Nicaragua Tourism by the Numbers: What the 2026 INTUR Data Actually Shows

Most "Nicaragua tourism is booming" articles online cite each other in a circle without ever linking back to an actual source. INTUR, Nicaragua's national tourism institute, publishes the real numbers directly, broken down by arrivals, transport method, region of origin, spending, and hotel capacity, going back several years. Here's what the current data actually says, year by year.

Visitor arrivals

	2022	2023	2024	2025
Total visitor arrivals	932,747	1,202,309	1,085,539	1,079,135
Overnight tourists	817,915	1,086,726	954,167	946,979
Same-day visitors	114,832	115,583	131,372	132,156

Arrivals hit their high point in 2023 and have eased back over the two years since, settling at just over a million visitors a year. Same-day visitors, mostly cross-border traffic from Costa Rica and Honduras, have held steady and even grown slightly, which points to a country that's easy to pop into for a day rather than one people are avoiding.

Where visitors are coming from

This is the more interesting shift. Origin mix, as a share of overnight tourists:

Region	2022	2023	2024	2025
Central America	30.0%	31.6%	44.8%	52.9%
North America	20.3%	25.1%	30.3%	30.8%
Europe	6.6%	9.1%	8.6%	7.9%
South America	6.8%	3.7%	2.1%	1.8%
Rest of world	36.3%	30.6%	14.2%	6.6%

Central America now accounts for more than half of Nicaragua's overnight tourists, up from 30 percent just three years ago. North America has climbed steadily too, from one in five visitors to nearly one in three. The combined effect: over 83 percent of Nicaragua's tourists in 2025 came from within the region or North America, a much more concentrated, repeatable visitor base than the scattered long-haul mix of a few years ago.

Spending and length of stay

	2022	2023	2024	2025
Average daily spend (US$)	$41.10	$43.30	$43.90	$45.70
Average stay (days)	11.4	10.6	9.7	9.6

Daily spending has risen every single year, up about 11 percent since 2022. Trips have gotten a bit shorter over the same period, which tracks with the shift toward regional visitors: a long-haul European traveler tends to book two or three weeks, while someone driving in from Costa Rica or flying in from Texas for a week spends more per day and moves on sooner. Shorter, higher-spending trips from closer, more frequent visitors is a different kind of tourism economy than fewer, longer visits from further away, not necessarily a worse one.

Hotel capacity

	2022	2023	2024	2025
Hotels and similar	1,000	1,044	1,076	1,125
Hotel rooms	12,785	13,298	13,678	14,229

This is the number that doesn't swing with any given year's arrival count: hotel and room capacity has grown every single year in the dataset, adding over 1,400 rooms and 125 properties since 2022. Someone is building for more visitors, not fewer, regardless of what a single year's arrival total does.

What this actually adds up to

Take it together and the picture isn't a simple up-or-down story. Raw arrival counts came off a 2023 peak, but the visitor base that's showing up now spends more per day, comes from closer and more repeatable markets, and is arriving into a country that keeps adding hotel rooms every year. That's a tourism sector settling into a more regional, higher-spend pattern rather than one running on hype from a single good year.

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Curious how this trajectory connects to the infrastructure driving it? The La Costanera coastal highway and the new Managua airport capacity are both part of the same build-out. And if you're weighing Nicaragua against the region's other options, Costa Rica vs. Nicaragua breaks down the real trade-offs.

Source: INTUR, Estadísticas de Turismo