Every Kid Outdoors
Open-knowledge reference entry

Every Kid Outdoors is a program run by the United States National Park Service in which fourth graders in the country receive free admission to national parks, federal land, and water recreation areas. The program was created by President Barack Obama in 2015 as Every Kid in a Park. It was renewed annually until 2019 when it was renewed for 7 years under the Every Kid Outdoors Act within the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act and lead to the program's name change.
Overview
Under the Every Kid Outdoors program, the National Park Service gives all United States students in the fourth grade and their families access to an annual pass for free admission to federal recreation areas from September 1 to August 31 of the child's fourth grade year. Areas of admission include national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife refuges. As of 2025, participating federal organizations included; Bureau of Land Management, United States Bureau of Reclamation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Around the time of the announcement of the original initiative, an annual pass to national parks would normally cost $80.
Some states recognize the Every Kid Outdoors pass and accept it in lieu of fees for their state park systems, including Maryland and New York. California has a separate free state park pass system for fourth-graders in the state, known as the Adventure Pass.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19880427. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015, 2019 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Every Kid Outdoors” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.