Medical Tourism Statistics for 2026: Global and Country-by-Country Data

Global Medical Tourism Statistics
The most complete public record of national medical tourism data — organised by region and country, newest year first, with the source and counting method attached to every figure.

Published: 2 January 2019  |  Last updated: 14 September 2026  |  Data period: 2015–2025 full years, 2026 part-year where available  |  Compiled by: Medical Tourism Watch Editorial Team  |  Next review: February 2027

Global

Global market size — the estimates do not agree

Eight commercial research houses published a 2025 or 2026 valuation of the global medical tourism market. They disagree by a factor of more than nine. This is the single most important fact on this page, and it is routinely hidden when publications quote one number without the others.

Tables scroll sideways →

Estimate All modelled, none measured. Publisher definitions differ on whether wellness, dental, cross-border insurance and companion spend are included.

Global patient volume

1. Over 14 million people travel abroad for medical services annually, per the Medical Tourism Association — the figure carried in most academic literature and cited by Thailand’s own government portal. Estimate
2. More than 21 million annually, per Patients Beyond Borders (2022–23 basis), implying a USD 74–92 bn market. The higher of the two competing estimates, on a broader definition. Estimate
3. No intergovernmental body — not the WHO, not UN Tourism, not the OECD — publishes an authoritative global count. Both figures above are private estimates recycled for several years without revision.

Structural markers, 2025

1. Turkey is the largest single country market by revenue, at approximately 13.5% of global medical tourism revenue in 2025 (Grand View Research). Estimate
2. Europe held the largest regional revenue share at 36.5% in 2025 (Fortune Business Insights) — a result that contradicts the widely repeated claim that Asia-Pacific holds around 62% of the market. The two rest on different definitions of where revenue is booked. Disputed
3. Private providers accounted for 54.8% of global market revenue in 2025 (Grand View Research). Estimate
4. Cosmetic procedures were the largest treatment segment by revenue at 24.2% in 2025 (Grand View Research). Estimate
5. India extended e-medical visa access to nationals of 171 countries in August 2025 — one of the clearest examples of policy formalisation now driving measured patient flows. Official

Asia-Pacific

South Korea

Counts: foreign patients registered at Korean medical institutions, including outpatient dermatology visits. Not restricted to surgical inpatients. Source: Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI) / Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Source markets, 2025: China 618,000 (30.8%), Japan 600,000 (29.8%), Taiwan 185,000 (9.2%), United States 173,000 (8.6%), Thailand (2.9%). Patients came from 201 countries and territories.

• Chinese and Taiwanese arrivals more than doubled between 2024 and 2025. US arrivals rose 70.4%, Canadian arrivals 59.1%.
• Specialty mix, 2025: dermatology 62.9%, plastic surgery 11.2%. Dermatology grew fivefold in two years — 239,060 patients in 2023, 705,044 in 2024, 1,312,700 in 2025. Plastic surgery doubled from 114,074 to 233,100 over the same period, but its share fell from 16.8% to 11.2%.
• Geographic concentration: 87.2% of foreign patients were treated in Seoul; 87.7% at clinic-level rather than hospital-level institutions. Busan grew 151.5% in 2025 and is the fastest-emerging second city.
• Cumulative total: approximately 7.06 million foreign patients since the series began in 2009.
• Wider economic effect of 2025 inbound patients estimated at KRW 22.8 trillion by the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.
• Interpretation caution: Korea’s count is registration-based and includes non-surgical aesthetic outpatients and some resident foreigners. Not directly comparable to Turkey’s or India’s border counts. The 2025 surge tracks late-2024 visa exemptions as much as clinical demand.

Malaysia

Counts: all foreign-passport patients treated at MHTC-registered facilities. By design this includes expatriates, migrant workers and business travellers whose primary purpose of stay was not treatment. Source: Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC), Ministry of Health.

