Grand County study says Arches timed-entry did not hurt local economy
Grand County’s study found Arches timed entry cut visitation by about 14% but countywide spending, jobs, and tax revenue still rose.
Grand County’s new study says Arches National Park’s timed-entry system did not drag down the broader Moab economy, even though it reduced park visitation by roughly 14% compared with a no-reservation baseline. For travelers building a Moab itinerary, the big takeaway is that access controls at Arches can coexist with a strong visitor economy, which makes timed entry look less like a one-off disruption and more like a management tool that trip planners may need to account for when peak-season rules return.
Grand County received the independent analysis from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute on May 4, 2026, after commissioning it to measure effects on jobs, wages and tax revenue from the timed-entry pilot that ran at Arches from 2022 through 2024. The county spent $60,000 on the study after the Grand County Commission voted 4-3 on March 20, 2025, to move ahead with exploring it. During the pilot, Arches required reservations during peak hours from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., a system that later became one of the most debated access policies in the Southwest.
The county’s summary says the overall numbers point in the opposite direction of the argument that timed entry damaged the local economy. Inflation-adjusted visitor spending rose 22.2 percent between the 2017-2019 average and the 2022-2024 average. Tourism jobs increased 16.3 percent, visitor-generated tax revenue climbed 27.8 percent, and total private-sector jobs were 19.8 percent higher. Grand County also says the report quantified losses in jobs, wages, gross domestic product and local tax revenue in an appendix, but the broader economy still grew during the pilot.
That matters for Moab because Arches is not just a park gate, it is part of the county’s tourism flow. The study’s comparison of actual visitation with a counterfactual baseline found that while Arches visitation stayed relatively flat, spending and job growth elsewhere in Grand County offset the drop tied specifically to park entry management. In other words, fewer reservation slots at the park did not mean fewer dollars across the county.
The politics around the system are not over. In February 2026, the National Park Service said Arches would not require timed-entry reservations in 2026, after Grand County pressed for alternatives and argued the system was limiting visitation and hurting the local economy. Now the county says the new report will help shape visitor-economy management, gateway-community partnerships and a more resilient tourism strategy. For anyone heading to Moab, the message is clear: access rules at Arches are becoming part of the planning reality, not an exception to it.
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