All 63 national parks · Official NPS sources
What do you actually need to get in?
Entrance fees, timed entry, vehicle reservations, shuttles, camping, and activity permits are different things. Pick a park and a date, and we answer each one separately.
NPS Photo · Public domain (work of the U.S. National Park Service)
Six things people call “a reservation”
Collapsing these into one yes-or-no answer is how visitors get turned around at a gate they already paid for. Every park page keeps them apart.
Entrance fee or pass
What you pay at the gate. An America the Beautiful pass covers this — and nothing below it.
Timed entry
A dated, often hour-bounded permit to enter. Separate from the fee, and usually booked somewhere else.
Vehicle, road, or corridor
Some parks permit a specific road rather than the whole park. Others close roads seasonally, permit or not.
Shuttle
Sometimes mandatory, sometimes optional, sometimes ticketed, sometimes free. Those are four different answers.
Camping and lodging
An in-park booking can satisfy one reservation and not another. We tell you which, per park.
Activity permits
Angels Landing, Half Dome, Old Rag, cave tours. Easy to confuse with entry; never included in it.
Parks where something must be booked this season
11 of the 63 parks we cover require something bookable — a timed-entry permit, a parking tag, a shuttle ticket, or a road reservation — on at least some dates. The rest do not, but many still have a road, a gate-hours limit or a permit that applies once you are inside, so check the park before you go.
Browse by region
Northeast & Mid-Atlantic
Midwest & Great Plains
Rocky Mountains
Southwest
Pacific West
Alaska
Pacific Islands & Caribbean
Common questions
- Does an America the Beautiful pass cover a timed-entry reservation?
- No. At every park we track, the interagency America the Beautiful pass covers the entrance fee only. If the park requires a timed-entry permit, a vehicle reservation, or a shuttle ticket, you still need to book that separately — and it usually carries its own small processing fee.
- Does a reservation include the entrance fee?
- Usually not. A timed-entry permit or vehicle reservation grants you the right to enter at a given time. At most parks you still pay the entrance fee, or show a pass, on top of it. We show both lines separately so it is never ambiguous.
- Does a campground booking get me past a timed-entry checkpoint?
- It depends on the park and sometimes on the specific campground. At Rocky Mountain National Park, for example, some campground reservations cover the Bear Lake Road corridor and others do not. We record that per rule rather than generalising.
- What if the park has not announced next season yet?
- We say so plainly and link the park’s official alerts page. We never carry last year’s rule forward into a season the park has not published — that is the single most common way these questions get answered wrongly.
- Which parks does this cover?
- The 63 congressionally designated U.S. national parks. It does not cover national monuments, recreation areas, seashores, national forests, or state parks, which have separate and often different rules.