• 2025 was the strongest year since MHTC was established and exceeded the government’s own RM 3 bn revenue target.
• Source markets: Asia-Pacific accounted for close to 90% of medical tourism revenue in 2024. Indonesia alone supplies an estimated 70–80% of international patients.
• Regional concentration, 2024: revenue intensity highest in the central region (41.7%) and northern region (40.1%) — Klang Valley and Penang.
• Target: RM 12 bn in annual industry revenue by 2030. Malaysia has designated 2026 “Malaysia Year of Medical Tourism” under the tagline Healing Meets Hospitality.
• Flagship Medical Tourism Hospital programme designates Institut Jantung Negara, Island Hospital Penang, Mahkota Medical Centre and Subang Jaya Medical Centre.
• Interpretation caution: Malaysia’s headline count is the most inclusive of any major destination. Revenue per traveller works out at roughly RM 1,815 (~USD 430) in 2025 — low for genuine medical travel, confirming that a large share of the count is low-acuity or incidental care.

Thailand

Counts: the TAT figure counts high-spending international visitors whose stated purpose includes medical treatment. Larger numbers in circulation count all foreign patient visits at private hospitals, including expatriates and repeat outpatient attendances.

• Spend per trip, 2025: approximately THB 107,662 per medical traveller — 102.67% higher than the average international visitor.
• Infrastructure: 61 hospitals and clinics hold Joint Commission International accreditation, with more than 500 medical facilities offering services nationwide. Treatment costs run 30–70% below Western markets. Official
• Source markets: Gulf states (Qatar, Oman, Kuwait), Cambodia and Bangladesh dominate the high-value segment. BDMS reported 49% revenue growth from Qatari patients in 2024 and 11% overall international patient revenue growth.
• Average length of stay for health tourists rose to 12.5 days in 2024 as treatment increasingly bundles with wellness and recuperation.
• Policy: the Ministry of Public Health’s steering committee approved a Strategy for Developing Thailand as a Medical Hub (2025–2034) in 2024, built on five pillars — Wellness Hub, Medical Service Hub, Academic Hub, Product Hub and Health Convention Hub. TAT launched “Amazing Thailand Health and Beauty” in March 2025 and targets THB 125 bn in 2026.
• Gender-affirming care now sits on Thailand’s official list of priority international-patient service lines alongside IVF, dental and aesthetic medicine — stated government strategy rather than clinic marketing. No patient count is published for it.
• Market valuations, 2025: USD 687.4 m (IMARC) · USD 2.57 bn (Grand View, 2023 basis) · USD 4.5 bn (Ken Research) · USD 8.6 bn (Future Market Insights). Estimate
• Thailand placed first in the 2020–21 Medical Tourism Index with a score of 79.53.

India

Counts: foreign tourist arrivals declaring “medical” as purpose of visit at immigration. A strict border count — it excludes anyone arriving on a tourist or business visa who then seeks treatment. Source: Bureau of Immigration, via Ministry of Tourism.

Official Source: Bureau of Immigration.

• India has not recovered its 2019 peak. The 2025 figure of 507,244 is 27% below 2019 and 21% below 2024 — a two-year decline that runs against the industry narrative of Indian medical tourism growth.
• Source markets, 2025: Bangladesh 325,127 · Iraq 30,989 · Uzbekistan 13,699 · Somalia 11,506 · Turkmenistan 10,231 · Oman 9,738 · Kenya 9,357.
• Source markets, 2024: Bangladesh 482,336 · Iraq 32,008 · Somalia 11,717 · Oman 10,431 · Uzbekistan 8,921.
• Bangladesh dependence is the story. Bangladesh alone accounted for 64% of India’s medical arrivals in 2025 and 75% in 2024. The 157,000-arrival fall in Bangladeshi patients between 2024 and 2025 explains essentially the whole national decline. This is a bilateral-relations exposure, not a competitiveness problem.
• Revenue is not measured. The Ministry of Tourism has confirmed it does not maintain revenue data attributable to medical tourism, and has not conducted a study of the sector’s status or growth potential. All Indian revenue figures in circulation are private estimates.
• Market estimates: approximately USD 8.7 bn in 2025, projected to USD 16.2 bn by 2030. Other figures in circulation include USD 9 bn on 2022 and 2023 basis years. Estimate
• Widely repeated but unsupported: the claims that India receives 2 million or 2.5 million medical tourists annually, and that it is the world’s number-one destination. Neither is consistent with Bureau of Immigration data. Disputed
• Policy: e-medical visa facilities extended to nationals of 171 countries as of August 2025.

