National Parks Set a Visitation Record. Their Repair Bill Set One Too.

The National Park Service runs on three numbers, and in 2025 all three moved against it at once.▸ More people came than ever before. The bill for everything left unrepaired grew to its largest size on record. And the permanent workforce responsible for both — greeting the visitors and fixing the roads — shrank by roughly a quarter in twelve months.

Every road, building, trail, water system, and campground the Park Service owns that needs fixing but hasn't been gets counted as "deferred maintenance."▸ At the end of fiscal year 2025, that backlog stood at an estimated $24.237 billion, spread across 70,687 tracked assets — the highest figure the agency has ever reported. It had briefly ticked down the year before, to $22.988 billion in FY2024, after $23.258 billion in FY2023. Then it jumped nearly $1.25 billion in a single year. A 2026 Congressional Research Service report tracking the same figures back to FY2014 found the backlog had already grown 102% in nominal dollars over the prior decade — before this latest jump.

None of that backlog gets smaller with fewer people to work it, and the Park Service has fewer people than it did a year ago.▸ Since January 2025, the agency has lost more than 4,000 permanent employees to layoffs, pressured buyouts, deferred resignations, and forced early retirement — a 24% cut to the permanent workforce in a single year, according to the National Parks Conservation Association's review of Interior Department workforce records, reported by Roll Call at the end of 2025. That leaves roughly 12,600 permanent staff — park rangers, maintenance crews, scientists, administrators — covering a system that just posted its busiest year ever. It also compounds a longer decline: a coalition of former NPS leaders found the 2025 cuts landed on top of a 20% drop in permanent staffing already recorded since 2010.

The gap shows up first in seasonal hiring, the crews parks lean on every summer to staff entrance stations and lead programs.▸ Heading into the 2026 season, the agency had filled only about 5,150 of a 7,700-position seasonal hiring goal — already behind both 2025 and 2024 at the same point in the calendar, according to a May 2026 memo from the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, which also cited new Interior guidance capping replacement hiring at one new employee for every four who leave.

Deferred maintenance figures are NPS's own year-end estimates and are periodically revised as the agency updates its asset inventory and costing methods, which can shift year-over-year comparisons independent of actual repair activity. Staffing figures reflect the most recent publicly reported counts as of this writing and may move further as a possible reduction in force proceeds.