More than 180 million Americans went outside to recreate in 2024, setting an all-time record with more than 58% of the country aged 6 and up playing outdoors.
That’s a big deal for outdoor advocates who spent decades laboring to get more than half the country outside.
“I want to beat caffeine. That’s my goal. 73%. That’s the big number,” said Kelly Davis, the wise-cracking statistician for the Outdoor Industry Association, or OIA. “We already killed flossing. That was 30%.”
The latest participation report by the OIA showed a 3% increase over the previous record in 2023. Since 2019, there have been 27.5 million new participants in outdoor recreation, with seniors, young adults and people of color leading the growth. But the frequency of outdoor trips by those newcomers and core participants is dwindling.
The recreation economy largely revolves around those core outdoor recreation fans. After a decade-long slide in that key demographic, the number of avid participants climbed by 5 million in 2024. But across the board, people are not getting outside as often. The average American recreates outdoors about 65.2 days a year, the second lowest showing since OIA started tracking participation in 2012.
But hidden in that declining frequency is a rising wave of new arrivals. Those casual participants may not log 50-plus days running on the trail, but they reflect a hidden treasure for an industry that has long focused on the grizzled vets who are pretty much always buying new stuff. The casual outdoor recreation participants — the folks who are mostly women and testing the waters with first-ever camping and fishing trips, trail runs and hikes — represent “a huge opportunity” for the outdoor recreation realm, Davis said.
She’s worried about how Americans will react. The pandemic spiked outdoor activity.
(She says: “The best marketing campaign the outdoors ever had was COVID.” Told ya she’s a wiseacre.)
But this looming economic slump and rising prices on essentials, Davis said, will see people “choosing between medicine and food.”
“When that happens, stuff for outdoor recreation is not very high on the list,” she said. “This one just feels different.”
Trump overhaul of Department of Commerce threatens annual outdoor recreation report
That participation report is a big deal for the outdoor recreation economy. So is the annual study from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which last year showed outdoor recreation spending supporting 5 million U.S. jobs as part of a $1.2 trillion economy. The BEA study that launched with federal legislation in 2017 shows the outdoor economy has grown 36% since 2012.
Those economic numbers anchor the establishment of now 24 outdoor recreation state offices and underpin the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experiences Act — or EXPLORE Act — the largest outdoor recreation legislation package unanimously passed by Congress last year.
But the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal bureaucracy could eliminate the annual report from the BEA. Federal and state outdoor recreation advocates are mounting a campaign to persuade both federal lawmakers and the president to support the analysis of outdoor recreation, which accounts for 2.3% of the nation’s economy.
“The work by BEA staff annually is vital to the outdoor recreation industry and has helped our manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, service providers and outfitters better understand economic trends that they can strategize around and, ultimately, grow jobs and economic resiliency in every corner of the country,” reads a letter sent to federal lawmakers last month from the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, a group representing more than 110,000 outdoor businesses and several dozen national organizations.
A similar letter was sent by the Confluence of States representing a growing number of state recreation offices, urging lawmakers to support funding for the BEA’s Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account. That letter outlined noted outdoor recreation’s oversized impact on rural employment and how the annual BEA data “catalyzes new initiatives for outdoor access resulting in recruitment and retention of talented employees to our states and job creation that bolsters economies of all sizes, especially in rural recreation communities.”
Congress is listening. All 2026 budget numbers keep the BEA funding intact.
But the shake-up at the Bureau of Labor Statistics could threaten that funding. Trump fired the head of the bureau this month after the federal July jobs report showed slow employment growth. Trump’s new nominee to head the bureau — conservative economist E.J. Antoni — supports the president’s assertion that the bureau’s methodology, modeling and statistical assumptions are flawed and unreliable.
Still, Trump has cited the bureau’s numbers on outdoor recreation. His July 3 Make America Beautiful Again executive order establishing a commission to help remove bureaucratic inefficiencies around conservation and federal management of public lands cited the $1.2 trillion numbers from 2023.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz also have cited the Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers in support of new policies surrounding the management of public lands.
“They are quoting our own numbers. People are actively using these numbers to show the importance of the outdoor recreation economy,” Jessica Turner, the head of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, told The Sun. “There’s a fear we could be swept up in the agency downsizing that is certainly happening in the Commerce Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Since 2017, economists at the BEA have studied outdoor recreation, developing relationships with industry leaders to build models to gauge the scope of the growing recreation economy. That build-up took a couple years, Turner said.
“I just wonder if the agency will actually be there or the people will be there to run the report,” she said. “We are super concerned about that.”