Yellowstone National Park Logs Record Number Of Visits

By

NPT Staff

June 14, 2025

Yellowstone National Park logged a record number of visits in May, and this year overall appears on track to be the park's busiest ever.

Numbers released Wednesday by the National Park Service showed Yellowstone hosted 566,363 recreation visits during the month, an increase of 8 percent from May 2024. Year-to-date visits as of May 31 clocked in at 762,672, more than any other year for that time period.

The park's busiest single year overall on record was 2021, with 4.8 million visits.

Yellowstone is one of the most beloved and popular national parks. Sitting in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, with parts of the park also in Montana and Idaho, it's most famous for spectacular geothermal features and roaming wildlife. But crowds in recent years have attracted attention for getting too close - sometimes with dangerous consequences. At least two people have been gored by bison this year, with the first incident in early May.

June and July are typically Yellowstone's busiest months. Annual visit numbers at the park have topped 4 million every year since 2015 except for two. One was during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The other was 2022, when flooding shut down the park for part of June.

The National Park Service as a whole saw a record number of 331.9 recreation visits last year. Of the 63 NPS sites designated specifically as national parks, Yellowstone was the fourth most visited.

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