Outdoor recreation participation data: who's doing what and where

If you’re trying to figure out whether your market is growing, shrinking, or shifting, outdoor recreation participation data is the clearest place to start. The numbers coming out of 2024 are striking, and not just because they’re record-setting.

181.1 million Americans participated in outdoor recreation in 2024. That’s 58.6% of everyone aged 6 and older. The Outdoor Industry Association tracks this annually, and 2024 was the ninth consecutive year of record participation. But the headline number is only part of the story. The who and the where matter more for anyone running an outdoor business. They tell you whether you’re fishing in a growing pond or marketing to a crowd that’s already walking past you.

The overall picture: bigger base, less frequent

Total participation hit a new high, but something else happened quietly beneath it: the average American only got outside 65.2 days in 2024. That’s the second-lowest figure since tracking began in 2012.

More people are trying outdoor activities, but many of them aren’t going often. That tension runs through everything else in the data.

The net-new participant growth since 2019 is 27.5 million people. These aren’t outdoor enthusiasts adding another trip to their calendar. They’re largely first-timers and occasional participants who found their way to a trail, campsite, or waterway during or after the pandemic. They’re not embedded in the outdoor recreation community. They don’t know your outfitter, they haven’t built a habit, and they’re searching for what to do next every time they decide to go outside.

The Outdoor Industry Association separates participants into “casual,” “active,” and “core” categories. The 2025 report added a new dimension: it now measures both frequency and intensity (whether someone approaches an activity aggressively or casually). The growth in 2024 was concentrated at the casual end. That’s who’s driving the record numbers.

For the first time ever, more than half of American women (53%) participated in outdoor recreation in 2024. Women have historically been underrepresented in outdoor participation data. That benchmark crossing is meaningful: it means the outdoor recreation market is no longer majority-male by participation. Operators in activity categories that have historically skewed male (fly fishing, hunting, whitewater rafting) have a market waiting for them that they’re not always reaching.

Who’s driving growth by demographic

Senior participation rose 7.4% in 2024. Youth participation rose 5.6%. These two groups are bookending a multigenerational outdoor moment that’s newer than most operators realize. It has practical implications for how you design trips, what your minimum age requirements are, and how you describe the physical demands of what you offer.

The racial and ethnic shifts are the most significant demographic change in the data. Black Americans grew participation 12.8% in 2024. Hispanic Americans grew 11.8%. Hispanic Americans now have the highest overall outdoor participation rate of any demographic group tracked: 63.6% of all Hispanic Americans aged 6 and older participated in outdoor recreation in 2024. For context, the overall average is 58.6%, and the rate for male Americans is 64%.

Those aren’t incremental numbers. Millions of new participants from communities that have historically faced access barriers (geographic, financial, cultural) are finding their way into outdoor recreation. Any operator still building content, imagery, and trip design around the old default customer profile is working with a demographic map that’s been outdated for several years now.

What does this mean practically? Your trip photos matter. Your location descriptions matter. Whether you explain what to expect or assume prior familiarity matters. The fastest-growing segments of the outdoor recreation market are people who may not have a family history of guiding trips, or who didn’t grow up in regions where fly fishing or backcountry hiking was part of the culture. Meeting them requires different content than the insider-speak most outdoor businesses default to.

Income data shifted in a separate direction. 35% of all outdoor participants in 2024 had a household income over $100,000, up from 32.6% in 2023. High-income households are outdoors at disproportionately high rates. That’s useful context if you’re pricing guided experiences and worrying about whether there’s a ceiling on what people will spend. The share of participants who can afford premium pricing is growing.

What activities people are actually doing

Walking, hiking, fishing, camping, bicycling, and running are the top activities by raw participant count. Each of those gained an average of 2.1 million participants in 2024. These are the gateway activities: low barrier, geographically accessible, and year-round in most of the country.

For outfitters who run guided trips, the core insight is that potential customers are entering through the easiest doors first. The person who started hiking in 2022 might be ready for their first guided fly-fishing float trip in 2025. The family that camped in a state park in 2023 might be ready for a guided backcountry trip in 2026. These aren’t future customers you have to create from scratch. They’re already out there, already interested, already spending time and money outdoors. They just haven’t found you yet.

Content that meets them where they are reaches this pipeline. “What do I need for my first guided rafting trip” is a real search query. “Is guided fly fishing worth it for beginners” is a real search query. Outfitters who answer those questions in their content (not condescendingly, but the way a knowledgeable friend would) are sitting in front of the fastest-growing segment of the outdoor recreation market. Most outfitters still write for their existing customers. That’s the gap.

Among newer activities, pickleball grew 45.8% in 2024 to 19.8 million participants, a 311% increase over three years. This isn’t directly relevant to most guided-trip operators, but it signals something worth understanding: Americans will adopt a new outdoor-adjacent activity at extraordinary speed when the barriers are low and access is easy. The question for every operator is whether they’re reducing the perceived barrier or raising it.

5 million new “core” outdoor users appeared in 2024. After a decade-long gradual decline in highly committed, frequent participants, that number reversed. The OIA defines core users by both frequency and intensity. These are the people booking multiple guided trips per year, spending significantly, buying gear, referring friends, leaving reviews. They’d been declining slowly since the mid-2010s. In 2024, that trend flipped.