China — Hainan and the Boao Lecheng pilot zone

Counts: the Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone reports patient travel visits, the overwhelming majority of which are domestic Chinese travellers. A separate, far smaller figure counts genuinely international arrivals. Source: Boao Lecheng Pilot Zone Administration / Hainan provincial government, via Xinhua and China Daily.

• Lecheng is a regulatory sandbox, not a conventional destination. It is the only area in China with special rules permitting use of medicines and devices approved overseas but not yet registered on the mainland. Patients travel there for early access, not for price.
• Special-access catalogue: 485 products as of July 2025, rising to 525 by December 2025 and 570 by mid-2026, with 21 fast-tracked to full mainland approval via real-world evidence studies. Cumulative beneficiaries reported at 130,000, then 200,000, then nearly 280,000 depending on release date and counting basis.
• Overseas patient profile, 2025: 14 countries and regions including Russia, Canada and Middle East markets. International visitors spent an average of over CNY 12,000 (~USD 1,640) per person in 2024.
• Infrastructure: over 40 medical institutions in the zone, roughly 60 foreign-funded enterprises, four overseas medical institutions, and partnerships with more than 180 pharmaceutical and device companies across 20 countries. A one-stop international patient services centre launched in 2026 covering visas, transfers, recovery care and cultural tourism.
• Caution on the series: Hainan’s own publications shift between province-wide framing (410,000+ medical tourists in Hainan in 2024) and zone-specific framing (413,700 at Lecheng in 2024). Even official narratives are not internally consistent.
• Outbound China is the larger story and is not measured at all. Chinese patients were the single largest source market for South Korea in 2025 at 618,000, and Chinese arrivals to Thailand and Malaysia are growing. No Chinese agency publishes an outbound medical-travel count.
• Further detail: Hainan Boao Lecheng explained — China’s medical special zone

Singapore

• The 2011 and 2008 figures differ by 18x because the definitions differ. This single country demonstrates the whole problem with medical tourism statistics better than any other.
• Source markets: Indonesia is historically dominant at roughly 60% of Singapore’s international patient base, followed by Malaysia and China.
• Positioning: Singapore competes on revenue per patient, not volume — consistently the highest in Asia. Complex oncology, cardiology and transplant work rather than elective aesthetics.
• Singapore placed second on the 2020–21 Medical Tourism Index, behind Canada.

Uzbekistan

Counts: foreign citizens declaring treatment as purpose of arrival. Source: National Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan.

• Source markets, 2025: Tajikistan 59,145 (69%) · Kyrgyzstan 15,631 · Kazakhstan 8,224 · Russia 1,899 · Afghanistan 914 · Turkmenistan 224 · Turkey 47 · United States 16 · China 15 · Azerbaijan 11.
• This is regional, not global, medical travel. Over 96% of inbound patients come from three neighbouring Central Asian states. Uzbekistan is simultaneously a significant outbound market — 13,699 Uzbek nationals travelled to India for treatment in 2025.
• A circulating error: the figure “Uzbekistan — 71,000 (2026)” appears in at least one widely-cited industry list. The official 2025 full-year figure is 86,199 and the H1 2026 figure is 35,401. Disputed

Rest of Asia-Pacific — legacy data only

No government or industry body in the following markets has published an inbound medical-travel count since 2019. These figures circulate widely, originate from a single undocumented compilation, and indicate relative scale only.

Middle East & North Africa

Turkey

Counts: departing visitors who state health as the purpose of visit, captured in the national exit survey. Revenue is the health-purpose share of tourism receipts. Source: Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK). This is the longest continuous official series of any destination country and the single most usable dataset in the industry.

Official Source: TUIK. Revenue-per-patient column calculated by Medical Tourism Watch. The 2020–21 per-patient figures are distorted by pandemic composition — a small number of high-acuity travellers.

