The US Is Losing Overseas Visitors, Not Canadians
Overseas arrivals to the US fell 7.0% in July while Canadian visits rose 7.6% and Mexican visits 8.0%. Total arrivals were flat at 6.25 million.
The United States welcomed 6,248,242 international visitors in July, according to the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). That is down 0.1% on July 2025: almost exactly flat.
The flat total hides two very different stories. Visitors from the US’s two land neighbours are coming back. Visitors from everywhere else are not.
The split
| Source | July 2026 arrivals | vs July 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Mexico | 1,696,679 | +8.0% |
| Canada | 1,465,644 | +7.6% |
| Overseas (all other markets) | — | −7.0% |
| Total | 6,248,242 | −0.1% |
Mexico was the largest source market and Canada the second. The United Kingdom ranked third, with 386,960 arrivals, followed by India (182,146) and Japan (166,902).
Canadians are drifting back
Canada’s rise is the clearest turn in the data. It matches what Statistics Canada has been reporting from the other side of the border: Canadian-resident return trips from the US have been rising again, after the steep falls of 2025. We covered the latest StatCan release here.
That doesn’t mean Canadian travel to the US is back to where it was. It means the year-on-year comparison is now against a weak base, and July cleared it comfortably.
Overseas is the problem
A 7.0% fall in overseas visitors matters because these are long-haul trips, typically longer stays than a hop across a land border. NTTO doesn’t give the overseas total on this page, only the rate of decline.
Read next · TrendsGlobal Travel Is Still Growing. Barely.2 min →The overseas weakness lines up with the global picture. UN Tourism’s first-half report shows long-haul travel under pressure from higher costs, Middle East air disruption and travellers favouring trips closer to home.
Americans keep going abroad
Outbound, the picture is steadier. US citizens made 11,776,323 international departures in July, up 2.3%. Mexico took 3,707,866 of them, or 31.5%. Nearly twice as many Americans left the country in July as international visitors arrived.
Sources
Andrew Lovesey is Editor-in-Chief of Not An Atlas, and always on the hunt for the next big thing: where to go, where to stay and what's worth the photo. His first trip was to the family cottage in Prince Edward Island, all rolling hills, red sand cliffs and jellyfish drifting in the North Atlantic. He'll sit anywhere but the middle seat (no armrest wars), never flies without the adapter that lets his AirPods play the in-flight movie, and has eaten at a McDonald's in every country he's visited. Iceland gets a pass because it doesn't have one. He once learned to bead earrings from Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's first female premier, on a ship in the Northwest Passage, and will tell anyone who'll listen that Cincinnati is wildly underrated. Friends say charming, driven and loyal. His mum says persuasive. Next stop: Greece.
