France was the most visited country in the world in 2024, with 102.0 million international tourist arrivals, followed by Spain with 93.7 million and the United States with 72.3 million, according to UN Tourism’s International Tourism Highlights (2025 edition). China, Turkey, Italy, Mexico, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Germany complete the top ten. The answer changes if you measure money instead of visits: the United States earns far more from foreign visitors than any other country, and France drops to fourth.
What UN Tourism Counts as an International Tourist Arrival
The standard ranking comes from the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization, now branded UN Tourism, which publishes its World Tourism Barometer up to six times a year and an annual Highlights report. It ranks destinations three ways: by international arrivals, by the receipts earned from inbound visitors, and by what each country’s own residents spend abroad. The “most visited” table uses the first of these.
An international tourist, in UN Tourism’s definition, is someone travelling to and staying in a place outside their usual environment for at least 24 hours and not more than one consecutive year, for leisure, business or other purposes. Same-day visitors are left out, which matters for countries with long land borders: a shopper who crosses from Germany into France for the afternoon is not a tourist arrival, but one who stays a night is. The figure also counts arrivals rather than individual people, so a Belgian who drives to the Alps in February and to Provence in August appears twice.
Three more rules shape the list. First, it measures international arrivals only, so the huge domestic markets of the United States, China and India are invisible. Second, UN Tourism reports Hong Kong and Macau as destinations separate from mainland China, as they keep their own border controls; visitors from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still account for a large share of arrivals in mainland China (over 60% of overnight visitors in 2016). Third, the data come from national statistics offices, which report late and occasionally revise, so the latest complete global table is for 2024, even though some countries have already published 2025 totals.
Rival Yardsticks: Receipts, Hotel Nights and Euromonitor’s City Counts
Other measures produce different leaders, and each has a case. By international tourism receipts, the money foreign visitors spend on accommodation, food, transport and shopping, the 2024 order was the United States ($215.0 billion), Spain ($106.5 billion), the United Kingdom ($84.5 billion) and France ($77.1 billion). The United States earns roughly twice as much as Spain from about 20 million fewer arrivals. The United Kingdom shows the same gap on a smaller scale: ninth by arrivals, but third by receipts. UN Tourism’s preliminary 2025 figures keep the same top four, with the US at $213.0 billion and Spain rising to $113.8 billion.
By overnight stays, France falls further. It records about 147 million hotel nights from foreign visitors, which puts it fifth, behind the United States, Spain, Italy, China and Turkey. France works as a transit country: many visitors counted at its borders are passing through on the way somewhere else, and many international visitors do not stay in hotels at all.
City rankings use yet another definition. The market research firm Euromonitor counts any visitor who stays at least 24 hours and counts each arrival separately, even if one person visits several cities on one trip. Its 2025 list is led by Bangkok (30.3 million), Hong Kong (23.2 million), London (22.7 million), Macau (20.4 million) and Istanbul (19.7 million), with Paris only ninth at 18.3 million. Mastercard’s Global Destination Cities Index, by contrast, counts only overnight visitors and ignores land-border crossings, so its city order differs again. Our list of the most visited cities in the world goes through these city figures in detail.
Finally, there is the reverse view: which countries send the most tourists abroad. On spending, China’s residents led in 2024 with $250.6 billion, ahead of the United States ($177.8 billion), Germany ($124.9 billion) and the United Kingdom ($103.2 billion). Those four source markets supply a large part of the arrivals in every table below.
The receipts table also rewards places that attract fewer but higher-spending visitors. The United Arab Emirates received 18.72 million international arrivals in 2024, less than a fifth of France’s total, yet earned $57.0 billion from them, not far short of Italy. Australia, which does not appear in any arrivals top ten, took in $52.0 billion in 2024 and $55.4 billion in 2025, more than Canada earned from its roughly 20 million visitors.