2026 year to date

• Turkey has now recorded two consecutive years of falling patient volume — 1.54 m (2023) → 1.51 m (2024) → 1.40 m (2025), a cumulative 9.1% decline from the 2023 peak — while revenue has held flat at just over USD 3 bn. Fewer patients, higher fees.
• Infrastructure: over 1,500 health institutions across more than 40 cities offer medical tourism services, with several hundred holding international accreditation. Patients arrive from roughly 180 countries.
• Treatment mix: aesthetic and plastic surgery, hair transplantation, dental treatment and ophthalmology lead demand. Earlier Yeditepe Health Care analysis for 2023 apportioned turnover as roughly 42% orthopedics, cardiology, cardiac surgery and neurosurgery; 40% dental; 15% plastic surgery.
• Competing official series: USHAS publishes different figures on a different methodology — 642,444 patients and USD 1.048 bn for 2021, and 1,258,382 patients and USD 2.119 bn for 2022. The TUIK series above is the one used for national accounts.
• Regulatory: a revised International Health Tourism and Tourist Health Regulation was published in the Official Gazette in 2026.
• A measurement caveat worth naming: Turkey’s figure is captured at exit by stated purpose. Patients who transit Istanbul and are brokered onward to clinics in North Cyprus or Georgia may register in Turkish arrival data without receiving treatment in Turkey. No agency quantifies this, and Medical Tourism Watch offers it as a known unknown rather than an adjustment.
• Widely repeated but wrong: “Turkey welcomed 1 million medical tourists in 2023, up 30% from 2022” and “Turkey treated approximately 700,000 international patients in 2019”. TUIK records 1,538,643 for 2023 and 756,926 for 2019. Disputed

North Cyprus

Counts: nothing. No agency publishes an inbound medical-travel series for North Cyprus. Included here because its omission distorts the regional picture, not because data exists.

1. No official or industry headcount exists. As an unrecognised jurisdiction, North Cyprus is absent from every international statistical framework, including the ones that produce the Turkey, Greece and Cyprus figures elsewhere on this page. Disputed
2. It is nonetheless a functioning destination in two specific segments: hair transplantation, competing directly with Istanbul on price, and assisted reproduction.
3. The fertility draw is regulatory, not clinical. Local law permits procedures that many patients’ home countries restrict or prohibit outright — including anonymous egg donation and preimplantation genetic testing for family balancing. Patients travelling for these reasons are, by definition, not captured in the destination statistics of the countries they leave.
4. Why it matters for Turkey’s numbers: some patients route through Turkish airports en route to North Cyprus clinics. See the transit caveat in the Turkey entry above.
5. Open item: Medical Tourism Watch is seeking any published series — hospital association, chamber of commerce or ministry — and will add one if it surfaces.

United Arab Emirates

Counts: the Dubai Health Authority counts international health tourists treated at DHA-licensed facilities in the emirate of Dubai only. There is no consolidated federal UAE series.

Dubai

Official Source: Dubai Health Authority. 2023 remains the most recent published year.

9. Patient profile, 2023: 58% women, 42% men. Asia 33–39%, Arab and GCC states 21–28%, Europe and CIS 22–23%.
10. Specialty mix, 2023: dermatology 31%, dentistry 24%, gynaecology 18%.
11. Abu Dhabi receives an estimated 15,000+ medical tourists annually and is positioned differently — organ transplant, oncology and robotic surgery rather than elective work. Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi has reported over one million patient encounters with a 35% rise in international visitors.
12. Market estimates: UAE medical tourism valued at USD 1,085.58 m in 2024, forecast to USD 2.3 bn by 2033 at 8.7% CAGR. A separate estimate puts the 2023 sector at USD 3.5 bn — a threefold divergence. Estimate
13. Policy: the Dubai Health Experience platform handles medical visas and concierge coordination. DHA and the Department of Economy and Tourism signed an MoU aligning health tourism with the D33 economic agenda. Dubai ranked 6th of 46 destinations on the 2020–21 Medical Tourism Index.

Jordan

Counts: foreign patients treated at private hospitals, clinics and specialised medical centres. Source: Private Hospitals Association (PHA).

