Italian Tourism 2025: 535 Million Nights, 92 Million Travellers, 229.7 Million Passengers and Which Number to Cite

Three series, three units: how to read Italian tourism data

ISTAT, Italy's national statistics institute, runs the survey of guest movement in accommodation. Every registered establishment reports arrivals and nights (presenze). An arrival is a check-in at one establishment. A night is one person sleeping one night there. Residents of Italy and residents abroad are both included, so ISTAT's totals describe domestic and inbound tourism together. ISTAT's President gave the 2025 totals at a parliamentary hearing on 12 October 2026: 160.8 million arrivals, up 7.7%, and 535.5 million nights, up 6.0%. The same figures, unrounded, sit in the Eurostat database as 160,765,334 arrivals and 535,463,245 nights.

The Bank of Italy runs the international tourism survey (Indagine sul turismo internazionale) to compile the travel line of the balance of payments. Its 2025 edition, published on 26 June 2026, says the results rest on interviews with and counts of travellers at Italian border points. Its basic unit is the traveller, which the Bank's statistics file defines as a crossing of the Italian border. Repeat trips count again. Day-trippers count. Italian residents are excluded from the inbound figures. For 2025 the Bank counted 92.2 million foreign travellers, of whom 61.4 million stayed at least one night and 30.8 million came for the day, and it recorded 392.8 million nights and €56.7 billion of spending.

ENAC, the civil aviation authority, publishes the national airport traffic series. Its unit is the airport passenger, counted at each airport on arrival and on departure. Direct transit passengers are left out "per omogeneità di analisi", for consistency of analysis. ENAC's "Dati di traffico 2025", published on 11 May 2026, gives 229,740,554 passengers at the 44 airports open to commercial traffic, against 218,713,879 in 2024. A return flight into Italy produces two passengers. A domestic flight from Milan to Palermo produces one at each end.

The units diverge sharply. Take a couple from Munich on a two-week trip, flying both ways and staying in three hotels. In this illustration, which is ours and not data, the Bank of Italy records two foreign travellers and 28 nights, ISTAT records six arrivals and 28 nights, and ENAC records four passengers. Change one detail and the counts move apart again. If the couple stay with friends, ISTAT records nothing at all. If they drive, ENAC records nothing.

ISTAT: nights, arrivals and the 2025 series break

Until 2024 ISTAT counted private rentals only when a business ran them. From 1 January 2025 every rental used for tourism had to register in the Ministry of Tourism's database of accommodation (BDSR), which gave ISTAT a full list of rentals run by private individuals outside a business. Footnote 7 of the October hearing states that the 2025 extra-hotel data include "per la prima volta, anche gli alloggi privati in affitto gestiti in forma non imprenditoriale", and that 2024 was recalculated on the same basis so the comparison is like for like. The registration rules behind this change are covered in our guide to Italy's CIN rental code.

The result is three national nights totals for 2025. The new-basis total is 535,463,245, which ISTAT rounds to 535.5 million at the hearing. ISTAT's Storie di dati publication of 17 July 2026 gives the old-basis total in a footnote: without the non-business rentals, nights were 481 million. A third figure circulated from March. ISTAT's provisional fourth-quarter release of 9 March 2026 put 2025 nights up 2.3% on the old basis, which on 2024's 466,158,045 works out at about 476.9 million. That last number is our calculation; ISTAT printed only the percentage. The difference between the first two, about 54.5 million nights, is the size of the non-business rental segment in 2025, rounded because ISTAT gives 481 million and no decimals.

The growth rates depend on which pair is compared. Eurostat's database lists Italy's 2025 new-basis figure next to the 2024 old-basis figure, 466,158,045, with no break flag. Divided, they give +14.87% for nights and +15.12% for arrivals. Neither is growth. The old-basis pair gives about +3.2% (481 million against 466.2 million, our calculation on a rounded figure). ISTAT's official like-for-like rate is +6.0% for nights and +7.7% for arrivals.

