Türkiye’s tourism season month by month: reading the official monthly data

Official monthly data puts Türkiye's foreign arrivals peak in July 2025 at 7,116,096 and the lowest month in January at 2,171,118, while the occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities peaked in August at 71.15% and fell to 26.79% in March. Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin and 2025 accommodation statistics bulletin.

Every year someone asks the revenue manager when the season starts, and the answer that comes back is about weather and school holidays. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism publishes two monthly series that answer the same question with counts, and almost nobody plots them side by side. This article does that, using the 2025 yearly bulletins and the latest monthly releases, and shows how to build the same 12-month profile for your own property. If you want a deeper grounding in citing these sources, start with how to read and cite Türkiye's official tourism statistics.

When does Türkiye's tourism season start and end?#

In the official data the season is not a date but a curve: foreign arrivals climb from a January trough to a July peak, and the occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities climbs to an August peak. Two separate Ministry series describe it, and they do not move together.

The first series is the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's yearly border statistics bulletin, which includes a monthly table of foreign visitor arrivals at border gates. It counts people crossing a border, including same-day visitors. In 2025 it recorded 52,775,055 foreign visitors; adding 11,166,206 citizens resident abroad gives the wider total of 63,941,261. The second series is the yearly accommodation statistics bulletin, which gives the monthly occupancy rate in İşletme and Basit certified facilities. It counts the use of available bed capacity over a month, not rooms.

Both series follow the same rhythm: a monthly bulletin plus a yearly compilation. As of 2 November 2026 the latest listed releases were the September 2026 border bulletin and the August 2026 accommodation bulletin, alongside the 2025 yearly bulletins for both.

The decision rule follows from the definitions. Use arrivals to time demand at the gate. Use the occupancy rate to read bed demand in certified stock. Never substitute one for the other. One honest limit sits under all of it: neither series tells a single hotel what its own season is. That comes from its reservation records, and the rest of this article shows how to build it.

Türkiye tourist arrivals by month: what the 2025 curve shows#

July was the highest month at 7,116,096 foreign arrivals and January the lowest at 2,171,118; the year totalled 52,775,055, up 0.28% on 2024, per the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin.

The shape falls into three bands. A low band runs through January (2,171,118), February (2,171,942), March (2,346,403), November (2,804,705) and December (2,718,036). A rising band covers April (3,900,546) and May (5,037,447). A peak band runs from June (5,772,328) through July (7,116,096), August (6,965,343), September (6,087,374) and October (5,683,717).

Read the change column, not just the levels. February fell 5.34% and March fell 13.14% in a year when July fell 2.97% and the total rose 0.28%. A month can move against the year. The bulletin records the change, not the reason, so do not supply one.

Two population caveats matter. The count includes same-day visitors, so a month with heavy excursion traffic can rise without adding a single bed-night. And these are foreign visitors only: the 11,166,206 citizens resident abroad sit outside the monthly table but inside the 63,941,261 total, so the monthly curve is not the whole market. Border bulletins carry a provisional note; for a finished year, cite the yearly bulletin.

What is the occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities, month by month?#

August 2025 was the highest month at 71.15% and March the lowest at 26.79%; the year averaged 49.54%, down from 51.91% in 2024, per the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly accommodation bulletin.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly accommodation statistics bulletin.

This curve is flatter and later than the arrivals curve. The measure, as the Ministry publishes it, is the use of available bed capacity over the month. No room-based rate is published, so write "occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities" and never "hotel occupancy" or "room occupancy". For more on the definition, see what the Ministry's occupancy rate actually measures.

The scope is İşletme and Basit certified facilities only. A property outside certification is not in the denominator, and a bed count is not a room count. The 2026 picture, from the Ministry's August 2026 monthly bulletin, shows 72.67% for August 2026 and 47.04% for January to August 2026. The yearly bulletin is the compiled record for a finished year, so treat the monthly figures as the running view and the yearly figures as the settled one.

One symmetry deserves a hotelier's eye: November 2025 (33.07%) returned exactly to the January level (33.07%). The certified stock empties as fast as it fills. And a warning: facility-type breakdowns use different denominators, so check what sits under each rate before you compare it with your own. Do not build an argument on a number you have not traced to its base.

