The RV Park Shortage Index: Where America Is Running Out of Places to Park

In Leadville, Colorado, the county commissioners did something in February that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: they voted, unanimously, to stop people from building campgrounds. Lake County's Resolution 2026-06 froze new applications for RV parks, campgrounds, group camps and resorts for six months, and when the Willow fire tore through the area over the summer, the freeze was extended. It now runs until October.

Lake County is not alone. Chesterfield County, South Carolina adopted an emergency moratorium on new RV park and mobile-home park permits in July 2026, one of three pauses it has placed on the category within a year. In Kiowa, Oklahoma, the town council approved two RV parks on a single night in July and then, in the same meeting, suspended all new applications. Pickens County, South Carolina passed its own six-month freeze in February. Different states, different politics, same instinct: whatever is driving all these campground proposals, slow it down.

Here is the strange part. The pause button is being pressed on an industry that, by the numbers, is barely building anything at all. Woodall's Campground Magazine, which tracks campground development the way trade papers once tracked rail construction, counted at least 4,146 new RV sites at 31 new parks across the United States and Canada between 2024 and early 2026, plus another 1,570 sites added at existing parks. Call it 5,716 sites over roughly two and a quarter years, against a private inventory most estimates put between 1.3 and 1.5 million sites. That is documented growth of about two-tenths of one percent a year (Innowave calculation).

Meanwhile, Texas alone registered 91,166 RVs, new and used, in 2025. One state added more rolling bedrooms in a year than the whole continent's documented new parking spots for them over two.

That mismatch is the subject of this piece. We wanted to know where it bites hardest, so we built an index.

The arithmetic of standing still

Start with demand, which is not booming. It is something arguably more dangerous for a supply-constrained market: permanently, structurally high.

Kampgrounds of America's 12th annual Camping & Outdoor Hospitality Report, released in April 2026, counted more than 52 million North American households that camped in 2025, generating $66 billion in local economic impact. The Dyrt's 2026 Camping Report put the number of U.S. campers at 82.4 million in 2025, the second-highest figure it has ever recorded behind 2023's 84.8 million, with 2.6 million people trying camping for the first time. The pandemic cohort that discovered campgrounds in 2020 did not, as many predicted, drift back to hotels. They stayed.

And they keep reporting the same frustration. In The Dyrt's 2025 report, 56.1% of campers said they had a difficult time booking a site in 2024 because campgrounds were full, up from 45.5% the year before and from just 10.6% back in 2019. The 2026 edition softens the number to a phrase, "more than half," but the finding has now held for five consecutive years. The Dyrt's CEO, Kevin Long, says campers have become "more cognizant of the difficulty their fellow campers are facing" when trying to reserve a site, which is a gentle way of describing a market where the customers have started rationing among themselves.

Now the supply side. The federal government does not count campsites, which is itself revealing; the best national inventory remains an RV Industry Association study that estimated roughly 12,290 private campgrounds in the United States, built partly from a Dun & Bradstreet list of 9,921 businesses filed under NAICS code 721211, the Census Bureau's category for RV parks and campgrounds. The Census Bureau's own most recent deep look at the industry found 4,513 employer RV parks and campgrounds generating $3.1 billion in revenue in 2017, up 30.3% from 2012.

Against a private base of 1.3 to 1.5 million sites, the roughly 2,500 documented new sites a year tracked by Woodall's work out to 0.17 to 0.20 percent annual growth (Innowave calculation). Even the industry's full forward pipeline, 18,115 sites announced for delivery by 2028 across 90 new parks and 66 expansions, amounts to less than 0.3% a year (Innowave calculation), and that assumes every project survives its county hearing.

For scale: American factories shipped 342,200 new RVs in 2025 alone. Divide shipments by documented new campsites and you get a ratio worth sitting with: roughly 130 new RVs rolling off assembly lines for every new place to park one (Innowave calculation).

Self-storage spent two decades as the asset class that quietly ate America's garages. Campgrounds may be running the same play in reverse. The vehicles multiplied first, and the real estate never followed.

The shortage nobody can feel everywhere

If you stopped reading here, you might expect campground owners to be swimming in money. Many are not, and the reason is the most interesting thing this data has to say.

The RV Industry Association has now cut its 2026 shipment forecast three times in eight months. The spring forecast called for a median of 349,000 wholesale shipments. Summer trimmed it to 314,000. The fall RV RoadSigns forecast, released October 16, landed at roughly 290,000 units, a 15.3% drop from 2025 and the first sub-300,000 year since 2012. RVIA president Craig Kirby blamed higher financing costs and "continued inflationary pressure on household budgets." Fewer new RVs are being sold, and the people who already own them are watching their spending.

The two public campground landlords tell the same story from the other side of the front desk. Sun Communities, which operates one of the country's largest RV portfolios, reported same-property transient RV revenue down 4.8% in the second quarter of 2026. Equity LifeStyle Properties said its seasonal and transient revenue came in 170 basis points below guidance, and built zero transient growth into its fourth-quarter outlook. Campspot, the reservation platform, measured network occupancy at 30.1% in early 2026 versus 30.2% a year earlier. Essentially flat. Pricing has gone soft too: Insider Perks' Outdoor Hospitality Pricing Index fell for the third straight month in September, with the average nightly rate slipping to $102.22. "Prices have now eased three months in a row," says Brian Searl, whose firm publishes the index.

