- The outdoor recreation economy generated $1.2 trillion dollars in 2023.
- The sector employs 5 million people, which is more than 3% of all workers in the country.
- Economists determined that a bear sighting in Yellowstone is worth $50,000 annually to the economy.
When Doug Burgum framed public lands as “America’s balance sheet” at his confirmation to become the Secretary of the Interior this past January, the suggestion was not well received by all.
“The reaction to that from the conservation community or the environmental community was ‘Oh, well, you can’t put a price tag on these places,’ or ... ‘That’s not what we should be doing — it’s about these beautiful vistas,’” said Jessica Turner, president of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable.
Her organization, referred to as ORR, is a broad coalition of outdoor recreation businesses and associations that come from nearly all subsets of the outdoor industry. One could say it represents the whole big tent of the industry, but Turner suggested that they’d also have to somehow include “yurt, glamp, lodge, RV,” as well as boat slips and then find ways to include engines, too.
Its members are state recreation offices, boat and snowmobile manufacturers, tech companies as well as the likes of REI, Rivian, Boat U.S. and the American Mountain Guide Association. Even CHM Government Services and Booz Allen Hamilton are members.
Turner agrees that the intrinsic values of America’s public lands matter, but she also believes wholeheartedly that the government should be assessing and aware of their full economic value. Instead of just focusing on natural resource extraction or other traditional economic drivers, however, her organization is shining a light on just how valuable the public appreciation of that intrinsic value is for the federal economy.
“Of course it is (about the vistas), right?,” she said. “But we do quantify things ... so let’s measure it.”
According to ORR’s latest published research based on federal data, the outdoor recreation industry was worth $1.2 trillion in 2023, the most recent available data. That’s 2.3% of the U.S. gross domestic product.
Just the excise taxes on things like fuel and gas for ATVs, boats and purchasing the wide variety of required equipment brought in approximately $6 billion to the federal government’s purse that year.
For context, that means the outdoor recreation economy is larger than that of farming or mining. And it’s not that far from the oil and gas industry, either. That market was worth $1.55 trillion in 2024 and is approaching $1.6 trillion this year, according to Towards Chem & Materials’ last report.
When the numbers are broken out to focus just on the money spent on public lands and waterways, their scale becomes clear. On public lands alone, the sector generates $128 billion a year. Recreational visitors fork over $72 billion directly to the federal government, with $27 billion spent at national parks, another $12 billion on U.S. Forest Service land and $6.2 on Bureau of Land Management land.
On public lands alone, the sector generates $128 billion a year. Recreational visitors fork over $72 billion directly to the federal government, with $27 billion spent at national parks, another $12 billion on U.S. Forest Service land and $6.2 on Bureau of Land Management land.
That total spending supports nearly a million jobs, and adds $351 million a day to the U.S. economy. Which is “equivalent to hosting eight Super Bowls every month in economic impact,” reads the ORR Report.
ORR believes that such numbers suggest that recreation is an economically competitive use of public lands, even when juxtaposed to natural resource extraction. Particularly in light of the various efforts to use federal property as a means to drive revenue against the rising federal deficit — the ‘one big beautiful bill’ includes a multitude of relevant statutes or Sen. Mike Lee’s efforts to sell off public lands — those significant figures provide tactile context to better assess the relative values of all uses of the country’s wild spaces.
A similar approach of determining the actual monetary value of natural experiences was undertaken by the National Park Service and U.S. Geological Survey in a different study, where researchers determined an actual dollar value for the worth of a bear sighting. It’s more than one would think.
In both cases, when land and wildlife are left alone so Americans can recreate in the myriad ways they like to, they drive an awful lot of revenue for both the public and the private sector.
“We can’t just say, ‘Oh, there’s intrinsic value.’ Yes, there is, but what does that get for us? It hasn’t gotten us very far,” Turner said. “There’s real economic value. And it’s not just economic value to the communities and the (recreation) economy, but it’s to the federal government also.”
Public lands do offer life-changing experiences for people just by being what they are, sure, but, Turner said, that they also are one of the country’s “greatest investments in people and communities.”
“When we care for these special places and keep them public, they give back tenfold —fueling local economies, strengthening rural businesses, improving public health, and connecting us to our shared outdoor heritage," she said.
Where do the numbers come from?
In 2016, Congress passed the Outdoor Recreation Jobs and Economic Impact Act. The bill directed the Department of Commerce to work with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior to conduct a thorough review of the outdoor recreation economy and the attributable effects it has on the overall economy.
The studies were ultimately done by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which has data going back to 2012.
ORR bases its research on the information provided by that data and uses the “gross output” numbers from the studies. That term is defined as “all sales of goods and services, including those for intermediate inputs and those to final users.” It further defines that for the outdoor industry as representing the “sales of both intermediate and final goods and services like buckles, backpacks, reels, fishing rods, steering wheels, ATVs, guided trips, and many others.”
It means that those figures do not include costs of goods or services and represent the top line sales or revenue. In ORR’s literature, it argues that it streamlines the conversation and limits confusion from a variety of cost structures that could over complicate matters.
