About this site
A visitor should be able to find out what a national park requires on a given date in about ten seconds, without reading a travel article, and without being told “reservations may be required.”
Independence. NationalParkEntry is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the National Park Service, Recreation.gov, the U.S. Department of the Interior, or any park concessionaire. We do not sell reservations, take bookings, or receive anything if you follow a link to an official booking system.
Why it exists
Park access rules have become genuinely complicated, and they change from season to season. Entrance fees, timed-entry permits, vehicle reservations, parking tags, mandatory shuttles, campground bookings, and activity permits are six different systems that visitors reasonably lump together as “a reservation.”
Getting it wrong is expensive. You can hold a valid entrance pass and still be turned around at a checkpoint. You can book a campsite and still need a separate permit for the road that reaches it. You can read last year’s advice and arrive under a rule that no longer exists.
What it does
It answers one question: for this park and this date, what do you need? It answers each requirement type separately, states the effective period the answer rests on, shows the official source, and links you to the official place to book — which is always someone else’s site, never ours.
It currently covers the 63 congressionally designated U.S. national parks for the 2026 season. National monuments, recreation areas, seashores, national forests, and state parks are out of scope: they have different rules and deserve their own treatment rather than being lumped in.
What it will never do
- Run ads, affiliate links, or sponsored placements.
- Rank or rate parks, or call one “better” or “most popular”.
- Use countdown timers, scarcity messaging, or fake urgency.
- Gate anything behind an account or a newsletter signup.
- Imitate NPS or Recreation.gov branding to look official.
- Guess at a rule a park has not published.
How it is built
Every rule is a structured, date-bounded record with a source. The site reads a single committed dataset and makes no network calls when a page loads. See methodology for how rules are gathered and sources for what stands behind them.
Getting it wrong
We will sometimes be out of date or simply wrong. When that happens the official park page is right and we are not. Please tell us — corrections are the fastest way this gets better.