Türkiye tourism revenue: what TÜİK's 2025 figure includes
TÜİK reports 2025 Türkiye tourism revenue at USD 65.23 billion. This figure includes transit passengers and citizens resident abroad, not just foreign tourists. Learn what sits inside the headline and how to compare it with your own property's numbers.
Contents
Key takeaways
- TÜİK's 2025 tourism revenue of USD 65.23 billion combines USD 64.45 billion of visitor spending with USD 782 million from transit passengers (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, 30 January 2026).
- The visitor total includes Turkish citizens resident abroad, so the figure is spending by everyone TÜİK counts as a visitor, not foreign spending alone (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, 30 January 2026).
- KPMG Türkiye, citing TÜİK, divides visitor spending into individual spending of USD 46.25 billion (71.8%) and package tours of USD 18.20 billion (28.2%) (KPMG Türkiye, Turizm Sektörüne Bakış 2026, p.6).
- The USD 100 per night figure is total visitor spending per night, not a room rate a hotel can hold its average daily rate against (Bloomberg HT, citing TÜİK, 30 January 2026).
- TÜİK publishes quarters, not a year-to-date total, so 2026 growth cannot be built by adding them; first-half 2026 visitor revenue was USD 25.75 billion, down 0.1% (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, second quarter 2026, 31 July 2026).
TÜİK, Türkiye's national statistical institute, put 2025 Türkiye tourism revenue at USD 65.23 billion, up 6.8%: USD 64.45 billion spent by visitors, including Turkish citizens resident abroad, and USD 782 million spent by transit passengers (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, 30 January 2026).
A revenue manager reads that Türkiye earned USD 65.23 billion from tourism in 2025 and immediately asks where the hotel's share went. The number is real, but it is not the number most people assume it is. After reading this article you will know exactly what sits inside the headline, whose spending it counts, and how to use it, and not use it, when you compare it with your own property's numbers.
Public data. No endorsement implied.
What does TÜİK's 2025 tourism revenue figure include?
It includes two things: spending by visitors who leave Türkiye through a border gate, and spending by transit passengers who pass through on the way to another country.
TÜİK, Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, is the national statistical institute. Its Tourism Statistics series is published quarterly, and the 2025 annual figure was released on 30 January 2026. The figure is built from passport records at border gates as its frame, then from face-to-face surveys of departing visitors, with card-center data and a health tourism survey added (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, third quarter 2026, metadata, 30 October 2026).
What the number is: gross spending inside Türkiye by those visitors, before the cost of serving them. It is not profit, not tax, and not value added.
Transit passengers are people changing planes or crossing the country en route elsewhere. Their USD 782 million is small next to visitor spending, but it sits inside the headline. The 6.8% growth is a change measured in US dollars for the country as a whole; it says nothing about lira, about margins, or about any single property.
Two further cautions. The series is not seasonally adjusted, so it describes a calendar year, not a season or a summer. And every use of the figure should carry its source line: TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, 30 January 2026.
| Component (2025) | Value | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Visitor revenue | USD 64.45 billion | Spending by departing visitors, foreign visitors and Turkish citizens resident abroad |
| Transit passenger revenue | USD 782 million | Spending by people passing through Türkiye en route to another country |
| Total tourism revenue | USD 65.23 billion, +6.8% | The sum TÜİK publishes as Türkiye's tourism revenue (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, 30 January 2026) |
Whose spending is in the figure?
Spending by foreign visitors and by Turkish citizens who live abroad, because TÜİK counts both as visitors.
TÜİK defines a visitor as a person who travels from their country of permanent residence to another country for less than a year, for any purpose other than earning income there. The definition covers both overnight visitors and same-day visitors. Citizens resident abroad are Turkish passport holders who live abroad and leave Türkiye through its border gates (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, third quarter 2026, metadata, 30 October 2026).
The practical consequence: the figure is not a foreign-tourist figure. A family living in Germany and flying to Antalya counts, and so does its spending. In 2025, TÜİK counted 63,917,057 departing visitors, of whom 17.5% were citizens resident abroad (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, 30 January 2026).
