Some 2.755 million foreign nationals visited the Macao Special Administrative Region last year, a year-on-year growth of 13.7 percent, according to the city’s Statistics and Census Bureau.

Foreigners accounted for 6.87 percent of last year’s record 40.069 million visitor arrivals. Macao’s previous record of visitor arrivals of 39.406 million was achieved in pre-pandemic 2019.

In 2024, foreign visitor arrivals – also known as international visitor arrivals – stood at 2.423 million, accounting for 6.93 percent of the total of 34.928 million visitor arrivals in that year.

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In 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic began to have a severe impact on Macao's tourism industry for three consecutive years (2020-2022), foreigners accounted for 3.065 million, or 7.77 percent, of its 39.406 million visitor arrivals.

In 2025, visitor arrivals from the Chinese mainland, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and China’s Taiwan region accounted for 93.13 percent of the total number of visitor arrivals.

As far as last year’s international visitor arrivals are concerned, South Korean and Philippine nationals took up the number-one and number-two spots respectively.

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Regarding the Southeast Asian markets, visitors from the Philippines (540,284), Indonesia (208,043), Malaysia (188,977), and Thailand (185,963) rose by 9.5 percent, 13.6 percent, 3.9 percent, and 38.1 percent year-on-year respectively, while those from Singapore (117,165) decreased by 1.7 percent.

With respect to the South Asian markets, visitors from India (114,040) rose by 9.8 percent year-on-year. For the Northeast Asian markets, visitors from South Korea (547,638) and Japan (159,455) grew by 11.3 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively. As regards long-haul markets, visitors from the United States (162,460) grew by 9.8 percent year-on-year.

Record 40.069m visitor arrivals in 2025

Meanwhile, Macao welcomed a record 40.069 million visitor arrivals last year, up by 14.7 percent year-on-year. Same-day visitors (23,524,943) and overnight visitors (16,544,417) rose by 24.6 percent and 3.1 percent year-on-year respectively.

Meanwhile, the average length of stay of visitors shortened by 0.1 day year-on-year to 1.1 days, due to the growth in the proportion of same-day visitors in the total number of visitors.

The bureau noted, however, that the duration of stay for same-day visitors (0.2 day) and overnight visitors (2.3 days) both remained unchanged.

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Visitors from the Chinese mainland increased by 18.5 percent year-on-year to 29.017 million in 2025. Visitors from the nine Pearl River Delta cities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) rose by 23.7 percent year-on-year to 14.828 million, driven by an upsurge of 58.1 percent in the number of visitors from Zhuhai, which abuts Macao.

Visitors from the Hong Kong SAR (7.300 million) and China’s Taiwan region (996,140) went up by 1.7 percent and 19.4 percent year-on-year, respectively.

Last year, 82.6 percent of visitor arrivals arrived by land, 9.8 percent arrived by sea and 7.6 percent by air.

The Macau Post Daily is a media partner of China Daily.