6 FEE-FREE DAYS AT NATIONAL PARKS ANNOUNCED FOR ’24

Special days meant to remove barrier to entry for visitors

To help with your 2024 travel planning, the National Park Service has announced its annual list of free entrance days.

The six days are split between seasons and offered as a way of giving Americans cost-friendly vacation options. Normally, entering one the 63 national parks in the U.S. costs between $10 and $35.

“If an entrance fee is a barrier to anybody visiting, we want to be able to take that away on certain days throughout the year to encourage people to go and visit a park maybe they’ve never been to before,” said National Park Service spokesperson Kathy Kupper.

In 2024, the entrance fee-free dates will take place on what Kupper calls days of celebration and commemoration, from national holidays to park-specific ones. Here’s the list:

Jan. 15: Martin Luther King Jr. Day

April 20: First Day of National Park Week

June 19: Juneteenth

Aug. 4: Great American Outdoors Day

Sept. 28: National Public

Lands Day

Nov. 11: Veterans Day Visitors on fee-free days will still have to pay for services and amenities such as camping reservations, boat launches and special tours. If you can’t make it on these particular dates, there are still more than 300 national park sites — including national monuments, historical places, seashores and trails — that are always free to visit.

“The majority of national parks are free to enter every day,” Kupper said. “Currently, there’s 109 of the 400-plus that have an entrance fee.”

For inspiration on which parks to visit, download The

Washington Post’s podcast “Field Trip” on your favorite podcast app. The show

follows host Lillian Cunningham to five iconic parks from New Mexico’s White

Sands to Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic, digging into their histories and challenges. You can also read By The Way travel guides, written by locals, for Yosemite, Glacier and Everglades.

Kupper said parks near major metros — like Shenandoah National Park near Washington, D.C., or Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California — tend to get the biggest spike in traffic on fee-free days. “It’s an incentive to the populations nearby to choose that day to go and visit a nearby park,” she said.

Harder-to-reach, bucket-list parks like Glacier National Park in

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GETTY IMAGES Capital Reef National Park in Utah is an alternative to Zion National Park, which can be highly crowded.