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Admission to US national parks will be free this Tuesday: Here’s why

By
FOX Local
Consumer
Published October 24, 2026 4:10 PM EDT
Published October 24, 2026 4:10 PM EDT
article

The National Park Service logo at the entrance to the Petrified Forest National Park, one of the national parks President Teddy Roosevelt established. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)

The Brief

    • All fee-charging U.S. national parks will waive entrance fees this Tuesday in celebration of former President Theodore Roosevelt's birthday.
    • The waiver is one of eight annual free-admission days scheduled throughout the year, with Veterans Day on November 11 serving as the final fee-free date of the year.
    • The event honors Roosevelt’s extensive environmental legacy, which includes establishing the U.S. Forest Service and protecting roughly 230 million acres of public land across dozens of national parks, forests, and monuments.

All fee-charging U.S. national parks will waive admission this Tuesday to celebrate the birthday of former President Teddy Roosevelt.

Big picture view:

Tuesday is one of eight days this year on which admission fees are waived for national park visitors. 

In addition to Roosevelt’s birthday, those days are Presidents Day in February, Memorial Day in May, Flag Day in June, Independence Day, Constitution Day and Aug. 25, the birthday of the National Park Service. 

The next day of free admission — and the last one of this year — is Veterans Day on Nov. 11. 

The backstory:

Theodore Roosevelt, who became the 26th president in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, was widely known not only as "Teddy" but as the "conservationist president," according to the National Parks Service. 

During his eight years in office, he created the U.S. Forest Service and established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, four national game preserves, five national parks and 18 national monuments.

Theodore Roosevelt, the nation's 26th president, was widely known as the "conservationist president for his work in establishing national parks and monuments. (Photo by the American Press Association via the Library of Congress)

He established Crater Lake National Park in Oregon in 1902, Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota in 1903, and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado in 1906. He also added land to Yosemite National Park in California. The national monuments he established included the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest in Arizona, California’s Muir Woods and Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower, the geologic formation that figured prominently in the 1977 movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."  

President Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916, seven years after Roosevelt left office. But by then, there were already 35 sites the new organization would manage and Roosevelt himself established 23 of them. 

The Source: Information for this story came from the U.S. National Parks Service and the National Archives. This story was reported from Orlando.



 

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