Two people carry a freshly cut fir out of a snowy national forest, a black dog running ahead of them
More Than Just ParksChristmas Tree Finder

144 places with a permit online · 110 on sale today144 online · 110 on sale today

Type your ZIP. We'll show you where it's legal, when sales open and what a permit costs, straight from the agencies.Type your ZIP for where it's legal, when sales open and what a permit costs, straight from the agencies.

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How this works

USDA Forest Service photo by Andrew Avitt

How this works

79 national forests list a 2026 Christmas tree permit on Recreation.gov, and 65 Bureau of Land Management offices list one in BLM's permit store. We read both on Nov 12, 2026 and print what they say: the dates, the price, the limit and the rules, each with its source. Sale times are in each place's own time zone. Recreation.gov prints them in Eastern, and we convert. A permit is the agency's to sell, and the rules on it are the agency's. We quote them and link them. We don't sell permits, and nothing here is one.

2 forests have pages on Recreation.gov with no permit type named and no dates on them. We print what the page says and no date. 53 more Forest Service units and 50 BLM field offices don't list a permit in either store. We say "not posted yet" for those, never "no program": some sell at the office and never post one online. Distances are straight lines to a forest's boundary, not to the cutting area and not by road. The forest's own map shows where you can cut. How we read the agencies · Not a permit, not the agency

The honest answer

Is cutting a Christmas tree bad for the forest? What it does and what it doesn't

Short answer: no, not when you follow the rules. A permitted tree comes out of a crowded stand of young trees the forest marked for thinning, and the forest won't miss it. But it isn't a wildfire fix either, and the people who run these programs say so out loud. The real harm comes from breaking the rules, and the biggest environmental cost of your tree is usually the drive.

From Santa Fe NF release, Nov. 18, 2025, CapRadio, Ezra David Romero, Dec. 5, 2018, Boise State Public Radio / Mountain West News Bureau via KNPR, Murphy Woodhouse, Dec. 21, 2023 and Dovetail Partners, Jim L. Bowyer et al., Nov. 19, 2018, read Nov 11, 2026.

Why agencies allow it, in their own words

You'll see one line again and again, because it's the agencies' shared wording: permits are "a unique opportunity to help thin densely populated stands of small-diameter trees." That's Recreation.gov, and forest after forest repeats it. Here's what individual offices add.

From Recreation.gov tree permits index, Santa Fe NF release, Nov. 18, 2025 and Iosco County News-Herald, Nov. 15, 2024, Huron-Manistee, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico: "Removing these trees in designated areas helps other trees grow larger and can open areas that provide forage for wildlife."

    From Santa Fe NF release, Nov. 18, 2025, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • Eldorado National Forest, California: Cutting can "help reduce hazardous fuel ladders that have built up over years of fire suppression."

    From Eldorado NF Christmas tree permit page, Recreation.gov, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming: Cut in aspen and willow stands, which are "biological hotspots." Conifers "naturally encroach and eventually overtake" them without fire or cutting.

    From Buckrail, Nov. 25, 2024, Bridger-Teton aspen and willow request, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • San Juan National Forest, Colorado: Small white fir "can become a ladder fuel during a fire and carry the fire from the ground to the canopy."

    From San Juan National Forest, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • Gala Miller, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington: "We're giving people a positive experience with public lands and letting them know that these lands are for you, too."

    From USDA Forest Service, Patrick Lair, Nov. 15, 2021, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • BLM Utah: Permits "improve forest conditions by removing overstocked or hazardous fuels."

    From BLM Utah press release, Dec. 5, 2025, read Nov 11, 2026.

  • The Interior Department, on last winter's $1 BLM tree: It would "help families save money, enjoy public lands and support wildfire prevention."

    From Interior press release, Dec. 5, 2025, read Nov 11, 2026.

Does it cut fire risk? Not much, and foresters say so

Here's the part you won't read on a permit page. Near Truckee in 2018, the Tahoe National Forest's Joseph Flannery figured about 2,000 acres there could stand to lose 50,000 trees, and the forest sold 300 permits there that year. "I don't think there's the infrastructure in place to really make a dent," he told CapRadio.

From CapRadio, Ezra David Romero, Dec. 5, 2018, read Nov 11, 2026.

Plumas National Forest's Lee Anne Schramel, the same year: "We have lots and lots and lots of small trees, but is it making a dent in thinning issue that we have? Not so much." Oregon State's James Johnston said in 2023 that even doubling or tripling the number of people cutting trees "wouldn't have a huge impact."

From CapRadio, Ezra David Romero, Dec. 5, 2018 and Boise State Public Radio / Mountain West News Bureau via KNPR, Murphy Woodhouse, Dec. 21, 2023, read Nov 11, 2026.

Nobody calls it useless, though. "Every little bit helps," the Lake Tahoe Basin's Lisa Herron told National Geographic, and UC Cooperative Extension's Susie Kocher put it this way: "By removing some of the smaller trees, we are doing some of the work." The reason behind the thinning, too many small trees after years of putting fires out, is real. The program is just too small to fix it.

From National Geographic (Dec 14, 2021), CapRadio, Ezra David Romero, Dec. 5, 2018 and Eldorado NF Christmas tree permit page, Recreation.gov, read Nov 11, 2026.

The real harms, and how forests respond

What nobody has measured, in anything we read: how much trampling or off-road damage cutters do, how much fuel the program removes, or whether cutters bother wildlife on winter range. With no study to go on, we won't guess.

From CapRadio, Ezra David Romero, Dec. 5, 2018, Dovetail Partners, Jim L. Bowyer et al., Nov. 19, 2018 and LTBMU release via Tahoe Living with Fire, Sept. 19, 2024, read Nov 11, 2026.

The biggest carbon cost is your drive

A wild tree needs no farm, no fertilizer and no shipping, but you still have to go get it. Dovetail Partners' 2018 review of the research found that "the overall environmental impact of self-harvesting is heavily determined by the driving distance from home to harvest site," and that a one-way trip over about 6 to 8 miles "is likely to favor other means of obtaining a tree." Check your own drive against that.

From Dovetail Partners, Jim L. Bowyer et al., Nov. 19, 2018, read Nov 11, 2026.

Keep it in proportion: all Christmas trees together are "less than 0.1% of an average person's carbon footprint," the same review says, and a string of 400 old-style incandescent lights can put out 1.5 to 3.5 times the carbon of a real tree's whole life. Nobody has studied a wild-cut tree on its own, so that's a gap, not a verdict. Wild, farm or artificial, compared.

From Dovetail Partners, Jim L. Bowyer et al., Nov. 19, 2018, read Nov 11, 2026.

What environmental groups say

We found no position for or against Christmas tree permits from the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, the National Forest Foundation, the Center for Biological Diversity or WildEarth Guardians. The closest is 2019, when WildEarth Guardians agreed with the Forest Service to free Christmas tree cutting and the Capitol tree from an injunction it had won over the Mexican spotted owl; its director questioned whether such uses "were ever a serious threat to the owl."

From Susan Montoya Bryan via iNFOnews, Oct. 23, 2019, read Nov 11, 2026.

How to be the good kind of cutter

Written by More Than Just Parks from the agencies' own pages, read Nov 11, 2026. The permit you buy, and the map and rules printed on it, govern. Not a permit, not the agency.