Why do arrivals and occupancy peak in different months?#

Because they measure different things on different calendars: arrivals count border crossings on a date, occupancy counts bed capacity used across a whole month.

Plain arithmetic shows the mechanism. A guest arriving on 28 July and leaving on 4 August adds one arrival to July and bed-nights to both July and August. The stay pushes the occupancy peak later than the arrival peak. Same-day visitors push the other way: they add arrivals and no bed-nights at all, lifting the arrivals curve without touching the occupancy curve.

The denominator moves too. Certified bed capacity changes as facilities open and close, so a month can gain arrivals and still lose rate if capacity grew faster. And the monthly rate is not split by domestic and foreign guests, so the August peak cannot be attributed to either group from this bulletin. The annual split exists, 154.8 million foreign and 97.5 million domestic overnight stays in 2025, per the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly accommodation statistics bulletin, but not month by month. Length of stay compounds all of this, as explained in why average length of stay changes what a monthly curve means.

Is an entry gate the same as a destination?#

No. Border statistics record the province of the gate where a visitor entered, not the province where that visitor sleeps.

The September 2026 numbers, provisional, show 6,111,821 foreign visitors arriving that month, up 0.4% on September 2025. Gates in Antalya province took the largest share of entries at 35.88%, while over January to September 2026 gates in İstanbul province led with 35.12% ahead of Antalya with 30.47%, per the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's September 2026 border bulletin.

The mechanism is transport, not hotels. A traveler landing at Antalya can stay in Muğla, Burdur or Isparta, and a traveler landing at İstanbul can reach a wide ring of provinces. Gate share is a fact about airports and roads. For context only, the Ministry's August 2026 certified stock figures, reported on 24 September 2026, put bed capacity at 654,133 in Antalya, 272,731 in İstanbul, 243,256 in Muğla, 94,936 in İzmir and 58,675 in Aydın. Capacity is not demand.

One national month also blends year-round city demand with coastal resort demand, and the two do not share a calendar. The Ministry's monthly bulletins publish no province-by-month occupancy table, so no hotel can read its own province's season from them. That gap is filled only by its own records.

How do you build your own 12-month curve?#

Pull nights sold by month and by market from your reservation records for at least 24 months, index each month to your own annual average, and place that shape beside the national one.

Fix the metric first: room-nights sold divided by room-nights available, with a written rule for rooms closed for renovation or a seasonal shutdown. The Ministry's rate is bed-capacity based, so your room-based rate will not equal it and is not meant to. Use nights, not arrivals: an arrival count tells you when people come, a night count tells you when you are full, and the two diverge exactly where the national curves diverge.

Split by market: country of residence, domestic against foreign, and channel. A single national curve hides a hotel running on two calendars at once. Index rather than compare levels: set each month to 100 equal to your own average month, then do the same to the national arrivals and occupancy figures, so the shapes can be laid over each other even though the levels cannot.

Close with the discipline. This is a record, not a forecast. For 2026 the national picture is flat, and no monthly series in this article predicts next season; see reading a flat 2026 in the official data.

Where do the monthly releases appear, and when?#

Both series are published by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's General Directorate of Investment and Establishments on its tourism statistics pages at yigm.ktb.gov.tr: one page for border statistics and one for Ministry-certified accommodation statistics.

On 2 November 2026 the latest border releases listed were the 2025 yearly bulletin and the September 2026 monthly bulletin; for accommodation, the August 2026 monthly bulletin and the 2025 yearly bulletin. The lag is honest but partly invisible: the page shows no publication date, so cite the file as "September 2026 border bulletin" rather than by a date you cannot see. The accommodation bulletin publishes no revision calendar, so the yearly bulletin is the compiled record to cite for a finished year.

Cite with publisher, title and date inside the sentence: TÜİK for revenue, the Ministry for visitors and accommodation. Wherever public figures appear, add the line "Public data. No endorsement implied." And remember that a monthly bulletin is a record of a month that has closed; it never carries a forecast for the next one.

What to do next#

Build the two-column table this month: your own nights sold by month for the last 24 months on one side, the national arrivals and occupancy curves on the other, both indexed to their own average. That single comparison tells you whether your season is the national season or your own, and that comparison is the basis for letting a monthly figure into a pricing decision.