What Medora's Tourism Numbers Actually Mean for Your Rental
If you host a short-term rental anywhere near Medora, North Dakota, you have probably already had this conversation this summer: someone at the co-op, a guest checking in, a cousin on Facebook, tells you tourism is booming or busting based on a number they heard secondhand. Medora runs on a short, intense season, and every host wants to know whether this July looks like a strong one before they finalize pricing, block off dates for family, or decide whether to add a second unit. The problem is that most of the numbers floating around town get mixed together until they stop meaning anything specific.
This piece is going to slow that down. We are going to walk through what Theodore Roosevelt National Park's own visitation data actually says, year by year, without averaging it into a soundbite. We are going to be explicit about the numbers that do not exist yet, including the one everyone assumes is public: a 2026 headcount for the Medora Musical. And we are going to talk about why park visits, library visitors, and your own booking calendar are three different data sets that should never be substituted for one another. If you host in the Badlands, treating those three things as interchangeable is how hosts end up under-pricing a strong week or over-committing to a soft one.
None of this is meant to talk you out of a good season. Medora has real, durable tourism demand, and late June through July is the engine of the year for almost every host in Billings County. The goal here is to give you a clearer read on what is actually known, what is genuinely unknown, and how to use your own listing's numbers to fill the gap that public data cannot fill for you.
This is not legal advice, and none of the marketing guidance on this page replaces reading your own contracts or confirming local rules with the relevant office.
What the Theodore Roosevelt National Park Numbers Actually Show
The most concrete, repeatable tourism number available to a Medora host comes from the National Park Service's own visitation reporting, tracked through the IRMA system (Integrated Resource Management Applications). For Theodore Roosevelt National Park, recreation visits were reported as 746,862 in 2023, 732,951 in 2024, and 729,893 in 2025. Those are the three most recent full years, and they should be read as three separate, labeled data points, not blended into a single average. Averaging them flattens exactly the information a host needs, which is the direction and pace of year-over-year change, not a smoothed-out midpoint that never actually happened in any single year.
It is also worth being precise about what a 'recreation visit' measures. It is a count of park entries, tracked across the park as a whole, not a count of overnight stays, not a count of unique people, and not a proxy for how many of those visitors slept in a paid short-term rental versus a tent, a relative's driveway, or a day trip from Bismarck. A recreation visit is also not split by unit in the IRMA figures cited here. Theodore Roosevelt National Park has a South Unit, which is the Medora entrance most hosts are closest to, and a North Unit, which sits up near Watford City, roughly 70 miles north. The topline IRMA figure above is a park-wide number. If you have seen a breakdown claiming a specific South Unit versus North Unit split, that split is not something the published IRMA graph itself provides here, and it should not be treated as confirmed just because it sounds plausible.
So what should a host actually take from three years of park entry counts? Directionally, visits eased slightly from 2023 to 2025, a decline of a little under two percent per year on average across that stretch, using each year's own reported figure rather than a smoothed trend line. That is a mild, gradual softening, not a collapse, and it is consistent with a lot of post-pandemic outdoor recreation destinations settling back toward a longer-term baseline after an unusually strong stretch. It does not tell you whether short-term rental demand specifically softened at the same pace, because rental demand depends on lodging supply, pricing, marketing reach, and events calendar in ways that raw park entries do not capture on their own.
The Medora Musical Gap Nobody Wants to Admit
The Medora Musical is the single biggest recurring draw tied to the town's identity, and for 2026 the dated season file is set: performances run June 3 through September 12, 2026. That is a real, confirmed scheduling fact, and it is useful for a host thinking about which weeks to block for premium pricing versus shoulder-season discounting.
What is not confirmed, and what this piece is deliberately not going to manufacture, is a 2026 attendance figure for the Musical. As of this writing, the official Musical channels have not locked or published a 2026 headcount, and no credible source ties a specific attendance number to the 2026 season. You may see attendance estimates repeated around town or in older articles referencing prior seasons, but carrying those forward as if they describe 2026 attendance would be inventing a number that does not exist yet for the year in question.
This is worth sitting with rather than glossing over, because it is exactly the kind of gap that tourism-adjacent marketing tends to paper over with a vague phrase like 'thousands of visitors expect to attend.' That phrasing sounds informative and says nothing. The honest version is simpler and more useful to you as a host: there is no locked 2026 Musical headcount, so if you want to know whether Musical nights are driving your bookings, the answer lives in your own reservation data, not in a press release. Look at which check-in dates cluster around performance nights and weekends versus midweek, and let that pattern, built from your own calendar across a season or two, do the work that a missing external number cannot do for you.
The Presidential Library Number, and Why It Is Not the Same as Park Visitation
A separate figure that circulates in Medora tourism conversation comes from a spokesperson for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, who has cited a range of 150,000 to 185,000 visitors in the Library's first year. This is a real figure worth knowing, but it needs to stay clearly labeled for what it is: a press statement from a spokesperson, not a figure pulled from the IRMA park visitation system discussed above.