So which is it? Are campgrounds full or half-empty?

Both, and that is the point. Annual occupancy across the industry runs near 54% while peak-season occupancy runs near 76%, according to the RVIA's inventory study, and the averages flatten a brutally spiky reality. A campground in the Hill Country is sold out every Saturday from March through November and a ghost town on Tuesdays in January; the yearly number splits the difference and tells you nothing. The shortage is not a shortage of campsites in general. It is a shortage of the right site, in the right place, on the right weekend, and increasingly of the long-stay and annual sites that both REITs are racing to create. Sun has converted more than 8,000 transient sites to annual leases since 2020, deliberately shrinking its short-stay inventory because the waiting list for permanence is longer than the line for the weekend.

Which means a national average will never find this shortage. You have to look state by state.

The Index: where the squeeze is tightest

No authoritative state-by-state count of private campsites exists. That gap is real, and anyone selling you a precise 50-state private-supply ranking is selling you a guess. So our RV Park Shortage Index starts from what can actually be measured and verified, then layers judgment on top, clearly labeled as such.

The measurable core is public capacity: how many state-park campsites each state offers per million residents. State park systems report their inventories to the National Association of State Park Directors, whose Annual Information Exchange is the closest thing American camping has to a census. We paired the most recent full public dataset (fiscal 2020-21) with Census Bureau Vintage 2025 population estimates for the 16 states that dominate RV demand. State parks matter doubly here: they are the cheapest sites, so they absorb demand first, and when they sell out the overflow lands on private parks.

Campsites: NASPD Annual Information Exchange, FY2020-21. Population: U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates. Texas Parks & Wildlife's own magazine cites a slightly higher 7,979 sites, which would lift Texas to 252 per million (Innowave calculation) without changing its rank.

Read the top and bottom of that table together and the geography of the shortage snaps into focus. Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Texas, the four states where RV demand is most concentrated, offer their residents four to ten times less public camping capacity per person (Innowave calculation) than Michigan, Oregon or Wisconsin. Michigan has 1,720 state-park campsites per million residents. Florida has 163. These are not neighboring numbers. They are different worlds.

And demand is piling onto exactly the thin end. Statistical Surveys' 2025 registration data puts Texas first in the nation in both new RV registrations (33,766) and used (57,400), with California, Florida, Michigan and Washington rounding out the new-unit top five, and Florida and Arizona near the top for used units. Texans registered roughly 2,875 RVs per million residents last year (Innowave calculation) while their state offered them 223 public campsites per million, which is about thirteen registrations for every public site, in a single year. The Bureau of Economic Analysis measures RVing's economic footprint at $2.7 billion in Texas and $2.1 billion in California, trailing only Indiana, where the figure measures factories rather than campers.

Putting the verified capacity data, the registration rankings and the regulatory record together, the index sorts the sixteen states into three tiers:

Tier 1, acute pressure: Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arizona. Thinnest public capacity per resident in the group, top-five demand by registrations (Georgia rides Atlanta's drive-to market and its neighbors' overflow), inbound migration, and active county-level friction against new supply.

Tier 2, tightening: North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Utah, California. Mid-table capacity, strong demand growth (Utah's used registrations grew 2.5% in 2025, among the national leaders), and in the Carolinas, some of the country's most aggressive moratorium activity. California is a special case: mid-table on paper, nearly impossible to build in practice.

Tier 3, balanced for now: Colorado, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, Michigan. Deep public capacity inherited from a century of park-building, demand that is strong in summer but seasonal, and the softest transient trends in the REIT portfolios.

Two caveats belong in the open. The tiers rest on public capacity because private capacity has never been counted at the state level by any government agency; the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns series counts RV park businesses by state. And capacity figures from fiscal 2020-21 slightly flatter fast-growing states, which means Florida's and Texas's true per-resident numbers today are even lower than the table shows.

Why nobody builds

If the squeeze is this visible, why does supply grow at 0.2% a year? Three forces, stacked.

The neighbors. Every moratorium in this story sits in a Tier 1 or Tier 2 state or a tourist-gateway county, which is no coincidence: campground proposals cluster where demand is, and so does the backlash. The pattern repeats with the regularity of a form letter. A developer files for an RV park. Residents pack the hearing with worries about traffic, septic systems and "those people." The county, lacking any RV-specific zoning category, buys time with a moratorium, then writes rules, and the rules usually make the next proposal harder. Chesterfield County has now cycled through this loop three times in twelve months.