Keep two counts separate. Same-day visitors are inside the visitor total but outside any per-night figure, so never divide one by the other. And note the unit of counting: the frame is passport records at border gates, and the Ministry's border metadata states plainly that entries are not person-based, so the same person entering twice is counted twice (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, border statistics metadata, 23 December 2024).
NoteVisitors, not tourists only
The series counts overnight visitors and same-day visitors together, and includes Turkish citizens resident abroad, so the revenue figure is wider than "foreign tourist spending".
If you need the split between total and foreign visitors in more depth, see our article on Türkiye visitor numbers 2025: total or foreign visitors?.
How does visitor spending split between individual travelers and package tours?
Individual spending is the larger part: USD 46.25 billion, or 71.8%, against USD 18.20 billion, or 28.2%, for package tours (KPMG Türkiye, Turizm Sektörüne Bakış 2026, p.6, citing TÜİK).
Individual spending means the visitor arranges and pays providers directly: the hotel bill, the restaurant, the shop, the domestic flight. Package tour spending means a bundle bought as one product, often paid to a tour operator and often partly before arrival.
What the split cannot tell you: where the money ends up, what margin a hotel keeps, or how much of a package price stays in Türkiye. The fact base carries no such breakdown, so none can be implied here. Resist the leakage framing: a package share is a description of how visitors buy, not evidence that money leaves the country.
Note the scale caution too. This is a split of spending, not of visitors, so a minority of travelers can carry a large share of value.
Watch outWhat this split is not
It is not a measure of leakage, margin or profit, and it does not say how much of a package price stays with a hotel. For component detail, use TÜİK's own spending-by-type table in the quarterly release rather than secondary write-ups.
Is USD 100 per night a room rate?
No. It is total visitor spending per night, covering accommodation and everything else the visitor pays for inside Türkiye, so it cannot be set against a hotel's average daily rate.
TÜİK's 2025 statistics put spending at about USD 100 per night for overnight visitors, and USD 1,008 per departing visitor (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025, reported 30 January 2026). Food, local transport, shopping, culture and health spending sit inside it alongside the room.
Average daily rate, on the other side, is room revenue divided by occupied rooms for a night. It is one line of the guest's bill, not the whole bill. The national per-night figure is total visitor spending divided across all nights those visitors stayed, so every lira spent outside a hotel room lowers the share that looks like accommodation.
If you use an average length of stay, check the exact definition in the release you are citing before you print it. A figure per departing visitor counts every trip a person made, while a figure per stay counts one stay in one facility, and the two are not interchangeable. For certified accommodation, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reports 2.55 nights per stay for 2025 (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, accommodation bulletin 2025). Never present either measure as the length of a single booking at one hotel.
The fair internal comparison is total revenue per guest night: all outlets and all charges divided by guest nights, with the scope stated next to it. Even then, your figure covers one property in one period, while the national figure covers a year, every province and every certified facility type.
Key pointTwo different denominators
USD 100 per night is total spending per night across all visitors; average daily rate is room revenue per occupied room. Comparing them directly is a category error, not a benchmark.
For the wider rules on reading and citing official data, see Türkiye tourism statistics: how to read and cite official data.
Dollars or lira: how do you compare the national figure with your own revenue?
Convert on a stated date with a stated rate, and keep the same convention every time, because a dollar total and a lira ledger only meet through an exchange rate you choose.
The source of the rate is the daily central-bank exchange rates: the TCMB indicative rates published each business day. Pick one convention and write it down: the rate on the last day of the period, or the average across the period. Switching between them mid-year manufactures growth that did not happen.
The mechanism matters. A dollar figure that rises 6.8% can fall in lira if the rate moved further, so the currency move is not a performance signal for any hotel. Keep the national comparison and your own accounts on separate lines: your revenue is in lira at the rate your invoices used, not at a national average. Put the rate source and the date in the footnote of any chart or board slide that mixes the two currencies.
ChecklistConversion checklist
- Choose the period you are comparing.
