Winners (and some losers) in the museum business

1 April 2026 Museums

Something over 204 million visitors were recorded by the world’s top 100 museums in 2025, according to the latest attendance rankings collated by The Art Newspaper.

There are many caveats in this league table – for instance, “museums that did not supply data in accordance with our criteria, or whom we were unable to contact, do not appear in the table”. But it’s still an interesting survey.

Our takeaways:

  • Museums and art galleries remain popular. Top was the Louvre, as usual, with 9m visitors; at the other end of the table the Cleveland Museum of Art clocked 800,000. The top ten all had more than 4m, with only London’s British Museum and Tate Modern showing a decline on 2024 (though only by a couple of percentage points, and it doesn’t look like a specifically London thing – the National Gallery recorded an impressive +29%)
  • The average increase over 2024 was 7%, but obviously that cover some big swings – better than doubled attendance for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; down by 25% and more for Washington’s National Gallery, the Smithsonian, and the National Art Center, Tokyo
  • The big gainers are coming from the Far East – notably the National Museum of Korea at No.3 with a 72% increase on last year. The average for the 20 entries from the region was a 19% improvement on 2024; the five South Americans did even better at 22%. But 50 Europeans averaged just 4%; and 16 from North America (USA plus Royal Ontario Museum) barely improved at all (+0.06%)
  • The numbers also compare 2025 with 2019. Of the 80 that actually existed in 2019, 33 have yet to reach the pre-Covid totals
  • The Louvre Abu Dhabi comes in at No.52 with 1.4m visitors. But that seems to be identical with the 2024 figure, and we can’t actually find an official 2025 figure … so we don’t really know where it ranks
  • The biggest new opening last year was the Grand Egyptian Museum, which opened only in November and reported up to 18,000 visitors a day. Maintaining that would mean around 6.5m visitors annually, about the same as the British Museum (currently No.4 in the list).

The detail, including a downloadable spreadsheet, is here.

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