At the end of 2025, the U.S. Department of the Interior made an announcement about admissions charges for the nation’s national parks. The biggest one involved dramatically raising the price for non-U.S. residents buying an annual park pass. And while there’s some precedent for charging people more or less to enter a specific destination based on where they’re coming from, the disparity between what non-residents and residents would pay was shockingly large.
The new policy went into effect this year, and you might wonder how it’s going. The answer, according to The Washington Post‘s Jake Spring, is about as well as you might expect — which is to say that the headline alludes to “chaos” at some national parks.
What does “chaos” mean in this case? For starters, it means that entering the parks with a higher admission cost for non-residents — there are 11 of those — is taking longer, given that visitors are now asked whether or not they are residents of the U.S. One Parks Service employee who spoke with the Post expressed frustration with this policy, saying, “We don’t want to make visitors feel unwelcome.”
It’s About to Get More Expensive for Foreign Travelers to Visit National Parks
The entry fees for non-residents are going way upThe Post also notes another reason for longer wait times to enter national parks: thousands of jobs have been cut in that department since the second Trump administration began last year. It isn’t rocket science to realize that asking fewer employees to do more work could backfire. Whether or not that leads to the Department of the Interior to revise this policy, though, remains to be seen.
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