A fifth consecutive record — 18.97 million visitors, Russia first, Germany second, America third — and a shoulder season turning into a second peak.
Istanbul is the rare city where the top of the passport table is a geopolitical map: Russia first, Germany second, America third — three different reasons to come, one shared destination.
18.97 million foreign visitors in 2025 (+2%) — a fifth consecutive record, after 18.58 million in 2024, and 27% above the pre-pandemic benchmark of 14.91 million set in 2019.
Russia leads with 2.02 million (10.7%) — a structural first place built on visa-free access and direct connectivity, holding the top spot every single month of 2025.
Germany follows at 1.52 million (8%), anchored by diaspora travel, and the United States at 1.06 million (5.6%) — the long-haul market that now outranks Iran and the UK on the annual table.
The midfield is broad: Iran (911k), the UK (759k), France (673k), with Saudi Arabia, Italy, Uzbekistan and China rounding out a top ten covering 47.8% of all arrivals.
Seasonality is flattening: October 2025 (1.86M) nearly matched July (1.88M), and January 2026 opened at 1.36 million, +7% year on year — the shoulder season is becoming a second peak.
Read Istanbul’s passport table and you read the last five years of world politics. Russia’s first place is sanctions-era aviation; America’s third is Turkish Airlines’ network ambition; Germany’s second is fifty years of migration turned into permanent travel demand. No other city monetizes geopolitics this directly. The risk is symmetric: the same table that gains from every rupture also reprices with every reconciliation.
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