• Source markets: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Libya supply the largest share.
• Care setting: only about a quarter of foreign patients are treated in hospitals; the remainder attend clinics and specialised medical centres. This matters when comparing Jordan’s numbers to hospital-only counts elsewhere.
• Economic footprint: private hospital sector investment of approximately USD 4 bn, supporting around 40,000 direct healthcare jobs and a further 60,000 in hotels, airlines, transport, restaurants, insurance and logistics.
• Treatment mix: bariatric and cosmetic surgery, orthopedics, neurosurgery, cardiology, obstetrics and gynaecology including IVF, oncology, spine surgery, urology, ophthalmology and organ transplant.
• Legacy figure to retire: “Jordan — 250,000 patients (2017)” circulates widely. PHA’s own series shows 2017-era volumes that were not surpassed until 2025.
• Natural therapeutic assets — the Dead Sea and Ma’in Hot Springs — are a differentiator Jordan markets alongside clinical care.

Iran

Counts: unclear. Iran has produced at least three inbound figures from three different official bodies on three different bases, and has never published a continuous series.

• The 1.2 million figure is a category claim, not a patient count. “Health tourists” as used in Iranian ministerial statements appears to include spa, wellness and cross-border visitors receiving incidental care. Applying it as an inbound medical-patient number would place Iran above Turkey — an outcome no independent evidence supports.
• Source markets: Iraq and Afghanistan dominate, with smaller flows from Pakistan, Oman, Bahrain, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. Much of this is short-distance, low-cost travel rather than premium elective work.
• Market estimates: USD 578 m in 2024, projected to USD 3.7 bn by 2033 at 20.5% CAGR. Estimate
• Why Iran is hard to measure: sanctions restrict the banking and insurance channels through which other countries’ medical travel becomes visible in trade statistics. Iran’s real inbound volume is plausibly large and is unlikely to be captured accurately by any published figure, high or low.

Saudi Arabia

• King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre reported a 47% rise in international patients in 2024 — the clearest facility-level evidence of Saudi inbound growth, well above the low-single-digit annual growth typical of major academic medical centres.
• Treat the “1.2 million medical visitors in 2024” claim with caution. It circulates without a named Saudi source and could not be traced to the Ministry of Tourism, the Saudi Health Council or any ministry release. Disputed
• Strategic context: Vision 2030 raised the national target to 150 million annual visitors by 2030 after the original 100 million target was met six years early in 2023. Over 111 organisations held Joint Commission International accreditation by 2023.
• Directional shift: Saudi Arabia is historically a major outbound market. The Health Sector Transformation Programme aims to retain domestic patients first and attract regional inbound patients second.

Egypt

Counts: patients treated at facilities of the General Authority for Healthcare (GAH), a state provider. This is not a national figure and excludes Egypt’s private hospital sector entirely. Source: GAH / Egypt Healthcare Authority.

Official 2024–25 figures announced 28 March 2026 by Ahmed El-Sobky, Chairman of the General Authority for Healthcare, and carried by Egypt’s State Information Service.

• Positioning: GAH markets internationally under the brand “In Egypt, We Care”, with treatment packages, an integrated digital patient-journey system and planned partnerships with private insurers and brokers.
• What is still missing: Egypt publishes no national inbound medical-travel count covering private hospitals, which handle the large majority of foreign patients. The GAH series is a genuine official data point and a small slice of the real picture.

Rest of Middle East & North Africa

Legacy figures from a single undocumented compilation. No newer official series exists for any of these markets.

Europe

Where the European datasets conflict

These countries appear in more than one widely-cited dataset. The gaps are too large to reconcile as growth.

The one real European dataset: the EU Cross-Border Healthcare Directive

Directive 2011/24/EU obliges member states to report cross-border care through National Contact Points, and the European Commission publishes the results annually. It is the only official, recurring, multi-country medical travel dataset in Europe.

Official Source: European Commission National Contact Point reporting, for member states with complete three-year data.

European inbound patients — 2017–2018 compilation

Americas

Mexico

Counts: Mexico publishes no official inbound medical-tourist series. All national figures are estimates, and the most-quoted range explicitly includes returning Mexican-American diaspora travelling for treatment — a population most other countries would not count as medical tourists.