Where participation concentrates: what the BEA shows

The Bureau of Economic Analysis tracks outdoor recreation’s economic footprint by state every year. The 2024 data shows the sector contributed $696.7 billion in value added nationally (2.4% of U.S. GDP), with nominal gross output at $1.3 trillion. Real GDP for the sector grew 2.7%, just under the 2.8% growth of the overall U.S. economy.

Geography tells you where the market is densest. California ($24.1 billion in outdoor recreation value added), Florida ($22.7 billion), and New York ($11.8 billion) are the three largest states by total economic contribution. But total size and market concentration are different things. Hawaii is smaller in absolute terms, but outdoor recreation represents 6.1% of Hawaii’s entire state GDP - the highest share in the country. For an operator in Hawaii, outdoor recreation isn’t a niche sector. It’s the economy.

The BEA breaks conventional activities into categories. Boating and fishing is the largest at $38.4 billion in value added nationally, bigger than any other conventional category by a significant margin. Florida ($4.4 billion), California ($3.3 billion), and Texas ($3.0 billion) lead that category. RVing ranks second at $27.5 billion, with Indiana ($5.2 billion) leading due to its manufacturing concentration. Hunting, shooting, and trapping is $16.5 billion. Snow activities come in at $7.6 billion.

These numbers include the full supply chain: equipment, retail, services, transportation. For a guided-trip operator, the activity participation rates and employment trends matter more than the total value added numbers. But understanding the economic scale contextualizes the market you’re in.

Outdoor recreation employment increased in 36 states and DC in 2024. Percent change ranged from 4.3% growth in North Dakota to a 4.0% decline in Hawaii. Employment growth is a useful proxy for where the market is expanding vs. contracting. An operator in the upper Plains or Midwest shouldn’t assume they’re too small to matter. The West North Central region has a 62% outdoor participation rate, among the highest regionally in the country. The market is there; it’s a question of whether operators are showing up for it.

Why the “where” matters more than it used to

The participation data used to tell a simpler story: outdoor recreation happened in places with mountains, coastlines, rivers, and public land. Growth was concentrated in regions with natural assets.

That’s less true now. Urban outdoor recreation (trails in city parks, urban kayaking, accessible hiking near metro areas) has grown faster than remote backcountry activity in the post-pandemic period. The casual participant driving the overall numbers isn’t driving four hours to a trailhead. They’re going to the closest accessible outdoor experience.

This matters for operators working to appear in regional search results. The “near me” search is still the primary way new outdoor participants find guided experiences. Ranking for activity + location searches like “kayak tours near Nashville” or “guided fishing near Denver” is how you reach the casual participant who’s active in your region but hasn’t booked a guided trip yet.

The geographic data also suggests the outdoor recreation economy is less concentrated than it was a decade ago. While California, Florida, and New York have the largest absolute numbers, the states with the fastest employment growth are distributed across the country. Market expansion is happening in places that didn’t traditionally define themselves as outdoor recreation destinations.

What this means for how you think about your customer

Most operators have a mental model of their customer built over years of actual bookings. That model was accurate when it was formed. The question is whether it still is.

The participation data points toward a few practical adjustments.

More participants at lower average frequency means more people in the “just getting started” category relative to experienced regulars. If your website and trip pages assume prior knowledge (jargon, skipped basics, no explanation of what to expect), you’re losing the fastest-growing segment before they ever make contact. Writing content that speaks to multiple experience levels without condescending to veterans is harder than it sounds, but that’s where the growth is pointing.

The demographic shift toward women, seniors, and Hispanic Americans means the visual and tonal assumptions baked into most outdoor marketing are overdue for a real look. Not a performative one. These groups are already participating in outdoor recreation. They just aren’t seeing themselves reflected in most outfitter content, which still defaults to photos of young white men in technical gear doing difficult things.

The outdoor recreation economy at $1.3 trillion in gross output is useful framing for why this market is worth investing in, but the participation data is what tells you who’s in it. High-income households are growing as a share of participants. That’s context for pricing decisions and for how you position your guided experience relative to the DIY option.

Core participants increased for the first time in a decade. These are your repeat customers, your referral sources, your reviewers. If your off-season email marketing isn’t building a specific relationship with this segment (separate from the casual participant in your list), you’re leaving the most valuable group in your database underserved.

Across every channel, the 2026 outdoor recreation marketing landscape is being shaped by this participation data: new demographics entering, frequency staying moderate, and core users reversing a decade of decline. Those aren’t abstract trends. They’re signals about which marketing investments will compound and which ones will stay flat.

The number that matters most isn’t the total

181 million participants is the number that gets the headlines. But 65.2 average days outdoors - that’s the one to sit with.

It means that among 181 million participants, most aren’t getting outside twice a week. Most are going a few times a season, or less. They found their way to a trail or a campsite, and they might find their way to a guided trip if someone makes it easy.

We’ve watched operators with thin websites and minimal content lose bookings to outfitters who were simply easier to find and easier to trust. The participation data isn’t a reason to feel confident about the market’s trajectory. It’s a reason to get specific about who you’re trying to reach and whether you’re actually showing up for them.

Your job isn’t to reach all 181 million. It’s to be visible when the casual participant (the one who just went camping for the first time, or just tried stand-up paddleboarding, or just turned 65 and is looking for guided trips they can take with their grandkids) starts searching for what to do next. The data says there are more of them than ever before. Whether you’re in front of them is a different question entirely.