travel.
The latest complete numbers cover 2025. The agency recorded more than 323 million recreation visits that year, including over 13 million overnight stays. The ten parks below are the true national parks that drew the biggest crowds.
1. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Great Smoky Mountains National Park had the highest visitation among national parks by far, with 11,527,939 visitors in 2025. That’s more than twice the total of the park in second place. It has topped the list for decades, though its count fell by nearly 600,000 from 2024.
Visitors can explore misty peaks and waterfall filled valleys by scenic highway or on more than 800 miles of hiking trails across North Carolina and Tennessee. The park also charges no entrance fee, which helps explain part of its pull, though that detail sits outside the 2025 dataset.
2. Zion National Park
Zion’s rock towers, sandstone canyons and sharp cliffs attracted 4,984,525 visitors in 2025. That put it in second place, just shy of five million. The Virgin River carves its way through Zion Canyon to the desert below.
Zion is a compact park for the crowds it draws. Most of that traffic funnels into a single canyon, so the count feels even larger on the ground than it looks on paper.
3. Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, was visited by 4,762,988 people in 2025. The reserve covers 2.2 million acres across Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Geysers, alpine lakes and wildlife are the main draws.
Visitation has recovered since the landslides and flooding of 2022, coming close to the park’s record of 4,860,242 set in 2021. So it sits just under its own all time high.
4. Grand Canyon National Park
Grand Canyon National Park recorded 4,430,653 visitors in 2025. That was good for fourth place among national parks. It’s the only park on this list in Arizona.
The figure sits comfortably ahead of the next group of parks, which cluster closely together. Roughly four and a half million people a year is a steady, dependable draw for a landscape that needs little introduction.
5. Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park drew 4,278,413 visitors in 2025. Depending on rounding, outlets report it as either 4.2 or 4.3 million. The official total sits closer to the higher number.
California’s best known park finished fifth. The gap between it and Grand Canyon above is only about 150,000 visits, so small shifts in a single season could reorder this part of the list.
6. Rocky Mountain National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado recorded 4,171,431 visitors in 2025. That makes it the sixth busiest national park. Its numbers are tightly bunched with those of Yosemite and Acadia.
For a park so tied to one state’s mountain tourism, it holds a high spot nationally. Roughly four million visits has become its normal range in recent years.
7. Acadia National Park
Acadia National Park in Maine saw 4,079,318 people visit in 2025. Most of the park is on Mount Desert Island, a patchwork of parkland, private property and waterside villages.
That setting matters for the crowds. The park has more than 500 miles of trails, ranging from easy to strenuous. It’s the only northeastern park in the top ten.
8. Grand Teton National Park
Grand Teton’s lakes, glaciers and granite pinnacles enticed 3,800,648 visitors in 2025. It sits just south of Yellowstone in Wyoming, and many trips combine the two. That likely helps keep its numbers high.
The Teton Range soars nearly 7,000 feet above the valley floor. Few mountain skylines in the lower 48 are as abrupt.
9. Olympic National Park
More than 3.6 million people visited Washington State’s Olympic National Park in 2025. Some outlets round the figure to 3.5 million, so it’s worth checking which source you’re reading. Either way, it ranks ninth.
The park spans 922,651 acres of wild Pacific coast, glacier capped mountains and old growth temperate rainforest. That variety lets it draw beach visitors and hikers in the same trip.
10. Glacier National Park
About 3.1 million people visited Glacier in 2025, a 2 percent drop from the previous year. That still earns the Montana park tenth place. It’s not far from the record of 3.3 million set in 2017.
Every one of the top ten parks drew more than three million visits. One tally found that these ten parks took about half of all visits to the 63 national parks. The data comes from the National Park Service’s yearly release, which covers every park in the system.
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