- Choose last-day or period-average rate, once.
- Record the rate source and date.
- Convert once, not line by line.
- Label the converted figure as converted, with its date.
Do not print exchange-rate values in your materials without a date; the values change daily, and the method is the point.
What does 2026 look like so far?
Flat. First-half 2026 visitor revenue was USD 25.75 billion, down 0.1% on the same half of 2025 (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, second quarter 2026, 31 July 2026).
TÜİK publishes quarterly, about 30 days after each quarter ends, with no seasonal adjustment, so the honest comparison is the same quarter a year earlier. There is no official year-to-date revenue total. Adding four quarters to manufacture a growth rate produces a number TÜİK never published.
Figures also move after publication. Second-quarter 2026 visitor revenue first appeared as USD 15,655,868 thousand and is marked revised at USD 15,661,610 thousand in the table released with the third-quarter bulletin (TÜİK, metadata, 30 October 2026). TÜİK refreshes a reference year quarter by quarter, mainly as health spending is updated from its Health Tourism Survey. After a 2024 revision, TÜİK recalculated the series back to 2012, so tables published before that revision are not comparable with today's. Always quote the release date next to a quarterly figure, so a reader can tell whether a later revision has superseded it.
TipReading a quarterly release in four steps
Check the release date, compare with the same quarter last year, check for the revised marker, and never sum quarters into a year-to-date growth figure.
For the full picture of the year, see Türkiye tourism 2026: reading a flat year in the official data.
What can the national figure not tell you about your own hotel?
It cannot place your property inside the average, because it is one number built from every province, every certified facility type and every season.
An average hides segment mix, seasonality, channel mix, and the difference between a city hotel and a resort; all are flattened into one figure. Do not borrow the Ministry's occupancy rate as your own either: it measures the use of bed capacity across certified facilities, not room occupancy in your building (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, accommodation statistics metadata, 23 December 2024).
The replacement measures are your own: average daily rate by room type and channel, revenue per available room, total revenue per occupied room, spend per guest night, channel and segment mix, and cost per booking. Set the order of comparison: your own year against your own prior year on the same basis first, then the region, then the country. If a national number must appear in a board pack, label it as context, never as a target or a budget line.
| The question you are asking | The measure that answers it | Why the national figure cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Are we priced right? | Average daily rate by room type and channel | It is total spending per night, not a room rate |
| Are we filling the building? | Room occupancy and revenue per available room | It is a country average across facility types |
| Are guests spending with us? | Total revenue per occupied room, spend per guest night | It mixes accommodation with every other category |
| Is the mix profitable? | Segment and channel mix with cost per booking | It carries no cost or margin data at all |
What to do next
Take one number from this article, the one you actually need, and use it on its own terms: the national total for context, the per-night figure never as a room rate, and your own revenue per guest night for decisions. Then open TÜİK's quarterly release, note its date, and check whether a later revision has replaced the figure you were about to quote.
Frequently asked questions
Does TÜİK's tourism revenue include Turkish citizens living abroad?
Yes. TÜİK defines citizens resident abroad as Turkish passport holders who live abroad and leave through Türkiye's border gates, and counts them as visitors, so their spending is inside the USD 64.45 billion visitor figure. The headline is therefore wider than foreign tourist spending.
Is tourism revenue the same as the tourism sector's contribution to GDP?
No. It is gross spending by departing visitors before the cost of serving them, so it is not value added, not profit and not tax revenue. Comparing it with a GDP share requires a defined measure on both sides, and this figure is not that measure.
Why can't I add the four quarters to get a 2026 growth rate?
TÜİK publishes each quarter separately, with no seasonal adjustment and no official year-to-date total, and it revises earlier quarters as new survey data arrives. Compare like quarters, quote the release date, and use the annual release for a full-year figure.
Does the figure cover domestic travel inside Türkiye?
The series is built from visitors departing through border gates, so residents who travel inside Türkiye without crossing a border fall outside it. Domestic overnight stays appear in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's certified accommodation bulletins instead, which measure something different again.