The distinction matters for two reasons. First, a spokesperson's first-year range is an early, rounded estimate for a single new attraction, not a verified, audited count with the same methodology rigor as the National Park Service's own reporting. Second, and more importantly for a host trying to build a demand picture, the Library's visitor range and the park's recreation-visit counts measure different things, at different locations, on different timelines, and mixing them into a single 'Medora tourism' number would double-count people who visited both, undercount people who visited only one, and produce a total that does not correspond to anything real.
If you want to use the Library range at all in your own planning, use it as a separate, standalone signal: a new attraction opened, early attendance appears meaningful, and it is plausible that it adds incremental visitation to the area beyond what the park and Musical alone were already drawing. Beyond that, resist the urge to combine it with the IRMA figures into a bigger, more impressive-sounding composite number. Two real numbers stacked together in a marketing sentence do not become a third real number just because they share a hometown.
What Your Own Booking Data Should Be Doing Instead
Here is the piece that actually belongs to you as a host, and that no park agency or library spokesperson can report on your behalf: your own listing's performance. AirROI market data for the Medora, ND short-term rental market shows an average annual host revenue figure of $47,851 across a sample of 22 tracked listings. That is a host-year figure, meaning it reflects revenue generated across roughly a full year of operation for the listings in that sample, not a single peak month and not a projection.
That number is useful precisely because it is a demand signal grounded in actual bookings and actual money changing hands, rather than a headcount of people walking through a park gate. It should not, however, be converted into an occupancy rate or an average daily rate without more granular data than a single aggregate revenue figure provides, and it should never be used to back-calculate what park visitation 'must' have been in order to produce that revenue. Park visits and rental revenue are correlated in a loose, common-sense way, more visitors in the region plausibly supports more bookings, but they are not mathematically linked, and treating a $47,851 average as proof of a specific occupancy percentage would be inventing precision that the underlying data does not support.
The more useful move for you is to treat that $47,851 figure as a market benchmark, a rough sense of where a well-performing Medora-area listing lands over a full year, and then compare your own trailing twelve months against it. If you are meaningfully below that figure, the gap is more likely explained by pricing strategy, listing quality, minimum-stay settings, or marketing reach than by some unknowable dip in regional tourism, because the park visitation data above shows only a mild softening, not a dramatic falloff that would explain a large revenue shortfall on its own.
Reading the Trend Without Overreading It
Three years of data, 746,862 in 2023, 732,951 in 2024, and 729,893 in 2025, is enough to see a direction but not enough to declare a permanent trend. A decline across three consecutive years is worth noting and worth watching, but it is also a short window in the life of a park that has drawn visitors for decades, and short windows are exactly where it is easiest to overreact. A host who sees two down years and immediately assumes a structural decline in Medora tourism is making the same mistake as a host who assumes every summer will repeat the strongest year on record.
The more disciplined read is this: visitation has eased slightly and gradually, staying within a fairly narrow band, not falling off a cliff. That kind of gentle softening is consistent with things like a slightly cooler travel year regionally, shifts in fuel prices affecting road-trip behavior, or simple mean reversion after unusually strong pandemic-era outdoor tourism years across the whole national park system, not just Theodore Roosevelt. None of those explanations are confirmed by the IRMA data itself, which only reports the visit counts, not the reasons behind them, but they are worth keeping in mind before assuming the worst about your own booking prospects.
If you want an early read on whether 2026 continues that gentle downward drift or stabilizes, the ND Commerce tourism dashboards that track hotel occupancy and park visitation for the state are the right place to check once updated figures are published. As of this writing, a specific 2026 dashboard figure for the Medora area has not been fetched or confirmed for inclusion here, so it is being left out rather than guessed at. Check that dashboard yourself as the season progresses rather than relying on a number this piece cannot verify.
Turning These Signals Into Actual Listing Decisions
So what does a host do with three years of gently softening park visits, a Musical season with a locked calendar but no locked attendance number, a Library range that is real but separate, and a $47,851 revenue benchmark from a 22-listing sample? Start with the calendar facts you do have. The Musical runs June 3 through September 12, 2026, and that window is your highest-confidence demand period regardless of attendance figures, because the show itself, along with the broader summer draw of the park and downtown Medora, reliably pulls visitors to the area every year the season runs. Price your peak weeks, and your Musical-adjacent weekends especially, with that confirmed schedule in mind.
Next, use your own booking history as the tool that public data cannot replace. If you have even one prior season logged, look at which weeks filled first, which weeks needed price drops to move, and which midweek stretches consistently lagged. That pattern is more predictive of your 2026 season than any park-wide visitation figure, because it reflects actual guest behavior toward your specific property, at your specific price point, in your specific location relative to Medora's core attractions.
Finally, resist the temptation to build your pricing or your promotional messaging around numbers that are not locked, especially a Musical attendance figure that does not exist yet for 2026. Guests researching a Medora trip can tell the difference between a listing description grounded in real, specific, and verifiable details and one padded with vague superlatives about how many thousands of people are supposedly coming. The gentle, honest version, this is peak Musical season, the park draws steady summer traffic, and past guests have consistently booked these dates early, is both more accurate and more persuasive than an invented crowd estimate.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many people visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in 2025?
