It will cost more for international visitors to walk among the alligators and anhingas in Everglades National Park.
President Donald Trump wants to charge foreign tourists more than Americans to enter national parks. How much more is up to Interior Secretary Doug Burghum.
The president signed an executive order July 3 directing the Interior Department to boost entrance fees for people visiting who are not U.S. citizens.
“The national parks will be about America First,” the president told a crowd in Iowa the day he signed the order.
The directive impacts Everglades National Park in South Florida. The park currently charges $35 per vehicle to drive into the park for one day. That fee covers the driver and all passengers. It is charged at the Homestead entrance and at the Shark Valley entrance. An annual pass is $70. A commercial bus tour with at least 26 seats is charged $300. The passes are good for seven days.
Attendance to Everglades has been falling since reaching a generational high in 2022 after the COVID-19 pandemic. About three-quarters of a million people visited the park in 2024, according to National Parks data.
Entry fees to see the famed River of Grass were last raised in 2020 as part of a two year phase-in that saw the daily cost go from $25 to the current $35. Prior to those hikes, the fees remained unchanged for 17 years.
The last fee increase also applied to visitors entering the park boundaries on the waters of Florida Bay.
Just how much more foreign visitors will have to pay to visit the Everglades isn’t clear yet. However, in the Interior Department’s “Budget in Brief” for the upcoming fiscal year, it wrote, “In 2026, NPS will establish a surcharge for foreign visitors that is estimated to generate more than $90 million to keep national parks beautiful.” Entry and visitor use fees generated $419 million in 2024.
A third of visitors to national parks were foreign travelers in 2019, the latest year of data available from trade group U.S. Travel Association. South Florida ranks high for international tourists. More than 22% of overnight visitors to Miami-Dade County in 2024 were overseas visitors, according to the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau.
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There is an estimated $23 billion of delayed and deferred maintenance work at the nation’s park system. It includes roads, buildings and other infrastructure. Everglades National Park’s list of deferred repairs and maintenance totaled $184 million. The park also needs $12 million a year on annual regular maintenance.
“Asset condition will further deteriorate if the annual routine maintenance is not addressed,” the park wrote in a factsheet. “Infrastructure investment needs may also include modernization and renewal to address safety, code compliance, visitor capacity, and other park requirements."
South Florida’s other national park, Biscayne National Park, does not charge an entry fee. Most of the park’s acreage is in Biscayne Bay. It had $88 million of deferred maintenance and needs about half a million dollars for routine maintenance each year. About 512,000 people visited last year.
President Trump’s executive order said the money raised by charging foreign visitors more will go toward park infrastructure. The order does not include a deadline for the Interior Department to institute a new fee schedule.
The nation’s first national preserve, Big Cypress, greeted more visitors than both national parks combined. A record 2.9 million people visited the preserve in 2021. Last year, 2.2 million people entered the preserve. There is no fee.
The preserve is next to the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, which is the location of a immigration detention center built by the state of Florida. It is expected to house as many as 3,000 people. The environmental group Friends of the Everglades sued the state saying the facility threatens the natural environment.
