Monthly arrivals · 1988–2026 · Ministry of Tourism
Who comes, and
when they come.
Tourist arrivals counted every month since 1988, broken out by nationality. It is the closest thing the Maldives has to a pulse: the industry is a fifth of GDP directly, and the rhythm of the year belongs to it.
Every month since 1988
Arrivals are counted monthly, and the same rhythm repeats: a European winter high, a long low through the south-west monsoon, and a second lift in August. Each cell is one month; darker means busier.
129,135 arrivals on average
78,160 arrivals on average
how much busier the high season runs
most recent month published
Arrivals by month and year
Hover any cell for its exact count. Shading uses quantile breaks, not a linear scale — arrivals grew more than twentyfold over the period, and a linear ramp would flatten every early year into one shade.
How far each month sits from an average one
Mean arrivals per calendar month since 2007, as a percentage above or below the average month. This is the seasonality with the growth taken out.
China sends one visitor in 6
Arrivals by nationality, 12 months to 2026-07. Seventy-nine countries are counted separately; the largest handful account for most of the traffic, and the mix has shifted decisively from Europe towards Asia.
+21.0% on the year before
+21.0% on the year before
-9.8% on the year before
share of the latest month, per cent
Source markets · 12 months to 2026-07
Every country the Ministry of Tourism counts separately, ranked by arrivals. Colour shows the change against the twelve months before.
The big markets over time
Twelve-month rolling totals, so the seasonal saw-tooth does not obscure which market is actually gaining. Tap a name to add or remove it.
The mix, region by region
Each region's share of the month's arrivals. Europe filled the resorts for decades; Asia and the Pacific now take a far larger slice, and the pandemic year shows as a hard break in the pattern.
Forty-five thousand people, one in ten of them a woman
The last time the Bureau surveyed resort payrolls it covered 93 properties and 44,954 staff. Two numbers dominate the result: Maldivians hold 47% of the jobs, and women hold 10%. This is the 2019 round — the survey has not been published as data since, so it predates the pandemic and everything after it.
across 93 resorts, 2019
23,622 of the staff were foreign
4,508 women in the whole industry
1,201 people — the smallest group of the four
The workforce, split both ways at once
Nationality against gender. Foreign men alone outnumber every other group combined; Maldivian women are outnumbered by foreign women, in an industry hiring within their own country.
Which part of the resort
Employees by the department they work in. Food and beverage is the single largest, ahead of housekeeping and front office combined.
Staff by star rating
Five-star resorts employ most of the industry simply because there are most of them. What barely moves is the nationality mix: the Maldivian share runs between 47% and 48% whichever band you look at, so the split is a feature of the sector rather than of the luxury end of it.
One caveat that matters for every figure above: this is the Employment in Tourist Resorts 2019 round, fielded before the border closures of 2020. The Bureau has run the survey since, but published it as a report rather than a dataset, so the numbers here cannot be brought forward without reading them off a PDF. They describe the industry as it was, and are shown for that reason rather than as a current count.
Two in three tourism jobs are held by a foreign worker
The census counted 70,864 people working in accommodation and food service on census night 2022. 45,765 of them — 64.6% — were not Maldivian. That single group is 15.2% of everyone employed in the country, in any industry.
45,765 of 70,864 · census 2022
counted where they sleep, not where they are from
11.9% of what tourism earned that year
97.8% are in the labour force — they are here to work
Foreign share of employment, by industry
Every industry employing more than 2,000 people, census 2022. Tourism is the second most foreign-staffed industry in the country after construction, which is 85% foreign — the industry that builds the resorts is staffed the same way as the industry that runs them.
What tourism earns, and what leaves as wages
Travel receipts and workers’ remittances, both from MMA’s balance of payments. 2020 is the test of how fixed that wage bill is: receipts fell 56% while remittances fell only 33%, so the share leaving more than doubled in a year the industry had almost no customers.
Which jobs, not just how many
Employed residents by occupation group, split by nationality — the two groups the labour force survey publishes. Foreign workers are a majority of everything outside the managerial and professional tier, and a fifth of the tier above it.
What these four sources can and cannot say. The 64.6% is the census measure of accommodation and food service, which is every resort, guesthouse, hotel, café and restaurant in the country — not resorts alone. The resort survey, which covers 93 resorts and nothing else, put the foreign share of resort payrolls at 52.5% in 2019; the two numbers differ because they count different populations three years apart, not because either is wrong. Remittances are sent by every foreign worker in the country, in every industry, so the comparison with travel receipts is a matter of scale rather than an attribution of that money to tourism. And neither the census nor the resort survey reports occupation broken down by nationality, so how the foreign share varies between a general manager and a room attendant is not something any published Maldivian source currently answers.