The official +6.0% has a detail that ISTAT does not spell out. Its restated 2024 base can be reproduced from two published numbers. In March 2026 ISTAT's Statistica Today on 2024 published a first count of non-business rentals: 39,050,103 nights and 9,630,062 arrivals, provisional and covering only 92 of Italy's 107 provinces. Added to the 2024 old basis, they give 505,208,148 nights and 149,278,005 arrivals. Against those bases, 2025 is up 5.99% in nights and 7.70% in arrivals, consistent with the hearing's rounded +6.0% and +7.7%. Because ISTAT rounds to one decimal, other bases within a narrow range would give the same rates, so the fit is strong evidence and not proof. It is our arithmetic, and ISTAT does not describe its restated base this way. ISTAT's own note says the 92 provinces account for 79.2% of nights in traditional accommodation, so the 15 it could not cover in 2024 are not small; how many rental nights they hold is unknown. If the reconstruction holds, the like-for-like rate compares a 2025 with full rental coverage against a 2024 that covered 92 provinces, and some of the 6.0% reflects wider coverage of rentals in 2025.

Hotels give the cleanest comparison, because the rental change does not touch them. Eurostat shows 288,181,878 hotel nights in 2025, and ISTAT's 2024 hotel total was 283,910,717. That is +1.5% (our calculation). Hotels held 53.8% of all 2025 nights on the new basis. Holiday homes, rentals and other short-stay lodging took 177.8 million nights and campsites 69.5 million, together 46.2%. The growth in Italian tourism in 2025, on every reading, came mostly from outside hotels.

The foreign share: 56.3% or 55.3%

ISTAT has published two different foreign shares of 2025 nights. The October hearing says foreign guests took 56.3% of nights, after foreign nights grew 8.0% and resident nights 3.5%. That share matches Eurostat exactly: 301,619,611 foreign nights out of 535,463,245 is 56.33%. ISTAT's July Storie di dati says the foreign share rose from 33.6% in 1990 to 55.3% in 2025, without stating whether the total includes the non-business rentals.

One explanation fits the published numbers. The long-run chart in Storie di dati uses the old basis for continuity, and if the 55.3% applies to the 481 million total it implies 266.0 million foreign nights. That would leave 35.6 million of the 54.5 million rental nights to foreign guests, about 65%. ISTAT's partial 2024 rental count found non-residents took 64.8% of rental nights. The fit is close, but it is our inference and ISTAT has not confirmed it. Until it does, cite 56.3% with its basis named, and avoid 55.3% unless the old basis is stated beside it.

Foreign guests matter more than ever in Italy's accommodation data either way. On Eurostat's figures, built from ISTAT returns, Italian residents account for 233.8 million nights, more than any single foreign market, and their like-for-like growth of 3.5% was less than half the foreign rate. A different resident figure circulates. On ISTAT's provisional old basis of March 2026, resident nights were flat (0.0%) and resident arrivals fell 3.5%. The +3.5% here is the like-for-like rate on the restated base, so the two measure different things and do not contradict each other. Our forthcoming analysis of Italian domestic tourism sets out the difference in detail. The source-market detail sits in the Bank of Italy series, which has country rows that ISTAT's annual national totals do not carry. Our German tourists in Italy analysis covers the largest market in the Bank's tables.

The Bank of Italy survey: border crossings and money

The Bank of Italy's survey has run since 1996. Interviewers question travellers at road and rail crossings, ports and international airports, and the Bank grosses the interviews up to totals estimated from border-authority data (mainly from airports), mobile-phone data and manual counts. The 2026 statistics file says that from February 2025 the Bank took the expansion of the sample in-house, with the basic method unchanged. A separate Bank note of 28 August 2026 puts the 2025 sample at over 115,000 questionnaires and about 300,000 manual counts. Older figures of 130,000 interviews and 1.5 million counts come from the Bank's 2018 methodology document and describe an earlier design. The Bank publishes no sampling error or confidence interval for the 2025 results.

The headline money figures are the strongest in the series. Foreign travellers spent €56.7 billion in Italy in 2025, against €54.2 billion in 2024, which the Bank gives as +4.6% in nominal terms and +3.1% after inflation. Italians spent €34.1 billion abroad, up 3.2% nominal and 6.2% real, helped by a stronger euro. The surplus on travel was €22.7 billion, 1.0% of GDP, the same share as in 2024. The spending figure covers what non-residents spend before, during and after their stay, including transport inside Italy, and leaves out international fares, which the balance of payments records under transport. It also includes spending by seasonal and cross-border workers, whom the Bank's 2018 glossary excludes from the definition of traveller but keeps in the published totals.