The 2024 Top Ten, From France’s 102 Million to Germany’s 37.5 Million
With those rules in mind, here is UN Tourism’s ranking of destinations by international tourist arrivals in 2024, with the change on 2023.
| Rank | Destination | Arrivals 2024 (millions) | Change on 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | France | 102.0 | +2.0% |
| 2 | Spain | 93.7 | +10.1% |
| 3 | United States | 72.3 | +9.0% |
| 4 | China | 64.9 | +82.8% |
| 5 | Turkey | 60.5 | +9.8% |
| 6 | Italy | 57.7 | +0.8% |
| 7= | Mexico | 45.0 | +7.3% |
| 7= | Hong Kong (China) | 45.0 | +32.3% |
| 9 | United Kingdom | 41.7 | +12.0% |
| 10 | Germany | 37.5 | +7.7% |
France’s lead is steady rather than growing: it had 93.1 million arrivals in 2022, 100.0 million in 2023 and 102.0 million in 2024. It borders eight European countries, which makes it the crossroads of western European road travel, and it adds Paris, the Loire Valley, the Alps, the Riviera and 53 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Tourism supports about 2.9 million jobs in France, some 10.9% of employment.
Spain is closing the gap fastest among the leaders. It climbed from 71.6 million arrivals in 2022 to 93.7 million in 2024, and in 2025 recorded about 97 million, another record. Mass tourism there dates from 1959, when the industry became a pillar of the economy, and in 2024 domestic and international tourism together made up 12.6% of Spanish GDP and more than 2.7 million jobs. Visitors come mainly from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux countries and the United States.
The largest jump in the table belongs to China, whose arrivals rose 82.8% in 2024 to 64.9 million as it reopened fully after the pandemic; UN Tourism had no comparable figure for 2022. Hong Kong’s 32.3% rise reflects the same recovery. The United States grew 9.0% to 72.3 million, up from 50.7 million in 2022.
Lower down, the table separates fast growers from mature markets. Turkey rose from 50.4 million arrivals in 2022 to 55.1 million in 2023 and 60.5 million in 2024, and its receipts reached $56.3 billion in 2024 and about $60.0 billion in 2025. Italy, by contrast, barely moved in 2024, gaining just 0.8% to 57.7 million, although it still earned $58.7 billion from foreign visitors, more than Turkey. Germany, tenth with 37.5 million arrivals, is better known as a source market: its residents spent $124.9 billion abroad in 2024, far more than foreign visitors spent in Germany.
Japan is the country the arrivals table understates most. It does not make the top ten, yet its arrivals rose from 3.8 million in 2022 to 25.1 million in 2023 and 36.9 million in 2024, and its receipts of $64.0 billion in 2025 ranked fifth in the world, ahead of Italy and Turkey. The pandemic is the reason for such steep curves: Spain, for example, received only 18.9 million foreign tourists in 2020, the worst year on record for its tourism income, before climbing back past its old records.
Beyond the Top Ten: Spain’s 2025 Record and the Leaders of Each Region
Worldwide, UN Tourism counted 1.52 billion international tourist arrivals in 2025, 4.0% more than in 2024. Europe alone took 793.5 million of them. Early 2025 country figures suggest the top of the table is stable: Spain reached 96.8 million on UN Tourism’s count, Turkey about 62 million, Italy 61.5 million and Greece 38.0 million, while the United States slipped to 68.3 million and Mexico rose to 47.8 million.
Each continent has its own leader. In Africa, which received about 75.4 million arrivals in 2024, Morocco led with 17.4 million, ahead of Egypt (15.8 million), Tunisia (10.3 million) and South Africa (8.9 million). In the Americas, the United States and Mexico are followed by Canada with about 20 million. In Asia, after China and Hong Kong come Japan (36.9 million), Thailand (35.5 million), Macau (34.9 million) and Saudi Arabia (29.7 million), home to Mecca, which Euromonitor ranks seventh among the world’s cities with 18.7 million visitors in 2025. Behind France and Spain in Europe, Turkey, Italy, the United Kingdom, Greece, Germany, Austria and Portugal each received at least 29 million in 2024, with Portugal at exactly 29.0 million.
A country’s place in the arrivals table therefore depends on its neighbours as much as its sights: France and Mexico benefit from long land borders with rich countries, Hong Kong and Macau from mainland Chinese travellers, and Spain from Europe’s appetite for Mediterranean beaches. The individual sights drawing those crowds, from the Louvre to the Forbidden City, are ranked in our guide to the most visited landmarks in the world.