• The range 1.4–3.0 million is a single estimate, not a series. It has been restated by Sectur, quoted by ministers and republished continuously since 2019 without revision. Its 2.1x internal width is a warning, not a rounding convention.
• Leading destinations: Tijuana, Cancún, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Piedras Negras, Los Algodones, plus Baja California Norte, Tamaulipas, Quintana Roo and the Riviera Maya.
• Treatment mix: dental, bariatric surgery, cosmetic surgery, ophthalmology, orthopedics and stem cell therapy. Mexico is generally regarded as the world’s largest dental tourism destination by volume.
• Cost differential: surgical treatment reported at up to 86% below United States prices. A Deloitte 2019 analysis valued the sector at USD 8 bn with a USD 13.8 bn projection for 2030.
• Source market: approximately 80% of Mexico’s health-motivated visitors come from the United States.
• Mexico ranked third on the 2020–21 Medical Tourism Index with a score of 70.05.

Rest of the Americas

• Colombia’s data is unresolved by a factor of nine. The 2018 compilation records 55,000 international patients; a 2023-basis aggregator claims 500,000, mainly for bariatric surgery. ProColombia and Migración Colombia publish total international arrivals — over 20 million visitors in 2025 — but do not break out a medical-purpose count. Medical Tourism Watch could not verify either figure and treats Colombia as a data gap. Disputed
• Brazil is also unresolved. Figures of 450,000 international patients annually and a USD 3.7 bn market for 2025 are in circulation, against the 200,000–250,000 above. A separate report cites 264,000 foreigners visiting Brazilian hospital regions between January and August 2025. None traces to Embratur or IBGE. Disputed
• United States outbound medical tourism spend is estimated to grow from USD 4.3 bn (2021) to USD 9.5 bn (2027). US inbound is separately reported at around 450,000 annually — less than half the 2018 figure above, with no reconciliation offered by either source. Estimate
• Latin America’s medical tourism market was reported to have expanded 12% in 2023. Estimate
• The United States ranked 9th on the 2020–21 Medical Tourism Index with a score of 62.08 — held down by cost and visa complexity despite clinical quality. Canada ranked first.

Sub-Saharan Africa

South Africa

9. The most likely explanation is that “purpose of visit” at a South African border post badly undercounts regional patients who enter by road from SADC countries and declare a holiday or family visit. The true number is probably well above 3,000 and far below 500,000. Nobody measures it.
10. What this means for the region: South Africa is the largest healthcare economy in sub-Saharan Africa and the destination for most of the continent’s cross-border patients. It is also, on this evidence, the least reliably counted major destination in the world.
11. Treatment mix reported as cosmetic surgery, fertility services and cardiology, concentrated in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

Rest of Sub-Saharan Africa

• Africa is structurally an outbound region. Nigeria’s figure is outbound patients leaving for India, South Africa or Europe — the only entry on this page measured in that direction. Somalia and Kenya together sent nearly 21,000 patients to India in 2025 alone, which is larger than most of the inbound figures in this table.
• Nigerian outbound spending is a live data-quality story. Central Bank of Nigeria figures show recorded medical-travel foreign exchange collapsing to negligible levels in 2025, while other reporting puts Nigerian spending on medical travel in the hundreds of millions of dollars over the same period. The most plausible reading is that patients are bypassing tracked FX channels, not that the travel stopped. Medical Tourism Watch is verifying both series before publishing figures.
• Nairobi functions as the East African regional hub; Accra and Kumasi anchor Ghana’s private sector growth.

Treatments, costs and patient profile

Indicative cost comparisons

Estimate Aggregator-sourced, not price-checked against provider tariffs by Medical Tourism Watch. Prices exclude flights, accommodation, companions and complication risk. Price checked: 14 September 2026  |  Next price check: December 2026

The companion problem

Patient profile

1. Approximately 60% of medical tourists originate in the United States, primarily motivated by cost. Estimate
2. 25% of patients are aged 50–65, concentrated in orthopedics. Estimate
3. Women are approximately 70% of cosmetic medical tourists globally; 58% of Dubai’s international health tourists in 2023 were women. Estimate Official
4. Roughly 40% of patients travel with companions, averaging two to three people. Estimate
5. An estimated 75% research online before travelling and 30% are repeat visitors for follow-up. Estimate
6. Approximately 45% of US medical travellers are uninsured or underinsured. Estimate

Medical Tourism Index

The Medical Tourism Index (MTI), developed by the International Healthcare Research Center, scores destinations 0–100 across 41 indicators in five categories: medical tourism industry, country environment, medical tourism costs, medical tourism facilities and medical tourism potential. The most recent published edition covers 2020–21 and evaluated 46 countries.

