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The record
8.74 million visitors
Louvre
France
The record
The most visited museum in the world is the Louvre, in France — 8.74 million visitors, annual attendance.
Source: TEA/AECOM Global Experience Index 2024. Verified .
The three most visited museum sites on earth are missing from this list, and that is deliberate. The Forbidden City drew 17 million people in 2024, Chengdu's Wuhou Shrine 14.6 million and Xi'an's Terracotta Army 11.6 million, but each sells a ticket to a palace, a temple or an excavation rather than to galleries.
A museum here is an institution showing a collection in its own halls, counted once: multi-site bodies such as the Smithsonian, or Dongguan's Opium War Museum, whose 7.2 million folds a fort and two memorial halls into a single figure, enter per museum or not at all.
Every number below is a 2024 calendar-year figure from the Themed Entertainment Association's Global Experience Index, still the current edition, because mixing reporting years quietly reshuffles any museum ranking. The countdown runs from 8.74 million visitors down to 4.9 million, and nine of the fifteen are in China.
Nine of the fifteen are in China — and the whole tail of the list, from Nanjing Museum down to Hunan Museum, is Chinese. Fourteen of the world's top twenty museums now sit in one country.
A district museum out-draws the British Museum — Nanshan Museum in Shenzhen took 6.81 million visitors in 2024, roughly 330,000 more than the British Museum, on a collection almost nobody outside Guangdong could name.
Free entry does most of the heavy lifting — eleven of the fifteen charge nothing at the door, including both London museums and every Chinese entry. The Louvre, the Vatican Museums and the Met are the notable exceptions.
Eight thousand visitors separate two entries — Suzhou Museum and Liwan Museum finished 2024 about one busy morning apart, close enough that their order could reverse in any given year.
The fastest riser gained 85.6% in a single year — Sanxingdui Museum nearly doubled its attendance after opening a new main building in July 2023, the sharpest jump anywhere on the list.
At 8.74 million visitors, the Louvre is the most visited museum on earth, and has been for as long as anyone has kept count. It began as a fortress, became a royal palace, and opened as a public museum in 1793 with 537 paintings. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid has marked the entrance since 1989, funnelling the crowd down into a courtyard beneath the Cour Napoleon and back out into three wings: Denon, Sully and Richelieu.
The scale is genuinely difficult. Around 35,000 works are on display across eight departments, from Egyptian antiquities to nineteenth-century French painting. The crowd, though, is not evenly spread. A large majority of visitors make straight for one small portrait behind glass in the Salle des Etats, which is why the museum announced a decade-long overhaul in 2025 that will eventually give the Mona Lisa a room of her own.
At 6.96 million visitors, the National Museum of China is the most visited museum in Asia and the second most visited anywhere. It occupies the entire eastern flank of Tiananmen Square, and with nearly 200,000 square metres of floor space it is one of the largest museum buildings ever put up. Admission is free, by timed online booking, which is the single biggest reason its numbers run where they do.
The collection is around 1.4 million items deep, and the permanent Ancient China galleries carry the weight of it. The Simuwu Ding, a ritual bronze cauldron cast more than 3,000 years ago, is the heaviest such vessel ever recovered; beside it sit jade burial suits sewn with gold wire and oracle bones carrying the earliest known Chinese writing. The museum took its present form in 2003, when two older institutions sharing the site were merged.
At 6.83 million visitors, the Vatican Museums move more people through less ground than anywhere else on this list, inside the smallest sovereign state on earth. They date from 1506, when Julius II put a newly unearthed Laocoon group on public view in a courtyard, and they have been accumulating ever since, to roughly seven kilometres of galleries if you walk the full route.
Almost everyone is walking toward the same ceiling. The circuit is designed to deliver you to the Sistine Chapel last, past the Gallery of Maps, the Raphael Rooms and the Egyptian and Etruscan collections, so the busiest museum route in the world is also one of the most tightly choreographed. Michelangelo painted the vault between 1508 and 1512, then returned nearly thirty years later to add the Last Judgement across the altar wall.
At 6.81 million visitors, Nanshan Museum out-draws the British Museum, the Met and every museum in the United States, which makes it comfortably the least famous entry on this list. It is a district museum, opened in 2018 in Shenzhen's Nanshan district, and it is free to enter. Attendance climbed 26 per cent in a single year to reach this figure.
Two things explain it. Shenzhen is a city of roughly 17.5 million people with a median age under 33, and Nanshan is its tech and university quarter, so the catchment is enormous and young.
The museum then programmes hard against it, running major touring exhibitions in archaeology, palaeontology and international loans alongside permanent galleries on the region's history from the Neolithic through the Ming and Qing coastal forts. It is the clearest single illustration of why this ranking now leans east.
