Nepal Tourist Arrivals: Annual Trends & Statistics (2019-2025)

In a normal year, Nepal receives a little over one million foreign (international) tourist arrivals, counted at the country's air and land entry points by the Department of Immigration and published by the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) and the Ministry of Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation (MoCTCA). The all-time record is 1,197,191 arrivals in 2019, the year before the planned 'Visit Nepal 2020' campaign. After a deep pandemic-driven collapse, arrivals returned to seven figures in 2023 and reached about 1.15 million in both 2024 and 2025.

The most recent full-year figures are 1,158,459 tourists in 2025 and 1,147,567 in 2024. The 2025 total was a modest gain of roughly 1 percent over 2024 and represented about 96.8 percent of the 2019 peak, meaning Nepal ended 2025 still around 38,700 arrivals short of a full recovery to its record year. These figures count international visitors arriving by air (chiefly Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, plus Gautam Buddha and Pokhara international airports) together with overland arrivals at land borders.

It is worth noting what these numbers do and do not measure. They count foreign arrivals, not Nepali citizens returning home, and they are arrival counts rather than unique individuals, so a visitor who enters twice in a year is counted twice. Indian visitors arriving overland are historically undercounted because land-border recording is less complete than airport immigration, so the true volume of Indian tourism is generally higher than the published totals suggest.

The table below gives Nepal's total international tourist arrivals for recent years, the figures most people search for. Use it as the data behind an annual-trend chart. The 2019 bar is the pre-pandemic peak; 2020 and 2021 are the pandemic trough; and 2022 through 2025 trace the recovery back toward, but not yet above, the record.

Longer-term context shows how far the sector has come. Nepal drew roughly 255,000 tourists in 1990, about 464,000 in 2000, and around 603,000 in 2010. Arrivals first crossed the one-million mark in 2018 (1,173,072), a milestone reached after several years of double-digit growth from 753,002 in 2016 and 940,218 in 2017.

All figures below are NTB / Department of Immigration arrival counts. Small revisions of a few hundred can occur between preliminary monthly releases and the final yearbook, so treat the last digit as indicative rather than exact.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the sharpest tourism shock in Nepal's modern history. Arrivals fell from the 2019 record of 1,197,191 to just 230,085 in 2020, a drop of more than 80 percent, as Nepal suspended on-arrival visas, halted international flights, and closed Mount Everest and other peaks to climbers during the 2020 spring season. The blow was especially cruel because 2020 had been designated 'Visit Nepal 2020,' a flagship campaign that had targeted two million visitors before it was cancelled.

2021 was worse still in headline terms, with only 150,962 arrivals, the lowest annual total in decades, as successive virus waves and travel restrictions kept borders effectively shut for much of the year. The tourism economy, which supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in trekking, hotels, airlines, and handicrafts, contracted severely, and many operators closed or paused during 2020-2021.

Recovery began once vaccination spread and borders reopened. Arrivals rebounded to 614,869 in 2022, then crossed one million again in 2023 (1,014,885) for the first post-pandemic time. 2024 reached 1,147,567 and 2025 edged up to 1,158,459, leaving the sector at roughly 97 percent of its 2019 peak by the end of 2025. Nepal had therefore substantially, but not completely, recovered its pre-pandemic tourism volume within about four years of the shock.

2025 was a year of slim growth interrupted by domestic unrest. The full-year total of 1,158,459 arrivals was only about 1 percent above 2024, and the first half of the year had actually run slightly ahead of 2019, signalling that a new record was within reach. April 2025 set an all-time April high of 116,490 arrivals, and month after month tracked close to pre-pandemic benchmarks.

That trajectory was disrupted in September 2025 by the 'Gen-Z' protests, a period of political unrest and violence in Kathmandu that caused dozens of deaths and heavy property damage, including to hotels. Arrivals that month fell to about 78,700, an 18 percent year-on-year decline, and the disruption cost the sector its chance of overtaking the 2019 record. Travel recovered toward the end of the year, with December 2025 recording roughly 98,000 arrivals, up about 7 percent year-on-year.

The episode is a reminder that Nepal's arrival numbers are sensitive to shocks other than global pandemics. The 2015 Gorkha earthquake, the 2001-2002 dip during the Maoist insurgency and the post-9/11 security climate, and the 2025 unrest all show up as visible dents in the long-run series.

India is consistently Nepal's single largest source market, reflecting the open border, shared culture, and pilgrimage traffic to sites such as Pashupatinath and Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha. In 2024, about 317,772 Indian arrivals were recorded, and in 2025 India still led with roughly 292,438 (about a quarter of all arrivals) despite an 8 percent year-on-year fall. Because overland Indian arrivals are undercounted, India's real share is higher than these airport-weighted figures imply.

Beyond India, the United States and China are the largest long-haul markets. In 2025 the United States accounted for about 112,316 arrivals and China about 95,480, followed by the United Kingdom (roughly 58,684) and Bangladesh (about 57,545). Other significant markets include Australia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Germany, and other European and East Asian countries. Chinese arrivals have recovered more slowly than Western markets since the pandemic.

Travellers come for a mix of purposes: trekking and mountaineering in the Everest, Annapurna, and Langtang regions; Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage; cultural sightseeing in the Kathmandu Valley's UNESCO World Heritage sites; and business, conference, and visiting-friends-and-relatives travel. The average length of stay has historically hovered around 12-13 days, among the longer stays in South Asia, which helps tourism punch above its arrival numbers in economic terms.

Tourism is one of Nepal's most important sources of foreign exchange and formal employment, so the arrival series is watched closely by the government, the Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), and the private sector. Each additional arrival, multiplied by an average stay of roughly two weeks and daily spending on lodging, guides, permits, domestic flights, and handicrafts, feeds directly into hotels, airlines, trekking agencies, and rural mountain economies that have few other cash-earning options.

This is also why the pandemic collapse was so damaging and why recovery to near-2019 levels matters politically as well as economically. The government continues to target higher arrivals and higher yield (spending per visitor), promoting new gateways such as Pokhara and Bhairahawa (Gautam Buddha) international airports and lengthening the average stay rather than simply chasing headline arrival counts.

For anyone tracking the sector, the durable takeaways are simple: Nepal's baseline is now around 1.1-1.2 million arrivals a year; 2019 remains the record to beat; India, the United States, and China are the top three markets; and the series is vulnerable to external shocks. Always cite figures with their year, and prefer the NTB and MoCTCA releases for the authoritative final numbers.