Acadia National Park has weathered periods of disruption in past years, but 2025 will stand out for a variety of reasons.
Acadia’s number of staffed positions was slashed this year by President Donald Trump’s administration, and it experienced its longest-ever federal government shutdown in its 109-year history.
And, by the end of this month, Acadia is expected to set a new record in annual visitation of roughly 4.08 million visits for the year.
The bigger crowds this year are consistent with a surge in visits to the park since the COVID pandemic, and will break an all-time attendance record that Acadia set in 2021. But as tourists show up in bigger numbers, and as the park’s staff face layoff threats amid federal wrangling over their budget, it feeds into concerns about whether ever-increasing tourism might be more than the park or surrounding communities can bear.
Though the future remains unknown, those who keep close tabs on the inner workings and policies of the National Park Service and of Acadia in particular say there is no reason to think 2026 will be much different, either in terms of staffing shortages or visitor traffic.
“The trend suggests [visitation] will remain high” in 2026, Perrin Doniger, spokesperson for the not-for-profit group Friends of Acadia, said last week. “We’re in a period of rapid change for the National Park Service.”
Annual visitation to Acadia is expected to remain in the 3.9-to-4 million range, which has become the park’s new normal since the COVID pandemic, said Todd Martin, a regional official for the National Parks Conservation Association. Prior to 2021, when Acadia tallied 4.07 million visits, the highest calculated estimate for annual visitation to the park was right around 3.5 million visits in 2017, 2018 and again in 2019.
Martin is more concerned about staffing cuts at Acadia potentially becoming a new normal.
The Trump administration has pushed hard to reduce year-round staffing throughout the National Park Service — more than a third of such positions at Acadia are currently vacant and cannot be filled because of a hiring freeze — which puts both visitation and Acadia’s substantial impact on the local economy at risk, Martin said. Visitors in 2024 are estimated to have spent more than half a billion dollars in Bar Harbor and other nearby communities, which supported thousands of local jobs, he said.
“This does not bode well for staff capacity in 2026 at Acadia,” Martin said of continued efforts by the Trump administration to make steep staff reductions throughout the park service permanent. “NPS staff at Acadia are working extremely hard to minimize the impact of these challenges on the visitor experience, but some [impacts] are inevitable.”
The park is moving ahead with filling seasonal jobs for 2026, which are unaffected by the current hiring freeze, Amanda Pollock, spokesperson for the park, said Friday. She said she did not have information about how many year-round jobs are vacant because of the Trump administration’s order against refilling them.
While the park continues to adjust to staffing constraints, the communities surrounding Acadia continue to adapt to the park’s ever increasing popularity. Not only are many surrounding towns seeing more vacation rental properties, with most declining to impose limits on them, but traditional hoteliers continue to build, adding more guest rooms and lodging capacity on Mount Desert Island and in nearby Ellsworth.
At the same time, there has been some pushback to continued growth of the tourism industry in Bar Harbor, which serves as the main service community for visitors to Acadia.
This year the town sharply reduced its cruise ship traffic — though legal challenges to the new limits remain pending in court — and in July it extended a temporary ban on new lodging development through the end of the year. The pause is to help the town assess the local impacts of tourism growth and whether it should adopt new measures on hotel development.
2025 was a “mixed bag” for the local tourism industry, despite the record visitation, the head of the local Chamber of Commerce said. The decline in cruise ship traffic and a tourist season that shifted from “an exceptionally wet spring followed by a very dry peak summer” were among the factors that affected businesses in different ways, Everal Eaton said.
There was a dip this year in international visitors — which other officials have attributed to Trump’s often antagonistic rhetoric toward foreign policy — and pricier entrance fees in 2026 for foreign visitors to Acadia could deter visitation to the park, he said. But strong domestic demand this summer is shaping up to be similar next year.
“We approach 2026 with optimism,” Eaton said. “Current web traffic and booking inquiries remain consistent with this time last year, showing that Bar Harbor remains a cherished destination.”
This past summer a senior Acadia official told members of the park’s advisory commission that how high tourist traffic in the park could rise most likely depends on how much tourism lodging is available.
Visits probably won’t rise above 4 million a year without more lodging options on Mount Desert Island or in places like Ellsworth or even Bangor, which are within an hour’s drive or less from Bar Harbor, Adam Gibson, the park’s social scientist who oversees the park’s visitation data, told the commission at a public meeting in June. Gibson did not speculate how high the total number of visits to Acadia could feasibly climb.
“Most visitors are staying on the island, so there likely is an upper limit for visitation,” he said.
Pollock would not speculate about visitation next year, but said the park expects 2026 to be consistent with recent years in terms of foot traffic.
“It was definitely high, and we know it is going to continue to be busy,” she said. “There’s no reason to believe it will be any different.”
Doniger said that despite concerns raised by the combination of more tourists visiting the island and staffing cuts at Acadia, the park and its partners made major strides this year with facilities upgrades, including adding more seasonal employee housing and a transit hub for mitigating traffic.
Acadia has been looking to reduce vehicle congestion in the park for years, dating back to the creation of the Island Explorer bus system in 1999, and more recently by mandating reservations for people who want to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain.
Over the past several years the shortage of available housing on and around MDI has caused many seasonal jobs to go unfilled.
New housing for seasonal employees opened this year and more is on the way as the park looks to complete apartments for 56 more seasonal employees at its Harden Farm property next to Kebo Valley Golf Course in Bar Harbor, Doniger said.
The park also is very close to finishing the last details on its new maintenance building, which replaces another that was decades old and increasingly beyond repair. The new building, funded by the Great American Outdoors Act during Trump’s prior term in office, is expected to be fully operational next spring, she said.
The most visible and public project was the completion in September of the state-run Acadia Gateway Center in Trenton, which was decades of planning, Doniger noted. This project has been key to the park’s goals of getting more day visitors and tourists who spend the night off MDI to use the Island Explorer bus service to get to and from the park, which will help reduce vehicle congestion at Sand Beach, the Jordan Pond House, and other popular sites in Acadia.
But as these capital improvement projects are completed, there still needs to be adequate staffing in Acadia to make sure visitors have access to programs and services and the park’s resources are protected and managed sustainably, she said.
“The current situation is not sustainable,” Doniger said of many year-round staff having been laid off and a hiring freeze that continues to block those positions from being refilled. Congress should continue to fund all Acadia’s positions, whether filled or not, and budget appropriately for the park’s never-ending maintenance and infrastructure needs.
“We need the park to be fully funded and staffed to make sure visitors have a positive experience,” she said.