Travel in Monaco: a country most visitors leave by nightfall

How Monaco counts the people who visit it

Monaco measures its visitors by asking them and by counting their telephones. The 2025 tourism survey, published by IMSEE in June 2026, collected 6,878 questionnaires between January 2025 and January 2026. Hostesses from the Direction du Tourisme et des Congrès handed them out at the tourist office and at the Monaco Monte-Carlo railway station, mobile interviewers worked the Place du Casino, the Grimaldi Forum and the Prince's Palace two half-days a week, and QR codes in hotels, shops, bus shelters and car parks let visitors answer on their own phones. Because one questionnaire could cover a whole group, the 6,878 forms stood for 17,473 people.

The definitions are strict. A visitor is somebody who neither lives nor works in Monaco, is present fewer than thirty days a year, and spends more than two hours on the territory in a single day. A tourist is a visitor who sleeps at least one night in the principality. An excursionist comes for the day and sleeps elsewhere, which in practice means France, and can come back on consecutive days within one visit.

The answers were then weighted against two outside counts. One was hotel arrivals, reported by the hotels themselves. The other was the mobile connections of phones registered abroad, supplied by Monaco Télécom and the government's digital transition delegation, filtered to phones present for more than two hours in a day and fewer than thirty days in the year. The institute worked the monthly totals back from the hotels. In January 2025 the hotels recorded 21,322 arrivals; the survey put hotel guests at 91.1% of that month's tourists, which gives 23,383 tourists, and tourists were 6.5% of January's visitors, which gives an estimate of 359,937 visits for the month.

The 6.7 million counts visits, so a person who came to Monaco four times in 2025 appears in it four times.

Why most of Monaco's visitors sleep in France

The survey split the 6,664 thousand visits of 2025 into 6,167 thousand by excursionists and 498 thousand by tourists. Excursionists made between 90.0% of visits in February and 95.3% in July, and their visits lasted 1.1 to 1.3 days in every month of the year. A figure above one day, the institute notes, means some slept across the border and came back the next morning.

Residents of France made 47.9% of all visits in 2025, and 49.6% of excursionist visits. The institute attributes this to proximity, particularly for people living in the Alpes-Maritimes, the French department that surrounds Monaco on three sides. Britannica puts Nice about 15 kilometres to the west and the Italian border about 8 kilometres to the east, and Wikipedia describes a cross-border agglomeration of about 55,000 residents in which neighbourhoods run without a break from Monaco into Beausoleil, Cap-d'Ail and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. For much of that population a visit to Monaco is a short trip within the same town.

Italy accounted for 7.9% of visits in 2025, the United States for 5.7% and the United Kingdom for 5.5%. Visitors from outside the European Union made 24.2% of excursionist visits.

Beds are scarce. In 2025 Monaco had 13 classified hotels with 2,460 rooms between them, and they recorded 353,875 guest arrivals at an occupancy rate of 64.5%, against 61.8% in 2024. Set against 6.7 million visits, those rooms could only ever hold a small share of the people passing through, and the rest sleep in the towns along the coast on either side.

How visitors reach a country with no airport

Every route into Monaco starts in France or at sea. The nearest airport is Nice Côte d'Azur, which Wikipedia puts a little under an hour away by train. The Monaco heliport, on the south-western edge of the principality, runs helicopter services to it. The railway station is the only one in the country, a stop on the Marseille to Ventimiglia line served by SNCF, the French national railway; the present station, built partly underground, opened in 1999. By road, the four-lane E80 motorway passes well to the north of the border and winding roads link its junctions down to the coast.

The survey asked each visitor how they covered the last stretch into Monaco. A visitor who came by taxi from Nice airport was told to answer taxi.

The two groups arrive differently. Day visitors come overwhelmingly by car, train and coach, and those three together carried more than 90% of all visits in 2025. Tourists took a taxi more often than anything else, at 34.8%, and 60.8% of them had passed through Nice Côte d'Azur airport, against 36.7% of day visitors. Across all visits, about 38.5% involved the airport, which the institute puts at around 2.6 million visits in 2025.

Cruise ships made 137 calls at Monaco in 2025 and landed 92,023 passengers, according to the port operator's figures published by IMSEE. The "other" category in the survey includes people who walked or cycled in from the neighbouring French communes, and made up 1.0% of visits.

What happens at the frontier

Nobody checks papers on the land frontier. Wikipedia records no border formalities for entering or leaving France and no land border controls since 1963. Monaco is outside the European Union but applies certain of its policies, including customs and border controls, and French customs law has applied in Monaco and its territorial waters under an agreement of 1963. The tourist office, on the far side of the gardens facing the casino, stamps a souvenir mark in a passport on request, because the frontier itself will not.

Where visitors go once inside Monaco

The survey's own collection points give a rough map of where visitors gather. Of the 2025 questionnaires, 26.4% were collected at the tourist office, 24.9% at the railway station and 10.3% on the Place du Casino. The Grimaldi Forum and the Prince's Palace each accounted for 6.2%, the Oceanographic Museum for 6.0% and the Musée des Traditions for 3.9%. The Jardin Exotique, the Japanese gardens, the cruise terminal, the cathedral, the Larvotto beaches and Port Hercule each accounted for less than 3%.

