Yellowstone’s July Visitor Report: Still Popular, Just Slightly Less Elbow-to-Elbow

Yellowstone National Park’s July 2025 attendance numbers are in, and while the park is still crushing it in the popularity contest, a few fewer people showed up to Instagram Old Faithful.

📊 July 2025 Stats

975,109 recreation visits – down 2% from July 2024 (992,352)
Down 10% from the 2021 July record (1,080,767), a.k.a. the “Year of Peak Yellowstone” when over 4.8 million folks came for bison selfies and geyser steams.

📅 Year-to-Date Visitors (Through July)

2025 – 2,666,031
2024 – 2,626,091
2023 – 2,462,535
2022 – 1,855,396 (remember the epic June flood that closed the park for over a week?)
2021 – 2,668,765
2020 – 1,674,699 (COVID shutdown spring)

📈 The Trend: 2025 is pacing just ahead of last year (+1.5%) but still a hair behind 2021’s all-time high (-0.1%). So basically, still a whole lot of people… just not quite that many people.

Planning a Trip?
Summer means long lines, tight parking lots, and plenty of “is that a grizzly?” gasps (spoiler: sometimes it’s just a log). The Park Service recommends grabbing the free NPS app, taking the Yellowstone Pledge, and channeling your inner responsible tourist. Translation: Don’t feed the wildlife, don’t block traffic for elk photo ops, and maybe just keep your hands out of the geysers.

For more stats and to see exactly how these numbers are crunched, you can dive into the official NPS visitation data.