As 2026 begins, the balance sheet on the tourism year just ended is encouraging. The city is steadily accelerating toward the record figure of 10 million visitors.
According to the analysis of Assolombarda’s Osservatorio Turismo 2025, compiled on available data from the Questura through October 2025, the Metropolitan City of Milan is expected to record between 8.7 and 8.8 million arrivals in the whole of 2025. This figure, which stands as a new historical record of attractiveness for the capital city, suggests that the 10 million target may have been reached by the end of December. For official confirmation that this goal has been surpassed, we will have to wait for the publication of final data from the Questura for the last months of 2025.
Milan City Council’s Councillor for Tourism, Martina Riva, commented that the Lombard capital’s strategy does not aim at indistinct maximum numbers, but at quality tourism, balanced with respect to residents and capable of generating value in the area. The distribution of flows throughout the year supports this vision, reducing seasonal peaks and promoting sustainable management of presences.
The post Covid Tourism
The growth of Milan’s tourist flows is anchored by the international component. As early as 2024, 64.8% of visitors to Milan came from abroad. The Lombard capital also shows a strong diversification of non-European markets: Asian people account for 14.7 percent of the foreign component, North American people 12.7 percent, Central and South American people 6.0 percent, and Middle Eastern people 5.0 percent. The United States remains the top source country, with 557.6 thousand arrivals in 2024, followed by France and Germany. In 2024, arrivals from other Italian regions in the capital accounted for 35.3 percent of the total and were still 16.5 percent less than pre-pandemic levels (2019).
Short-term rental boom
Milan, which has 11.2 thousand establishments and 138.7 thousand beds by 2024 (Italy’s fifth largest province in terms of supply), continues to position itself at the upper end of the market: among hotel guests, 73.5 percent choose upper-scale facilities, a significantly higher incidence than the national average (54.4 percent). At the same time, the non-hotel sector is booming, with nearly 80 percent of demand concentrated in short-term rentals, a trend particularly marked among foreign tourists who seek flexible solutions.
Milan’s tourism growth is part of a nationally leading Lombardy. The region ranks first in Italy for international tourism spending, with nearly 10 billion euros spent by foreign travelers in 2024. Milan’s role as a gateway is also confirmed as crucial thanks to the airport system: in 2024, Milan’s airports handled 56.8 million passengers, a historic record, with 75.5 percent coming from international routes. The positive trend continued in 2025: between January and September, arrivals at Milan’s airports reached 45 million, with support for growth coming exclusively from the international component (+7.6% over the same period in 2024).