At 6.48 million visitors, the British Museum is among the oldest institutions of its kind anywhere and still one of the busiest. It opened in 1759, six years after Parliament bought Sir Hans Sloane's collection for the nation, and it opened free, a principle it has never abandoned. Norman Foster's glass roof enclosed the Great Court in 2000, turning a hidden service yard into the largest covered square in Europe.
Some eight million objects are held, of which perhaps one per cent is on display at any time. The famous rooms stay crowded: the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, the Sutton Hoo helmet, the Assyrian lion hunt reliefs. Several of those holdings are the subject of active restitution claims, and the museum's next decade is likely to be defined as much by those arguments as by its attendance.
66. Natural History Museum, London
Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom
At 6.30 million visitors, the Natural History Museum draws more people than any other museum in Britain, into a building that is itself one of the exhibits. Alfred Waterhouse finished it in 1881 as a terracotta cathedral to the natural world, every column and arch moulded with animals, living species ranged down the west side and extinct ones down the east.
Hintze Hall sets the tone. Since 2017 a 25-metre blue whale skeleton named Hope has hung diving from its ceiling, having taken the place of Dippy the Diplodocus cast. Behind the public galleries sit around 80 million specimens and some 300 working scientists, including material collected by Darwin and Wallace. One footnote worth carrying: in 2025 the museum recorded 7.1 million visits, an all-time British record, in a reporting year this ranking does not yet cover.
At 5.99 million visitors, Sanxingdui Museum is the fastest-rising entry here, up 85.6 per cent in a single year after a new main building opened in July 2023. It stands at Guanghan in Sichuan, above the remains of a Bronze Age city that no historical text records and that nobody suspected existed until a farmer turned up a cache of jade in 1929.
What the sacrificial pits gave up in 1986, and again from 2020, is unlike anything else in Chinese archaeology: bronze masks a metre wide with eyes on stalks, a standing figure 2.6 metres tall on its own plinth, and a bronze sacred tree hung with birds. The Shu culture that made them flourished around 3,000 years ago and then disappeared, leaving no writing behind, so the galleries are unusually candid about how much is still unexplained.
At 5.73 million visitors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most visited museum in the Americas and the largest art museum in the United States. It was founded in 1870 by a group of New Yorkers who simply thought the city ought to have one, and it has since spread along Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile to roughly two million square feet holding some two million works across 5,000 years.
Its signature move is to install things whole. The Temple of Dendur stands in a glass-walled gallery beside a reflecting pool, given to the United States by Egypt in 1965 and rebuilt block by block. Elsewhere there are complete period rooms, a reconstructed Ming scholar's courtyard and the arms and armour court. The Costume Institute's spring exhibition, and the gala that opens it, reliably produces the museum's busiest weeks of the year.
At 5.68 million visitors, Nanjing Museum is one of the earliest modern museums in China and among the most heavily used. It was founded in 1933 on the initiative of the scholar Cai Yuanpei, intended as a national museum for what was then the capital, and its main hall was built in a deliberately archaic Liao dynasty manner that still anchors the complex.
More than 400,000 items are held across six separate galleries, which is an unusual structure: alongside the historical collection sit dedicated pavilions for art, folk culture, intangible heritage and digital display. The crowd-pleaser is the Republic-era gallery, a full-scale indoor reconstruction of a 1930s Nanjing street complete with shopfronts, a post office and a tram. Among the treasures are a jade burial suit sewn with silver thread and a gilt-bronze censer shaped as a mountain.
At 5.42 million visitors, the China Science and Technology Museum is a useful reminder that museum attendance is not an art-world metric. It is the national science museum, and it moved to its present home on Beijing's Olympic Green in 2009, into a stacked cubic building a short walk from the Bird's Nest stadium.
Its audience is overwhelmingly children, and the exhibits are built for handling rather than contemplation. A Glory of China hall covers historical Chinese invention, and floors above it run through materials, transport, energy and space, with a Children's Science Paradise for the under-tens. Tickets are nominal, school groups arrive by the coachload, and four cinemas, among them a dome theatre and a giant screen, absorb a good share of the daily traffic on their own.
At 5.40 million visitors, the American Museum of Natural History is New York's other giant, facing Central Park from the west while the Met faces it from the east. It was founded in 1869 and now runs to some 45 permanent halls spread across a campus of interconnected buildings on Central Park West.
Two set pieces do much of the work. The fourth-floor fossil halls hold one of the largest dinosaur collections on public display anywhere, arranged as an evolutionary branching path rather than a straight walk through time, and a 94-foot fibreglass blue whale has hung above the Hall of Ocean Life since 1969.
The Rose Center for Earth and Space added a planetarium sphere inside a glass cube in 2000, and the Gilder Center opened in 2023 around a cavernous atrium carved to look eroded.
