Tourism
01
3.8 million arrivals in August 2026.
The Immigration Department counts every foreign national crossing into Malaysia, month by month, by nationality — read live from the official open-data API. Over the twelve months ending August 2026, 44.2 million arrivals were recorded.
Arrivals · August 2026
3.81M
-1.0% against the same month a year earlier
Trailing twelve months
44.2M
september 2025 – august 2026
Top origin · 2025
Singapore
48.3% of the 43.2M arrivals counted that calendar year
Data freshnessThe open monthly series runs to August 2026 — 1 months behind today. Every figure on this page describes that published window, not the present.
DocumentedFor newer context: Tourism Malaysia announced 42.2 million international visitor arrivals for full-year 2025 (Tourism Malaysia announcement, Jan 2026) — a separate headline count on its own definition, not computed from, and not comparable with, the monthly series shown here.
Official latestMonthly administrative counts, not survey estimates — every border crossing by a foreign national is one arrival, however brief the visit and however often the person returns.
Immigration Department / MOTAC — arrivals (monthly international arrivals by nationality and sex), via the data.gov.my open API · retrieved 2026-10-12 02:34 UTC
Border arrivals by foreign nationals, January 2020–August 2026; upstream data as of 2026-08-31 23:59. Arrivals count entries at the border, not overnight tourists, and the open series lags — the page states its latest month rather than implying the figures are current.
The long view
02
The month the border counted fourteen thousand.
The series opens in January 2020 with 2.92 million arrivals, then falls 99.5% to 14,282 in May 2020 as the borders close. August 2026, the latest published month, stands +30.2% against that opening month — the series starts in 2020, so no pre-pandemic 2019 comparison is possible from this dataset.
The boxed window marks every month below one-tenth of the series' opening month. The biggest month on record is December 2025, at 4,077,583 arrivals.
Who visits
03
Singapore is 48% of the story.
The top ten origin countries of 2025, the latest complete calendar year in the data. The top three — Singapore, China and Indonesia — account for 69.9% of all 43.2 million arrivals counted that year.
| Origin | Arrivals | Share of 2025 | vs 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 20,851,066 | 48.3% | +11.0% |
| China | 4,767,725 | 11.0% | +25.7% |
| Indonesia | 4,529,201 | 10.5% | +3.0% |
| Thailand | 2,595,015 | 6.0% | +11.8% |
| India | 1,701,944 | 3.9% | +12.2% |
| Brunei | 1,570,025 | 3.6% | -9.0% |
| Philippines | 667,660 | 1.5% | +6.8% |
| South Korea | 572,640 | 1.3% | -0.4% |
| Australia | 498,687 | 1.2% | +10.3% |
| Japan | 474,387 | 1.1% | +14.0% |
Calendar-year 2025 arrivals by nationality. The share bar is each country's slice of all arrivals that year; the change column compares against calendar 2024, when borders were still reopening.
When they come
04
December is the busiest month at the border.
Averaged across the 6 complete years in the data (2020–2025), arrivals peak in December, with August next, and bottom out in April. Two of those years were border-closure years, which drags every average down — the shape of the calendar is more trustworthy here than the absolute levels.
| Month | Average arrivals | vs the peak month |
|---|---|---|
| January | 1,943,750 | 85% |
| February | 1,674,788 | 73% |
| March | 1,720,083 | 75% |
| April | 1,550,356 | 68% |
| May | 1,732,450 | 76% |
| June | 1,856,774 | 81% |
| July | 1,953,991 | 86% |
| August | 2,030,253 | 89% |
| September | 1,888,212 | 83% |
| October | 1,873,222 | 82% |
| November | 1,924,694 | 84% |
| December | 2,278,645 | 100% |
Mean monthly arrivals across the complete calendar years 2020–2025. Incomplete years are excluded.
Did you know
December 2025 is the biggest month on record: 4,077,583 arrivals.
The single largest month in the published series — larger than the whole of 2021 (a border-closure year) many times over, and +39.5% against the series' opening month, January 2020.
Computed from the data.gov.my monthly arrivals series
Three countries account for 70% of all arrivals.
Singapore, China and Indonesia together supplied 69.9% of the 43.2 million arrivals counted in 2025. Malaysia's visitor economy is overwhelmingly a neighbourhood economy.
Computed from the data.gov.my monthly arrivals series
May 2020: 14,282 arrivals in an entire month.
The emptiest month of the pandemic closure. Before the borders shut, January 2020 averaged roughly 94,292 arrivals per day — so the whole of May 2020 amounted to about 0.2 days of ordinary traffic.
Computed from the data.gov.my monthly arrivals series
Deep data
04.3
What an “arrival” means here.
This dataset counts border crossings, not holidays. Every foreign national entering Malaysia is one arrival — a Singaporean commuting across the Causeway for the afternoon counts the same as a family flying in for a fortnight, and the same person can be counted many times in a month.
Series window
80 months
January 2020 to August 2026, read live from data.gov.my
Nationalities tracked
227
distinct country codes in the 2024–2025 rows, plus a national total
Publication lag
1 months
upstream data as of 2026-08-31
Sex split · August 2026
54% male
46% female, from the same monthly rows
Arrivals are not tourists
Tourism Malaysia's headline "tourist" and "visitor" figures follow international definitions that involve purpose and length of stay. This series is the raw administrative count at the border — bigger, blunter, and published by nationality every month. The two should never be added or compared directly.
The neighbourhood effect
Land borders inflate arrival counts relative to air travel: crossing from Singapore or southern Thailand is a routine trip that can happen weekly, so a large share for a neighbouring country reflects frequency of crossing as much as volume of visitors.
The lag, and what's missing
The open series ends at August 2026, 1 months behind today — treat this chapter as recent history, not a live gauge. A state-of-entry breakdown was not available from the open catalogue when this chapter was built, so the figures here stay national.
Immigration Department / MOTAC — arrivals (monthly international arrivals by nationality and sex), via the data.gov.my open API · retrieved 2026-10-12 02:34 UTC
Border arrivals by foreign nationals, January 2020–August 2026; upstream data as of 2026-08-31 23:59. Arrivals count entries at the border, not overnight tourists, and the open series lags — the page states its latest month rather than implying the figures are current.
Arrivals are where the visitor economy starts — the spending, jobs and festivals they feed belong to other shelves: Economy and Culture & Society.