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
Methodology · read from the agencies Nov 12, 2026
How we read the agencies And what we don't claim
Where every fact comes from
Two stores sell federal Christmas tree permits online. Recreation.gov sells the Forest Service's: 79 national forests list a 2026 permit there. BLM's forest products store sells the Bureau of Land Management's: 65 offices list one. We read both every day from October through December, and on the morning a forest opens sales we read again every hour. Each place on this site prints the store it came from and the day we read it.
Dates, prices, tree limits and rules are the agency's, printed as the store prints them. Rules are quoted, never paraphrased. A sale hour prints in the time zone the place sits in, from its own land and the federal zone lines; a place whose land crosses a line prints both zones. Recreation.gov prints the hour in Eastern, and the card beside a converted hour says so. BLM's store gives a day with no hour; that sale counts as open from the start of that day where the office is. A ZIP's answer adds the hour in that ZIP's zone where the county its point sits in settles it, under the federal zone lines (49 CFR Part 71); where it doesn't, the hour stays Eastern. We don't print a BLM price until a person has checked it against the office's own page: the store holds a per-unit figure that may not be what a buyer pays, so a BLM permit reads "on the permit page" until then. A free-use permit, which the store marks free and prices at $0.00, reads "Free". Recreation.gov holds a Forest Service price twice, once on the permit and once on the season. Where the two differ we print neither: the price reads "on the permit page" and says the records disagree.
What "not posted yet" means
The Forest Service's own unit list and boundary layers name every national forest and grassland, and BLM's field office layer names every office. 53 Forest Service units and 50 BLM field offices don't list a 2026 permit in either store. We say "not posted yet" for those, never "no program": some sell at the counter or through a local vendor and never post online. Only an agency's own sentence, quoted and dated, can say a place has no program.
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. Nothing on such a page can be bought, so it isn't counted as posted.
13 national grasslands have no store listing of their own and lie inside a forest's line. Each is listed as its own place, with every sentence of the covering permit's rules that names it. Where those rules exclude it, we say so, and the forest is measured to the cutting areas its permit names, not to its whole line.
- Buffalo Gap National GrasslandSouth Dakota
- Butte Valley National GrasslandCalifornia
- Caddo National GrasslandTexas
- Cedar River National GrasslandNorth Dakota
- Cimarron National GrasslandKansas
- Comanche National GrasslandColorado
- Fort Pierre National GrasslandSouth Dakota
- Grand River National GrasslandSouth Dakota
- Little Missouri National GrasslandNorth Dakota
- Lyndon B. Johnson National GrasslandTexas
- Oglala National GrasslandNebraska
- Pawnee National GrasslandColorado
- Sheyenne National GrasslandNorth Dakota
Distance
Miles are straight lines from the ZIP code's center (the Census Bureau's 2023 ZIP Code Tabulation Area internal point) to the unit's boundary, as the agency draws it and simplified to about a quarter mile. Not driving miles, and not miles to a tree you may cut: the forest's own permit map says where cutting is allowed. A national forest is measured where its land is proclaimed national forest; a BLM office is measured to the land the BLM manages inside its line, never to the towns its line takes in.
What we are not
We don't sell permits and nothing here is one. We are not the agency. The permit you buy, and the map and rules printed on it, govern. If something here disagrees with the agency, the agency is right, and we want to know: every place has a "Report a problem" form, and a person checks each report against the agency's page before anything changes.
This season's record was built Nov 12, 2026 from the read of Nov 12, 2026. Not a permit, not the agency.