The Bank attributes nearly two-thirds of the growth in foreign spending to visitors who came for the Jubilee. Its box estimates about 1.4 million Jubilee travellers and about €1.6 billion of spending, over 90% of them heading mainly to Rome. Those figures rest on a sub-sample of interviews and carry no published margin of error; the Jubilee 2025 numbers piece sets out what the estimate can and cannot support.

The traveller count needs the most care. The 92.2 million figure counts crossings, so a Swiss resident who shops in Como every week, a Swiss day-tripper and a Canadian on a three-week tour each add to it in proportion to how often they cross. Day-trippers made up 30.8 million of the total, unchanged from 2024. Overnight travellers rose from 57.8 million to 61.4 million, +6.2% on our calculation. Their average stay fell from 6.6 to 6.4 nights, and their spending per night rose from €135.6 to €139.1. The Bank also prints €144.4 per day for all travellers including day-trippers, a different measure that should not be set beside the per-night figure.

Why foreign nights differ by 91 million

ISTAT and the Bank of Italy both report foreign nights for 2025, and they are far apart. ISTAT's accommodation survey, through Eurostat, gives 301.6 million nights by non-residents. The Bank of Italy gives 392.8 million nights by foreign overnight travellers. The gap is 91.2 million nights, our calculation.

The two series cover different lodging. ISTAT counts only nights that a registered establishment reports, which since 2025 includes private rentals run outside a business. The Bank's survey asks travellers where they slept and records every kind of stay, including nights with friends and relatives and nights in a holiday home the visitor owns. A joint ISTAT and Bank of Italy guide to tourism statistics, published in June 2020, sets out the split: the border survey covers inbound and outbound travel in all forms of lodging, while the accommodation survey covers domestic and inbound stays in registered establishments only. Some of the 91 million is therefore visitors who never check in anywhere. The rest is unexplained, since the two surveys also differ in method, one counting registrations and the other weighting up interviews.

The growth rates diverge as well. On ISTAT's like-for-like basis, foreign nights rose 8.0% in 2025. On the Bank's survey they rose 2.3%, from 383.8 million to 392.8 million, our calculation. Part of the gap may be the coverage effect described above, because ISTAT's restated 2024 base appears to include rentals from only 92 provinces. Part may be a shift from unregistered stays into registered rentals, which would raise ISTAT's count without any change in travel. Neither survey publishes enough detail to separate the two.

Average stays differ for the same reason. ISTAT's 535.5 million nights over 160.8 million arrivals give 3.33 nights per arrival, our calculation. The Bank gives 6.4 nights per foreign overnight traveller. The two are measuring different things. A traveller who spends a week in Rome, three nights in Florence and four in Venice is one Bank traveller with 14 nights and three ISTAT arrivals averaging under five nights each.

ENAC and Assaeroporti: airport passengers, counted at both ends

Two national airport series exist, and they give different totals for the same year. ENAC's annual volume reports 229,740,554 passengers at 44 airports open to commercial traffic in 2025, up 5.04% and 11.0 million on 2024, our calculation from its levels. ENAC adjusted 2024 to exclude Grosseto, so its 2024 figure is not the same as earlier editions. Assaeroporti, the airport operators' association, publishes monthly figures for 41 airports. Its live statistics page, read on 4 November 2026, shows a 2025 total of 230,080,945, including 409,706 direct transit passengers and 635,907 in general aviation. The difference of 340,391 passengers reflects the perimeter, and neither body publishes a reconciliation. Our Italy airports 2025 analysis breaks both series down by airport.

The airport total is the series most often misread as a count of visitors. ENAC's own text gives 157.2 million international passengers (68%) and 72.5 million domestic (32%), with 72.4 million on other pages of the same document. Each domestic trip appears twice, once at each airport. ENAC's route analysis counts departing domestic passengers only, "to avoid double counting", and finds 36.2 million, about half the domestic total. International passengers include Italians flying abroad and home, foreign visitors arriving and leaving and, on the standard airport-count convention, connecting travellers at each airport where they change planes. No published ENAC table splits passengers into residents and visitors or by nationality.

ENAC's figure also has a publication history. A January 2026 executive summary gave "first data" of over 229 million passengers, up 5%. The exact 229,740,554 arrived with the full "Dati di traffico 2025" in May; the PDF's web address calls it version 0.7, and its cover carries neither date nor version. Our own content plan named a different document, ENAC's "Rapporto e Bilancio Sociale 2025", as the source. We found no 2025 edition of that report; the latest edition we found is 2020. The figure belongs to "Dati di traffico 2025".