According to the National Park Service's IRMA visitation system, Theodore Roosevelt National Park recorded 729,893 recreation visits in 2025. That figure follows 732,951 in 2024 and 746,862 in 2023. These are park-wide entry counts, not overnight stays and not unique visitors, and they should be read year by year rather than averaged together. The trend across those three years shows a mild, gradual decline rather than a sharp drop.
Is there an official attendance number for the 2026 Medora Musical?
No. The 2026 Medora Musical season is dated and confirmed, running June 3 through September 12, 2026, but no official source has published a locked attendance figure for that season as of this writing. Any specific headcount you see circulating for 2026 is not confirmed by the Musical's own channels. Hosts should treat this as a genuine data gap and lean on their own booking patterns around performance dates instead of an unconfirmed number.
What does the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library's visitor range actually represent?
A spokesperson for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library has cited a range of 150,000 to 185,000 visitors in the Library's first year of operation. This is a press statement, not a figure pulled from the National Park Service's IRMA visitation system, and it should be kept separate from park recreation-visit counts. Combining the two into one composite tourism number would misrepresent both figures, since they track different locations using different methods.
Should I use park visitation numbers to estimate my own occupancy rate?
No, and this is one of the most common mistakes hosts make with public tourism data. Park recreation visits measure entries to Theodore Roosevelt National Park as a whole, not overnight stays, unique visitors, or short-term rental demand specifically. There is no reliable formula for converting a park visit count into an occupancy percentage or nightly rate for your listing. Your own trailing booking history is a far more accurate guide to your actual demand than any park-wide figure.
What is the AirROI revenue figure for Medora-area short-term rentals?
AirROI market data shows an average annual host revenue of $47,851 across a sample of 22 tracked Medora-area listings. This is a host-year figure reflecting roughly a full year of bookings, not a single peak-month snapshot or a forward projection. It offers a useful benchmark for comparing your own trailing twelve months, but it should not be broken down into an implied occupancy rate or nightly rate without more detailed underlying data than a single aggregate figure provides.
Why does this article separate South Unit and North Unit tourism data?
Theodore Roosevelt National Park has a South Unit near Medora and a North Unit near Watford City, roughly 70 miles apart, and the topline IRMA visitation figures cited here are park-wide totals that do not include a published unit-by-unit split. A Medora host and a Watford City host are drawing on the same park brand but different physical entrances, trailheads, and drive-time patterns. Treating an unconfirmed unit split as fact would overstate certainty the published data does not actually offer.
Is Medora's tourism demand declining?
Park visitation eased gradually from 746,862 in 2023 to 732,951 in 2024 to 729,893 in 2025, a modest year-over-year softening rather than a sharp downturn. Three years is a short window, and this pattern is consistent with a broader national park system trend of settling back from unusually strong pandemic-era travel years. It is not evidence of a structural collapse in Medora tourism, and hosts should weigh it alongside their own booking data before drawing conclusions.
Where can I find updated 2026 tourism dashboard numbers for North Dakota?
North Dakota Commerce maintains tourism dashboards that track statewide hotel occupancy and park-related visitation, and those are the right place to check for updated 2026 figures as they are published. A specific 2026 dashboard number for the Medora area has not been fetched or confirmed for this piece, so it has intentionally been left out rather than estimated. Check the dashboard directly as the season progresses rather than relying on secondhand summaries.
Do I need to worry about short-term rental permitting rules in Billings County before listing?
Short-term rental permitting and zoning rules vary by county and municipality in North Dakota, and Medora and the surrounding Billings County area may have specific registration, occupancy, or fire-code requirements that apply to your property. Because these rules change and can differ from a neighboring county's approach, hosts should confirm current requirements directly with local county or city officials before finalizing a listing. This is not legal advice, and a local official or licensed attorney is the right source for a definitive answer on your specific property.
How should I price my listing for the June 3 to September 12, 2026 Musical season?
The Musical's 2026 dates are confirmed, which makes that window your highest-confidence peak-demand period regardless of the missing attendance figure. Look at your own prior booking history for which weeks filled first and which needed discounting, and weight your pricing toward performance-adjacent weekends where past demand was strongest. Layer in the mild softening shown in recent park visitation data as a reason to stay competitive rather than aggressive on shoulder weeks, rather than assuming every week will perform identically to a peak year.
What is the single biggest data mistake Medora hosts make with tourism numbers?
The most common mistake is blending separate data sets, park recreation visits, Musical attendance estimates, Library visitor ranges, and personal booking revenue, into one implied 'total tourism' figure that does not actually exist in any single source. Each number measures something different, at a different location, using a different method. The safer approach is to keep each figure labeled and separate, acknowledge openly when a number like 2026 Musical attendance simply is not available yet, and let your own booking calendar fill the gaps public data cannot fill.
Work with Crest & Cove Creative
Medora's summer season is short, intense, and easy to misread if you're pricing off rumors instead of real numbers. Here's what the actual tourism data says, and what your own calendar can tell you that no park report ever will.
Your best pricing tool this season isn't a headline attendance figure, it's a clear-eyed read of your own bookings against real regional trends. Start comparing your calendar to the patterns above before you lock in your July rates.
Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.
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