Macau hit a record number of visitor arrivals in 2025, with over 40 million tourists from China and abroad, feeding into a record for cross-border trips too, according to recently released Public Security Police (PSP) figures.
The PSP announced the data on 4 January 2026 with a post on WeChat, showing 40.06 million visitor arrivals last year, a 1.7% increase on 2019’s pre-COVID benchmark that exceeds the Macau Government Tourism Office’s forecast of 39 million amid a push on international promotional campaigns. The figures mean the autonomous South Chinese coast territory has now recovered from the pandemic. Year on year, the figures represent a 14.7% increase.
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Visitor arrivals in the former Portuguese territory, sometimes known as the Las Vegas of Asia, were dominated in 2025 by domestic travel from the Chinese mainland, which represented 72.4% of the total during the year. Hong Kong residents accounted for 18.2 %. The data for foreign nationals was reported as 6.9% of arrivals, in addition to Taiwanese guests who composed 2.5%. The data is due to be adjusted by Macau’s official Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) later in January.
In terms of border crossings, there were 235 million entries and exits in 2025, a rise of 9.8% year-on-year and another record. Entries and exits had already surpassed the pre-pandemic benchmark of 190 million and amounted to 210 million in 2024. The border crossing data includes local residents (36.4%), visitors (33.9%), non-resident workers and family members (26.2%), and non-local students (3.2%).
The two most significant days for entries and exits were 2 May 2025, when Macao recorded 837,000 entries and exits, a daily record then surpassed again on New Year’s Day last week, when 866,000 entries and exits were made. The most-used checkpoint was the Barrier Gate, where 124 million entries and exits took place, 52.7% of the total. Barrier Gate is the historical boundary between Portuguese Macau and Zhuhai in mainland China. It is one of the world’s busiest checkpoints.
Records were also broken at Zhuhai border ports, which handled 2.4 million inbound and outbound passengers over China’s three-day New Year’s Day holiday alone, numbers driven by events such as concerts, countdown ceremonies, and fireworks displays.
Cheung Kin Chung, president of the Macau Hoteliers and Innkeepers Association, is looking forward to another successful year in 2026, predicting that visitor numbers to the region could increase by up to 8% year-on-year.
“We are entering 2026 with confidence,” he said, adding that hotel occupancy rates and room prices are expected to show steady growth, he said reported by Macau Daily Times and citing “favourable factors” in the city’s culture and tourism sector and Macau’s economic development strategy.