Growth rates for 2025 do not agree

The three series show growth in 2025 of between 2.3% and 7.7%, depending on what is measured. The spread follows from the units. ISTAT measures stays registered in Italy by anyone. The Bank of Italy measures foreign visitors at the border and their money. ENAC measures movements through airports by anyone, residents included. A year in which Italians flew more, foreigners stayed fewer nights each and more rentals registered with the state would show exactly this pattern.

Seasonality is the one pattern every series agrees on, and ISTAT's monthly data show its scale. Eurostat's monthly table for Italy, built from ISTAT returns, gives 95.6 million nights in August 2025 and 20.0 million in November, a ratio of 4.8 to 1. July and August together took 183.5 million nights, 34.3% of the year. The quietest months were January, February and November, each under 23 million, with November just below 20 million. These are our calculations from the monthly values, on the new basis.

What the three series cannot tell you

No official series counts the number of people who visited Italy in 2025. ISTAT counts check-ins, the Bank of Italy counts crossings and ENAC counts passenger movements, and none of them removes repeat visits. Any headline that turns 92.2 million, 160.8 million or 229.7 million into a number of tourists has converted a unit that does not convert.

ISTAT has not yet published its full annual tables for 2025. The pattern of earlier years points to a Statistica Today on 2025 tourism in March 2027, and until then the only absolute annual figures are the hearing's rounded totals, the 481 million footnote and the Eurostat database values. There is no published restated 2024 level, no split of the 481 million old-basis total by residence or type of lodging, and no breakdown of the roughly 54.5 million rental nights by region. The 56.3% and 55.3% foreign shares remain unreconciled in ISTAT's own publications.

The Bank of Italy publishes no sampling error for 2025, so small changes in its country rows cannot be tested against noise. Its country detail stops at ten named markets plus continental groups; there are no rows for Japan, China, India or Australia. ENAC publishes no resident and visitor split, and the domestic double count is visible only in its arithmetic. The remaining gaps are on the regional and city level, where the same three-series problem repeats with fewer published numbers.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers can read the 2025 data as a guide to timing more than to crowding. July and August took over a third of the year's 535.5 million nights, and August alone had almost five times November's volume, so shoulder months offer the same country at a fraction of the pressure. Hotel nights grew only 1.5%. Most of the measured gain came from rentals and other non-hotel lodging, part of it simply because private rentals registered under the national CIN code were counted in full for the first time. Foreign visitors stayed 6.4 nights on average and spent €139.1 a night, figures that cover lodging, food and transport within Italy but not the flight. The one point most visitors miss is that "record" headlines for 2025 often compare a larger, newly counted total with a smaller old one. For a first trip, our Rome travel guide is the place to start planning.

Tourism businesses and investors should anchor on the series that matches their exposure. A hotel group should read the hotel-only line, 288.2 million nights and +1.5%, before any national headline. A rental operator should note that the 2025 rental segment was measured in full for the first time, so its growth cannot yet be separated from new registrations. Anyone underwriting demand from foreign markets should use the Bank of Italy's spending, €56.7 billion and +3.1% in real terms, rather than nights, because it is the series designed to measure visitors' money. The assessment would change if ISTAT published a fully restated 2024, if the March 2027 tables showed the rental segment by region, or if the Bank's 2026 survey showed how much of the 2025 spending growth left with the Jubilee.

Journalists and analysts will find the figures that hold up in the box above; the harder part is the caveats that travel with them. ISTAT has not published its restated 2024 base, so the +6.0% rests on a base that outsiders can only reconstruct, and our reconstruction suggests it is the old basis plus a partial rental count from 92 provinces. If that is right, even the corrected 2025 growth rate carries a coverage effect, and the hotel-only +1.5% is the cleanest like-for-like reading available. The foreign share needs its basis named, because ISTAT has printed both 56.3% and 55.3% for the same year. Airport totals need the domestic double count spelled out, since every domestic trip is counted at both ends and no series separates residents from visitors. The Bank of Italy's 92.2 million is a count of border crossings, and its Jubilee estimate rests on a sub-sample with no published margin of error.