The first report the government published was in 2018 and reported an overall market worth $880 billion dollars, which Tuner said matched what the nongovernmental industry partners had derived from their own internal research. But seeing the scale of the total industry in a government report gave the outdoor recreation leaders a reason to band together.
“That brought all the CEOs of these huge trade associations together from the outdoor industry — the ski industry, the concessionaires, snowmobilers, paddlers, bikers, you name it,“ Turner said. ”They said, ‘These numbers only count when we’re together.... maybe we should do something about it, because we are on par with the Farm Bureau or the American Petroleum Institute.’"
Which was how ORR came into existence. It advocates for the outdoor recreation industry in a variety of ways, but one major component is by providing research and insight to the public and Congress on the scale of what the industry has to offer the country. Not just in awe, but specifically in economic value.
Turner said it isn’t a lobby so much — particularly compared to other industries with massive lobbying infrastructure — but it has assisted with legislation in the past such as the Great American Outdoors Act, the Explore Act and others.
She sees its efforts as facilitating a shift in legislators’ thinking about how to support the American economy. If the outdoor recreation industry can be included in the list of more traditional industries considered economic drivers, then public lands, those companies and the surrounding communities can benefit from that governmental recognition.
What else does the study reveal?
Since the first data was released, the outdoor recreation economy has grown by 36%. From the last years of available data from 2022 to 2023, the segment has grown 24% faster than the rest of the American economy.
It also employs 5 million people, which is 3.1% of the total workforce. When the economic impact of each segment of the broader outdoor recreation industry is broken out, the sense of tremendous scale is explained.
According to the last available data, biking’s economic impact was $5.4 billion. Skiing and snowboarding’s is $7.6 billion while climbing, hiking and tent camping had $12.8 billion in impact. Boating was worth $52.5 billion and RVing was worth a jaw-dropping $56.8 billion.
State to state, too, there are big differences. Vermont may have been highest with 4.6% but in Utah, outdoor recreation represents 3.6% of the state’s GDP. Alaska and Montana are each 4.6%, Wyoming is 4.1% and Idaho 3.4%. The lowest studied was the District of Columbia with 0.8%.
One of the more surprising statistics comes from the U.S. Forest Service. The report found that folks recreating in national forests brings in more revenue to the federal government than the timber industry. Recreation generates and maintains more jobs, too.
“Recreation ... support(ed) 161,000 jobs, compared to the combined 103,200 jobs from forest products, livestock grazing, mineral extraction, and energy production,” the report states.
How much is a bear sighting worth?
Economists are now also able to track other recreation related values for experiences that do not directly cost money.
Leslie Richardson, of the National Park Service, and Aaron Enriquez, from the U.S. Geological Survey, found out how much seeing a bear in Yellowstone National Park is worth in dollars and cents.
Individual grizzly bear sightings are worth about $16 each, while a black bear viewing is worth $14. The numbers may seem small at first, but once they’re added up over the course of the year and across the number of visitors that come to Yellowstone, however, they grow considerably.
In yearly sightings alone, individual grizzlies are worth $46,000 and individual black bears are worth $15,000. Said another way, the park’s grizzlies and black bears are worth about $10 million and $7 million, respectively, every year.
Enriquez and Richardson based their calculations on information in the Yellowstone Visitor Survey. That data set includes information that suggests travel costs, and also determines how much visitors value and prioritize seeing a bear and whether or not they saw one. Divining those numbers out yielded an accountable figure.
And, in economics terms, bears are great multiple use species, Enriquez explained. They have economic benefits and losses attached to them — similarly to other animals like elephants, moose, and wolves. To understand their value is less clear because, while the damages are easy to quantify in livestock depredation and property damage, the positive impact on tourism and subsequent local economies is less clear.
“The problem is on the benefit side, those numbers aren’t floating around,” Enriquez said. “The reason that happens is because there’s no existing economic markets to provide that kind of information, right? Livestock are traded in markets, (bear) viewing opportunities are not.”
“The way people talk about the economic value of lands it always has this really big bend towards ‘We’ve got to take something from it. We’re saying, sure, and also, you could just leave it there and build a trail or build a lodge and that’ll bring in revenue for a long time.”
— Jessica Turner, president of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable
By providing those numbers, Enriquez said wildlife managers can now make more informed decisions about how they do their work. It may be a very specific window — the value of bear sightings in a single national park — but now state and federal employees can use the same determining factors when deciding what to do with a problem bear.
Is the dollar cost of the damage it caused greater than the dollar cost of what it generates for the local economy? They may do damage, but they also yield a big return for the communities where they exist.
“Our goal with this kind of thing is not to give a very specific, ‘This animal is worth X dollars and forty-three cents,’” Enriquez said. “That’s not the overall goal so much as even getting to a framework where we can look at both the damages and the benefits in one common framework. For economists, the easiest common framework happens to just be dollar values.”
Which is a similar perspective to that of Turner and the ORR. Getting the public, elected officials and land managers all on the same page of the relative economic value of all natural resources has the potential to inform the way decisions are made and conversations about public resources are had.
“The way people talk about the economic value of lands it always has this really big bend towards ‘We’ve got to take something from it,’” Turner said. “We’re saying, sure, and also, you could just leave it there and build a trail or build a lodge and that’ll bring in revenue for a long time.”