Legacy The 2020–21 edition predates the entire post-pandemic recovery and every figure in the Asia-Pacific section above. Any ranking drawn from it should carry its vintage.

Methodology, definitions and limitations

What each country actually counts

Editorial standards applied to this page

1. Primary sources first. Where a national statistics office, health ministry or hospital association publishes a figure, that figure is used and the intermediary is not cited.
2. Year labels are checked against the originating release, not against the article quoting it. Several figures in wide circulation carry the wrong year.
3. Estimates are labelled as estimates. Market-research valuations are modelled outputs and never appear alongside headcounts without a tag distinguishing them.
4. Conflicting figures are shown, not resolved. Where two credible-looking sources disagree by more than 50%, both appear and the conflict is named.
5. Confidence labels from third-party aggregators are not inherited. A statistic marked “verified” elsewhere is not treated as verified here unless Medical Tourism Watch traced it to a primary source.
6. Agency attributions are checked. Several figures circulating in this industry carry the name of a real statistical agency that has not published them. Where an attribution could not be confirmed, the figure is flagged rather than reproduced.

Known limitations

1. No country here uses an internationally standardised definition of a medical tourist. Cross-country ranking is not supportable from this data.
2. Europe, Africa and Latin America have almost no current official series. Their representation is proportionally far weaker than their likely real share of global activity.
3. Revenue figures mix direct clinical spend, total traveller spend and modelled market size. These are compared only within a country, never across countries.
4. Currency conversions use approximate contemporaneous rates and are indicative.
5. Several pre-2020 country figures derive from a single compilation with no published methodology. They are retained for completeness and tagged accordingly.
6. Transit and re-export flows — patients entering one country and treated in another — are counted nowhere and quantified by no one.

Update schedule and open items

1. Statistics reviewed quarterly. Next scheduled review: December 2026. Prices reviewed every 90 days.
2. Under development: a balance-of-payments view using OECD Health Accounts and IMF “health-related travel” exports and imports. This is currency-verified, standardised across countries and independent of clinic marketing — the only route Medical Tourism Watch has found to genuine cross-country comparability, and the likeliest source of real numbers for Europe and Latin America.
3. Corrections: If you hold primary-source data that contradicts anything here, contact us — including the originating agency and release date lets us verify quickly.

Sources

1. Turkey: Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK); Services Exporters’ Association (HIB); USHAS
2. South Korea: Korea Health Industry Development Institute; Ministry of Health and Welfare; Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade
3. India: Bureau of Immigration; Ministry of Tourism; Press Information Bureau
4. Malaysia: Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council; Ministry of Health Malaysia
5. Thailand: Ministry of Tourism and Sports; Tourism Authority of Thailand; Ministry of Public Health
6. China: Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone Administration; Hainan provincial government; Xinhua; China Daily
7. UAE: Dubai Health Authority; Department of Health – Abu Dhabi
8. Jordan: Private Hospitals Association
9. Uzbekistan: National Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan
10. Egypt: General Authority for Healthcare; Egypt State Information Service
11. Saudi Arabia: Ministry of Tourism; King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre
12. Singapore: Singapore Tourism Board; Ministry of Health
13. South Africa: Statistics South Africa, International Tourism series
14. Europe: European Commission, National Contact Point reporting under Directive 2011/24/EU
15. Mexico: Secretaría de Turismo; Baja California state data via UC San Diego
16. Market sizing: Grand View Research; Fortune Business Insights; Precedence Research; Towards Healthcare; Market Data Forecast; Polaris Market Research; Global Market Insights; Future Market Insights; IMARC; Credence Research; Ken Research
17. Estimates and indices: Patients Beyond Borders; Medical Tourism Association; International Healthcare Research Center; Deloitte; Frost & Sullivan

This page is maintained by Medical Tourism Watch, an independent trade-intelligence publication covering global medical travel. It is not sponsored, and no provider, destination or agency has paid for inclusion or placement.