At 5.095 million visitors, Suzhou Museum edges the next entry by about 8,000 admissions, roughly one busy morning, and the two are close enough that they are best read as a shared rank rather than a settled order. It opened in 2006 to a design by I. M. Pei, then 85, who was born into a Suzhou family and called the commission his small daughter.
The building is the reason many people come. Pei worked in white stucco and grey granite, translating the whitewashed walls and dark tiled roofs of Suzhou's classical gardens into flat geometry, and set the result directly against the sixteenth-century Humble Administrator's Garden next door. Inside are Wu-region antiquities, Ming and Qing painting and calligraphy, and a small, exceptional group of Buddhist relics recovered from a local pagoda. Admission is free.
1313. Liwan Museum
Longjin West Road, Liwan District, Guangzhou, China
At 5.087 million visitors, Liwan Museum sits about 8,000 admissions behind Suzhou Museum, a margin narrow enough that the two are effectively level and could swap places in any given year. It is a district museum in Xiguan, the old commercial quarter of Guangzhou, and it is free to enter.
Its core is a house. The museum occupies the 1930s mansion built for the silk merchant Chen Lianbo, a grey-brick compound with carved screens and coloured glass in the distinctive Xiguan manner, so the building doubles as the principal exhibit.
Around it the museum interprets Liwan's own history, from the Thirteen Factories trade to Cantonese opera and the Xiguan townhouses, and it anchors a restored precinct of lanes and teahouses, which goes a long way to explaining how a district museum records numbers on this scale.
At 5.00 million visitors, the Hubei Provincial Museum holds what may be the single most extraordinary object on this list. In 1978 archaeologists opened the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at Suizhou and found a bianzhong: a set of 65 bronze bells on a three-tiered rack, cast around 433 BC, each one sounding two distinct pitches depending on where it is struck.
The set still works. The originals are sounded only on rare occasions, but the museum performs on a full replica in its own concert hall, so visitors can hear a five-octave chromatic scale in the tuning of the Warring States period. The same tomb yielded lacquerware and bronze vessels of remarkable complexity, and elsewhere the museum keeps the Sword of Goujian, unearthed nearby in 1965 and still bright and sharp after 2,500 years underground.
At 4.90 million visitors, the Hunan Museum closes the list on the strength of a single excavation. Between 1972 and 1974 the Mawangdui tombs were opened outside Changsha, and the museum was effectively rebuilt around what came out of them. It took its current name in 2022, dropping the word provincial.
The find that draws the crowd is Xin Zhui, the Lady of Dai, buried around 163 BC and recovered so completely preserved that her skin was still soft and her limbs still moved at the joints.
Alongside her came a T-shaped silk funerary banner mapping the heavens, the earth and the world below, nested lacquered coffins, silk manuscripts including a version of the Daodejing older than any then known, and a gauze robe weighing 49 grams. Admission is free, by advance booking.
FAQ: The Most Visited Museums in the World
What is the most visited museum in the world?
The Louvre in Paris, which recorded 8.74 million visitors in 2024 and has topped this ranking for as long as comparable figures have been collected. Its nearest rival, the National Museum of China, sits nearly 1.8 million admissions behind, and a large share of the Louvre's crowd is there for a single painting.
Why is the Forbidden City not on this list?
Because its ticket admits you to a palace precinct rather than to galleries. On raw footfall the Palace Museum recorded 17 million visits in 2024, close to double the Louvre, but this ranking counts museum institutions that show a collection in their own halls. The same rule sets aside Chengdu's Wuhou Shrine and the Terracotta Army site at Xi'an. The Forbidden City gets its due among the largest palaces in the world.
How is museum attendance counted?
The standard reference is the Themed Entertainment Association's Global Experience Index, produced with AECOM, which audits calendar-year attendance across the world's attractions. Every figure here comes from its 2024 edition, still the most recent published. Holding all fifteen entries to one reporting year matters more than it sounds, because museums report on different cycles and mixing years quietly reorders the table.
Which is the most visited museum in the United States?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on 5.73 million visitors, followed closely by the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park on 5.40 million. No Smithsonian museum reaches this list, because the Smithsonian's headline figure covers roughly twenty separate museums and each one is counted on its own here.
Why are so many Chinese museums on this list?
Free admission, very large urban catchments and a decade of state investment in new buildings. Fourteen of the world's top twenty museums are now in China by the index's own count, and nine of them clear this list's rules. Several, such as Shenzhen's Nanshan Museum, are district institutions that would look modest on their collections alone but serve cities of many millions.
Is the biggest museum also the most visited?
Broadly, but not reliably. The Louvre leads both this ranking and our list of the biggest museums in the world by gallery space, yet several institutions with enormous floor areas draw far smaller crowds, and Nanshan Museum reaches fourth here on a fraction of the space. Floor area and footfall measure different things, and both get their own treatment across our world record-breakers countdowns.
