Country guide
Free camping in the United States, for visitors
The United States has more free legal camping than the whole of Europe combined, almost all of it on federal public land in the west. The catch for a visitor is that the good stuff is unsigned, unnamed and reached on dirt, and the rules come from four different agencies that do not agree with each other.
American free camping mostly means dispersed camping: pitching outside a developed campground, on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service, with no facilities of any kind and no fee.
We map the officially designated free sites that appear in federal open data. We do not publish coordinates for undesignated dispersed spots, for the same reason we do not publish them anywhere else: a spot that gets a pin and a thousand visitors stops being the spot, and usually stops being legal too.
Written for visitors
If you live in the US and camp full time, this site is not aimed at you and you will find deeper American coverage elsewhere. These pages assume you are flying in, renting or shipping a vehicle, and have not spent years learning which agency manages which map.
Where they are
Only officially designated stopovers are pinned. Wild camping is covered in the rules below, and never as a coordinate.