Some 200 million visitors streamed through the 100 top-attended museums around the world in 2025, according to the latest attendance ranking by the Art Newspaper. That figure is still down a bit from the 230 million who punched their tickets in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic shut museums down for months, indicating that overall museums haven’t quite regained their footing even five years later.
Many new museums in the Middle East and Asia, which are relatively new to museum-building, attracted tons of visitors, according to TAN, but so did museums in places like New York and London, already well known for their rich institutional landscape.
Paris’s Louvre Museum continues to hold the top spot, with some 9 million visitors. Rounding out the top 10 are the Vatican Museums, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, the British Museum in London, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum, Shanghai Museum East, Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery in London.
In the UK, TAN notes that the National Gallery has not regained its pre-Covid attendance levels despite the reopening of its Sainsbury Wing last May, with star attractions such as paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh. At 4.1 million, visitorship is still down 30 percent on 2019.
The Prado in Madrid received 3.5 million visitors in 2025.
Photo Bildagentur-online/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Museums throughout mainland Europe held largely steady, the survey found. A small bump was seen at the Prado in Madrid, which exceeded 3.5 million visitors for the first time. Director Miguel Falomir is perfectly happy with that number, telling the press in January that the museum “does not need a single visitor more” and saying that the Louvre provides a case study in how overcrowding can cause a museum to “collapse.” (The Louvre gained visitors year-over-year.) Institutions like the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, both in Paris, largely held steady. The Vatican “continued to pack them in,” TAN observes, welcoming 6.9 million.
Major climbs in visitor numbers were seen in East Asia. The Shanghai Museum East roared onto the scene in 2024 with 4.2 million visitors and did even better in 2025, with some 4.6 million. Fully 2.8 million of those visited the blockbuster show “On Top of the Pyramid: The Civilisation of Ancient Egypt.” China’s thousands of state museums, it should be noted, did not report figures in time for the report, but TAN notes that some might have made the top 10 if they had.
South Korea is a nation on the rise in terms of museum-going. The main venue of National Museum of Korea, in Seoul, “boomed” by more than 70 percent, from 3.8 million in 2024 to 6.5 million in 2025. “That is one of the largest rises in absolute numbers we have ever seen,” TAN writes. What’s more, the National Museum’s branches in several cities also upped their visitorship, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul increased by 28 percent to 2.1 million, perhaps owing to “the worldwide fervour for Korean culture.”
In Australia, meanwhile, the Art Gallery of New South Wales clocked 2.4 million visitors, nearly double its 2019 level.
War enters the picture when the authors consider Israel, which is widely accused of genocide in its military campaign in Gaza. The Israel Museum saw a 40 percent decline in visitorship year over year, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art had its exhibition program “severely disrupted” as international shows were canceled.
The biggest new opening in Egypt was the Grand Egyptian Museum, outside Cairo, which opened only in November and reported up to 18,000 visitors a day, which would work out to some 6.5 million annually, at the same level as the British Museum, the report notes.
The Statue of Ramses II, at the Grand Egyptian Museum.
©Grand Egyptian Museum
In the US, current events led to some drops in museum attendance, especially in Los Angeles due to the January 2025 wildfires and in Washington, D.C., due to the October-November government shutdown. Though untouched by the flames, the Getty Villa saw a 58 precent decline in visitorship, having been closed nearly half the year. Fires aside, the Getty Center was up as the sixth-most-popular museum in the US.
In Washington, federal institutions saw drops due to closures, including the National Gallery of Art (down 28 percent from 2024), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (13 percent), the National Portrait Gallery (26 percent), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (44 percent). Those drops also came in a tumultuous year overall due to increased scrutiny of museums’ activities by the Trump administration.
The reigning champ of US museums is New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which saw nearly 6 million visitors, up 4 percent year over year, making it the world’s fifth-most-visited institution. But the greatest gains in visitorship were accomplished at smaller museums away from art-world capitals, TAN found, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (nearly doubling visitorship year over year to 132,000), the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Toledo Museum of Art, both seeing climbs of more than 20 percent.
Two other countries with great climbs were Mexico and Brazil. Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology had a record 5.1 million visitors last year, up 36 percent on 2024, while the Museu de Arte São Paulo (MASP) more than doubled attendance, with 1.2 million visitors, after the reopening of a long-delayed expansion and a popular Claude Monet show.
