Booking windows by reservation system

A booking window is the earliest point at which an arrival date can be reserved. Before that point the date exists on the calendar but cannot be booked by anyone.

Summary table

Rolling daily windows

Under a rolling window, one new arrival date opens every morning. The agencies count in calendar months, not days.

Indiana notes that its online inventory opens at noon, the same hour as its reservation phone line, and not at midnight.

Month-end exceptions

Some arrival dates have no matching day in the release month. An August 31 arrival under a six-month window points at February 31. Each agency handles this differently.

The effect is that three days of arrivals open on one morning. Demand for those dates is concentrated accordingly.

Booking past the edge of the window

A stay can extend beyond the last released date on some systems, as long as the arrival date is inside the window.

• Indiana: a reservation can include up to 13 additional nights after the window edge, within the 14-night maximum stay. On March 1 a camper can reserve September 1 through September 14.
• BC Parks: the whole stay can be reserved up to three months before the arrival date.
• Ontario Parks: each part of a multi-site stay has to satisfy the five-month window on its own.

A reservation that reaches past the window edge can be frozen afterwards. See cancellations.

Facility-specific windows on Recreation.gov

Recreation.gov does not apply one rule to every campground. Its guidance says most campsites can be booked six months before the arrival date, that some locations offer shorter windows, and that the exact date and time for a campground are listed on that campground's Seasons and Fees tab.

Yosemite shows how far a single park can depart from the default:

All of these release at 7 a.m. Pacific. The National Park Service says Camp 4, Wawona and Hodgdon Meadow are first-come, first-served in winter.

Annual launches on Parks Canada

Parks Canada does not use a rolling window. It publishes a table of launch dates, one per park or offer, and the whole reservable season for that park opens at the launch. The table for the 2026 visitor season listed most launches at 8 a.m. local time. Examples from that table: Kootenay on January 20, 2026 at 8 a.m. Mountain, Gros Morne on February 11 at 8:30 a.m. Newfoundland, and Banff on February 12 at 8 a.m. Mountain.

When this page was checked, the table showed no 2027 dates. A previous year's launch date does not predict the next one. See Parks Canada for the launch-day queue.

Other windows that are not campsite windows

Several agencies run different windows for other products on the same reservation site. These are easy to confuse with the campsite rule.

• California State Parks holds reservation drawings up to eight months in advance for certain parks.
• Ontario Parks sells advance daily vehicle permits up to five days before the visit, from 7 a.m. Eastern.
• BC Parks' three-month rule covers frontcountry campsites. Backcountry trips and group sites follow other rules.

Sites with no window

Not every campsite is released online. California State Parks, BC Parks, Oregon State Parks and Pennsylvania all state that some sites are first-come, first-served. Those sites never appear as bookable, whatever the date. The status meanings page covers how they show up in a search.