Those points fall across the four traditional quarters. The Rock, the headland of Monaco-Ville, carries the old town, the palace, the cathedral and the Oceanographic Museum, inaugurated in 1910 as a project of Prince Albert I. Street signs there are printed in French and in Monégasque. La Condamine lies around the natural harbour on the west of the bay. Monte-Carlo holds the casino, whose building also contains the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in a theatre designed by Charles Garnier. Fontvieille, reclaimed from the sea between 1966 and 1973, holds the Stade Louis II and a marina of 55,000 square metres.

Getting between them is mostly done on foot. Wikipedia describes walking as one of the main modes of local transport and records plans in the 2020s to extend the pedestrian network, including a footbridge in Fontvieille. The Compagnie des Autobus de Monaco runs buses to the museums, the casino, the Jardin Exotique and the stadium, and Monaco has about 77 kilometres of roads, many of which double as racing circuits.

What the casino admits

The Casino de Monte-Carlo is open to visitors and closed to the principality's own citizens, who are barred from the gaming rooms. It sits on the Place du Casino with the Hôtel de Paris and the Café de Paris, whose predecessor opened in 1868 and completed what the Société des Bains de Mer calls the magic triangle of the square. Wikipedia describes themed rooms inside the main building with their own entry and dress requirements, and a second house, the Café de Paris casino, with lower minimum stakes.

The Oceanographic Museum measures its own crowds. Its "Mission Polaire" exhibition counted more than 1.7 million visitors between its opening in June 2022 and its closing on 5 January 2025, and in August 2026 the museum reported that "Méditerranée 2050" had passed one million visitors seventeen months after it opened.

Which months fill Monaco and which stay quiet

Visits rose from 275 thousand in March 2025 to 898 thousand in July and 822 thousand in August. May reached 726 thousand, which the institute ties partly to the Monaco Grand Prix, a race founded in 1929, on the Formula One calendar since 1950 and run on a temporary circuit through the streets of Monte-Carlo. January, March and November 2025 had between 275 and 378 thousand visits each. Counted in visitor-days instead of visits, July 2025 reached about 1.17 million and May about 1.16 million, because visitors in May stayed longer.

The resort was first built for the opposite season. The Société des Bains de Mer's history records winter as the favourite season of the nineteenth-century clientele, drawn by the mild climate. Summer arrived between the wars: a bathhouse opened in July 1928, the Monte-Carlo Beach Hotel in 1929, and Larvotto took its first bathers. Britannica describes a place that was once a winter attraction and now draws summer visitors to its beaches and moorings as well.

The weather station at the Jardin Exotique gives the seasons in figures. Over the 1991 to 2020 normal, the daily mean runs at about 11 °C in January and 24.5 °C in August, and rain is concentrated in autumn, with a normal of 142 millimetres in November and 125 millimetres in October against 17 millimetres in July. The summer of 2025 opened with a June mean of 24.8 °C, 3.3 °C above normal, and two lasting heatwaves followed; the regional heatwave threshold is three consecutive days above 31 °C by day with nights that stay above 24 °C. Winter 2025 was mild, with mean minimum temperatures of 8.5 °C in January and February.

Who stays the night in Monaco

The 498 thousand tourist visits of 2025 lasted 3.8 days on average, from 3.0 days in February to 4.9 in August, and produced 1.4 million nights. Hotels took 71.1% of those stays and 64.7% of the nights. Rented apartments accounted for 17.5% of stays, staying with family or friends for 6.9%, and sleeping aboard a boat for 3.9%; boat stays reached nearly 6% between April and September and almost disappeared in the other six months. Hotel guests stayed 2.6 nights on average in 2025 and guests in other lodging 3.6.

Work brings a large part of this group. Business alone accounted for 20.6% of tourist visits in 2025 and business combined with leisure for another 3.9%, against 2.6% and 0.9% among day visitors. Colleagues, clients and prospects made up 9.3% of the groups that stayed overnight, and 28.4% of tourist respondents described themselves as business owners, traders or self-employed.

Overnight visitors also came from further away. France accounted for 26.4% of tourist visits in 2025, the rest of the European Union for 31.2%, and residents of countries outside the Union for 41.9%. Italy supplied 14.1% of tourist visits, the United States 9.9% and the United Kingdom 8.7%. More than half of tourist respondents, 52.9%, had been to Monaco before, against 30.6% of day visitors.

What visitors spend in Monaco

The survey put average spending at 92 euros per person per day across all visitors in 2025. Day visitors spent 76 euros a day and 85 euros over a whole visit, mostly on meals and drinks at 33 euros a day, shopping at 21 euros and leisure at 18 euros. Tourists spent 348 euros a day and 1,669 euros over a stay, of which lodging took 165 euros a day, or 330 euros a night. Spending per stay peaked in the second quarter of 2025 at 2,365 euros per tourist, the quarter that includes the Grand Prix.

Spending varied with where visitors lived. Tourists resident in the Near and Middle East spent 1,017 euros a day in 2025, those from Russia and the CIS 524 euros, North Americans 479 euros and residents of France 324 euros, against 237 euros for residents of the rest of the European Union.

Totalled over the year, visitors spent an estimated 1,353 million euros in Monaco in 2025, equal to 6.8% of the principality's turnover outside financial and insurance activities. Meals and drinks took 422 million euros, lodging 386 million, shopping 298 million and leisure 180 million. Tourists, at 7.5% of visits, accounted for 831 million of the total, or 61.4%, and day visitors for the remaining 38.6%. Lodging and food spending by visitors came to 809 million euros, which IMSEE puts at 70.9% of the turnover of the accommodation and food sector; commuters and residents supplied the rest.