The state house. Regulation is also arriving from above, and sometimes for heartbreaking reasons. After the July 2025 Guadalupe River flood killed campers in the Texas Hill Country, the legislature passed Senate Bill 1, the Heaven's 27 Camp Safety Act, which Governor Abbott signed on September 5, 2025. It made Texas the first state to write NFPA 1194, the national fire-safety standard for RV parks and campgrounds, into state law, and it requires every campground operator in a floodplain to file flood and tornado evacuation plans with county emergency managers. Nobody in the industry argues with the goal. But the law applies to every non-government campground in the state, and whether its construction standards reach existing parks or only new ones is a question the statute leaves genuinely open: the incorporated NFPA standard scopes itself to new parks and additions, and SB 1 neither confirms nor overrides that. Texas operators are, for now, planning as if compliance is the price of expansion. For a developer, safety standards of this kind are manageable; what they are not is free, and they reward the operators who get their permit site plans right the first time.

The spreadsheet. The quietest constraint is arithmetic. Building an RV park means roads, utilities trenched to every pad, stormwater, and in much of the Sun Belt a septic or sewer solution that caps density before zoning ever does. With debt costs where they have sat since 2023, a new park has to clear a return hurdle that existing parks, bought at yesterday's basis, never face. The result is a market where the smart money would rather buy and upgrade than entitle and build, which adds exactly zero net sites. The REITs' own behavior says it plainly: Sun converting 8,000 transient sites to annual leases is a landlord monetizing scarcity, not relieving it.

Stack the three and you get the paradox the moratorium counties have not noticed they are creating. Every freeze, every acreage minimum, every extra hearing makes the existing parks in that county more valuable and the shortage more durable. Scarcity, in this market, is now partly a policy choice.

What to do with this map

For the three audiences who will actually use this index, the tiers translate into different instructions.

For developers and landowners, Tier 1 is where the arithmetic finally works, if you can get entitled. Florida at 163 public campsites per million residents, with the nation's second-largest registration base, is the deepest structural deficit in American outdoor hospitality, and Georgia at 191 may be the least talked-about. But the counties that need sites most are also the ones writing the most hostile rules, which makes the entitlement package the whole game. A proposal that arrives at the hearing as a professional RV park site plan, with density, setbacks, stormwater and fire access already drawn to the county's own code, is answering the neighbors' objections before they are raised. Projects aimed at the long-stay demand the REITs have identified look less like campgrounds and more like RV resorts with annual pads, and in the constrained coastal markets the overflow shows up as demand for RV and boat storage, the shortage's quieter cousin: all those vehicles need somewhere to sit between trips, too.

For investors, the index is a filter against a seductive national story. The 2026 numbers say plainly that transient, weekend-trip revenue is the soft part of this market and annual, long-stay revenue is the hard part. An acquisition pitch built on peak-weekend sellouts in a Tier 3 state deserves skepticism; a development thesis built on annual-site waiting lists in a Tier 1 metro deserves a closer look, with the feasibility work to match. The spread between those two stories is where the next five years of returns in this sector will be made or lost.

For state tourism offices and park agencies, the table is a budget argument wrapped in a ranking. Michigan's 17,416 state-park campsites were built by earlier generations as infrastructure, and they now function as a tourism moat that Florida, with 3,826 sites for a much larger population, simply does not have. Texas is the test case to watch: its state park system's own materials describe campsites that sell out every weekend, and the state has committed historic funding to new parkland. Whether that capacity arrives faster than the registrations do is, in miniature, the whole national question.

The campground was always America's cheapest room. The index says the country has let the supply of that room fall a decade behind the demand for it, most severely in exactly the states people are moving to. The vehicles are built. The land is there. What stands between them, in 2026, is a hearing room.

Methodology and sources

The RV Park Shortage Index ranks states on verified public camping capacity per resident, read alongside RV registration rankings, REIT disclosures and the county-level regulatory record. Tiers are a judgment built on those inputs, and we say so. All figures are as published by their sources as of October 19, 2026.

• State-park campsites: NASPD Annual Information Exchange, FY2020-21, Table 2 (improved plus primitive sites). Definitions vary by state.

• Population: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 state estimates, July 1, 2025.

• Supply growth: Woodall's Campground Magazine development tracking via RVBusiness (5,716 documented sites, 2024 to early 2026) and Woodall's (18,115-site pipeline through 2028). These are documented minimums, not net figures.

• Private inventory base: RVIA/CHM Government Services Campground Industry Market Analysis (about 12,290 campgrounds); industry estimates of 1.3 to 1.5 million private sites. No government agency counts campsites.

• Registrations: Statistical Surveys 2025 data via RV News, March 17, 2026.

• Camper demand: KOA 2026 Camping & Outdoor Hospitality Report (April 14, 2026); The Dyrt 2026 Camping Report; The Dyrt 2025 report for the 56.1% booking-difficulty figure (2024 data).

• Shipments and forecast: RVIA RoadSigns via RV News, October 16, 2026.

• Operators and pricing: Sun Communities Q2 2026 10-Q; Equity LifeStyle Q2 2026 results; Campspot via Woodall's; Insider Perks OHPI, September 2026.

• Regulation: Texas SB 1, enrolled; Lake County, CO moratorium; county records for Chesterfield County, SC, Pickens County, SC and Kiowa, OK.

Innowave Studio prepares preliminary site plans for RV parks, campgrounds and glamping resorts nationwide. Journalists and researchers are welcome to reuse the table and tiers with attribution and a link to this page.