Beautiful Arizona’s 25 national parks accumulated $995.9 million over the course of the 2016 calendar year. This contributed to the National Park Service’s record breaking year in which $35 billion was spent at the country’s 417 parks, hosting 331 million visitors. Arizona was the sixth highest contributor to this national summation in 2016.

The majority of this money was spent on lodging at hotels, accounting for 28.5% of the total spending. Other notable areas include recreation industries (15.4%), restaurants (19.7%), and retail (11.7%).

As one can imagine, much of the visiting activity occurred at the Grand Canyon National Park. In 2016, the Grand Canyon played host to 6 million visitors who spent $648.2 million at the park. This sums to 65% of the total visitor spending that was done at Arizona’s national parks. On a national scale, the Grand Canyon placed third in this regard.

Several other parks are worthy of mention in regard to the amount that they contributed to the overall $995.9 million total. Coming in a distant second, Lake Mead National Recreation Area in the Mojave Desert raked in $312.7 million in visitor spending. The last park in the hundreds of millions of dollars range was Glen Canyon National Recreation Area at $235.2 million.

This activity was outstanding for the state economy. The $995.9 million of visitor spending that occurred at the parks supported a total of 15,600 jobs. These dollars also created $532.1 million in labor income, $1.5 billion in economic output, and added $881.4 million of value to the Arizona economy.

With the current consumer behavior trend of expendable income being used on travel, it is good for the Arizona economy to be able to take advantage of the natural beauty in the state to bolster itself.