Travel trends: 2025

• Overseas residents made an estimated 40.8 million visits to the UK in 2025 and spent an estimated £29.8 billion; of the total visits to the UK in 2025, 36.9 million were to Great Britain (GB), and an estimated £29.2 billion was spent by visitors to GB.

• UK residents made an estimated 99.9 million visits abroad in 2025 and spent an estimated £86.2 billion; of the total visits abroad in 2025, 95.5 million were by residents of GB, and £83.9 billion was spent by residents of GB.

• The greatest number of estimated visits to GB in 2025 were made by residents of the United States (5.5 million visits), followed by residents of France (3.1 million visits), and Germany (2.8 million visits).

• Spain was estimated to be the most visited country by residents of GB in 2025 (19.1 million visits), followed by France (9.1 million visits), and Italy (5.7 million visits).

• Overseas residents made 5.5% more visits to GB in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2025, and 2.7% fewer visits in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) than in the same period in 2024; spending increased by 4.2% in Quarter 3 2025, and remained broadly unchanged in Quarter 4 2025.

• GB residents made 5.0% more visits abroad in Quarter 3 2025, and 2.5% more visits in Quarter 4 than in the same period in 2024; spending decreased by 1.2% in Quarter 3 2025 but increased by 0.8% in Quarter 4.

Overseas residents

An overseas resident is a person who permanently resides outside the UK.

Visits

The figures for visits relate to the number of completed visits, not the number of visitors. Anyone entering or leaving more than once in the same period would be counted on each visit.

Using our data

Comparisons between 2024 and 2025 require caution because the annual 2024 estimates combine two survey methodologies. The methodology used to produce all quarterly data for 2025 is consistent with the methodology used for Quarter 3 (July to Sept) and Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024. Therefore, users have six comparable quarters from Quarter 3 2024 to Quarter 4 2025, under our new International Passenger Survey (IPS) design. For more information, see our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: September 2026 update article.

Developing our travel and tourism statistics

These estimates are provisional and are labelled as official statistics in development to reflect the ongoing development of our travel and tourism statistics. Our Improving our travel and tourism statistics article series provides further information on the data collection changes and methodological developments we are undertaking. Once these developments are complete, we will decide whether the statistics are of sufficient quality and value to be published as "official statistics", or if further development is needed.

This article is accompanied by our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: October 2026 update, which outlines the methodological and quality assurance work completed since our last update in September 2026. It also sets out our planned next steps to develop and refine our travel and tourism statistics.

Uncertainty measures of travel and tourism

We provide 95% confidence intervals for the headline travel and tourism estimates included in this article. These intervals mean that if we drew 100 random samples and calculated a 95% confidence interval for each sample, we would expect 95 of them to contain the true population value. A wider interval indicates more uncertainty in the estimate. The confidence intervals for data used in this article can be found in the accompanying datasets in Section 2: Data on travel trends.

More information on how we measure uncertainty is available in our Uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys methodology.

Users should take caution when interpreting estimates where confidence intervals are not currently provided.