Museum Attendance Rose in 2025, but the World’s Biggest Institutions Still Haven’t Reached 2019 Levels
Five years after the pandemic upended cultural life, the world’s most visited museums are drawing crowds again — just not quite at the scale they once did. Roughly 200 million people passed through the 100 top-attended museums worldwide in 2025, according to a newly released global attendance ranking. That figure remains below the 230 million recorded in 2019, the last full year before Covid-19 closures and travel disruptions reshaped museum habits.
At the top of the list, Paris’s Louvre Museum retained its long-standing lead with about 9 million visitors. The rest of the top 10 underscores a split reality: legacy institutions in Europe and the United States continue to anchor global museumgoing, while newer or newly expanded museums in Asia and the Middle East are increasingly capable of competing at the highest level.
After the Louvre, the Vatican Museums welcomed 6.9 million visitors, continuing to operate at a scale few institutions can match. Seoul’s National Museum of Korea surged to 6.5 million, placing it among the world’s most heavily trafficked museums and marking one of the most dramatic year-over-year jumps in the ranking.
London and New York remained central to the story. The British Museum and Tate Modern both landed in the top 10, as did the National Gallery in London and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). Other top-10 institutions included the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum, and Shanghai Museum East, which drew 4.6 million visitors.
In the United Kingdom, the National Gallery’s numbers illustrate how uneven the recovery can be even for institutions with canonical collections. Despite the reopening of its Sainsbury Wing last May — and the enduring pull of works by Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh — the museum recorded 4.1 million visitors in 2025, still about 30 percent below its 2019 level.
Across mainland Europe, attendance was largely steady, with a few notable shifts. The Prado Museum in Madrid crossed 3.5 million visitors for the first time, a milestone that its director, Miguel Falomir, framed less as a growth target than a cautionary threshold. In January, Falomir said the Prado “does not need a single visitor more,” pointing to the Louvre as a case study in how overcrowding can push an institution toward “collapse.” The Louvre, for its part, increased attendance year over year. Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou held largely stable.
The most pronounced momentum came from East Asia. Shanghai Museum East, which opened in 2024 and immediately entered the global conversation, expanded its audience again in 2025. Of its 4.6 million visitors, 2.8 million attended the blockbuster exhibition “On Top of the Pyramid: The Civilisation of Ancient Egypt,” a reminder that ambitious, tightly branded historical shows remain among the most reliable engines of mass attendance.
South Korea’s rise was even more striking. The main venue of the National Museum of Korea jumped more than 70 percent, from 3.8 million visitors in 2024 to 6.5 million in 2025. The institution’s regional branches also increased attendance, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul grew by 28 percent to 2.1 million — a shift attributed, in part, to the broader global appetite for Korean culture.
Elsewhere, Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales reported 2.4 million visitors, nearly double its 2019 level, suggesting that expansions and programming strategies can meaningfully reshape local museumgoing.
Geopolitics also left a visible imprint. In Israel, the Israel Museum recorded a 40 percent year-over-year decline in attendance, while the Tel Aviv Museum of Art saw its exhibition program “severely disrupted” as international shows were canceled.
One of the most closely watched new openings came in Egypt. The Grand Egyptian Museum, located outside Cairo, opened in November and reported up to 18,000 visitors a day — a pace that would translate to roughly 6.5 million annually, comparable to the British Museum if sustained.
Taken together, the 2025 ranking suggests a sector in motion: the gravitational pull of the Louvre, the Vatican, and other long-established institutions remains strong, but the geography of museumgoing is widening. The lingering gap with 2019, however, signals that the post-pandemic museum audience is still being rebuilt — shaped by travel patterns, blockbuster programming, and the political realities that can redraw cultural calendars overnight.
