NC Tourism Hit $37 Billion in 2025. The Mountains Haven't Even Peaked Yet.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  May 24, 2026

North Carolina visitors spent $37.2 billion in 2025, a new all-time record, and they did it while a significant chunk of the state's most popular destination was still putting itself back together after Hurricane Helene.

That detail matters. Western North Carolina took a direct hit from Helene in the fall of 2024. Asheville, Chimney Rock, Hot Springs, and dozens of smaller communities across the mountains spent months rebuilding roads, businesses, and trail systems. Lodging revenue in the region dropped sharply. Visitor traffic fell. And yet the state still posted its highest tourism spending total on record.

The numbers, released this week by Governor Josh Stein and the NC Department of Commerce, show the scale of what tourism means to this state. Visitors spent an average of $101 million per day in North Carolina in 2025. That total supports nearly 231,000 jobs and generates $9.8 billion in payroll. State and local governments collected $2.7 billion in tax revenue from that activity, which works out to roughly $605 in annual savings per North Carolina household.

That last number tends to get overlooked. Tourism pays taxes that residents don't have to, and in a state with no shortage of roads to fix and schools to fund, that is a meaningful contribution.

North Carolina ranks seventh in the country for domestic visitation, behind California, Florida, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Those are states with major urban centers and coastal resort economies. North Carolina draws visitors with something different: the Outer Banks in the east, Charlotte and the Piedmont in the middle, and the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains in the west.

The mountains carry more than their share of that brand. Six ski resorts in Western NC generate $244 million annually and bring more than 780,000 visitors to the region each winter, enough that the state has earned the informal title of "Winter Capital of the South." That's before summer hiking season, fall color tourism, and the steady draw of towns like Highlands, Brevard, Waynesville, and Franklin, which run near capacity from Memorial Day through October.

After Helene, the state launched a campaign called "Rediscover the Unforgettable" specifically to bring visitors back to the mountains. It worked, at least partially. Businesses across the region reported improved traffic in late winter and spring 2025, though the recovery has been uneven. Some towns bounced back faster than others. Short-term rentals in Macon, Jackson, and Haywood counties saw demand return as trails reopened and word spread that the mountains were accessible again.

The fact that the state still broke records statewide, with WNC underperforming for much of the year, is worth sitting with. What does the number look like when the mountains are fully back online?

For anyone thinking about buying property in Western NC, the tourism data is not a footnote. It is context. Vacation rental demand in the mountains tracks closely with visitor traffic, and the region's consistent draw, even through a difficult post-storm recovery year, points to consistent demand. People are not choosing Cashiers or Sylva or Murphy because it is convenient. They are going out of their way to get there.

That kind of loyalty holds. It also tends to support property values over time in ways that purely seasonal or transactional markets don't.

The $37.2 billion figure is a statewide number, but the mountains are a disproportionate part of what makes people want to come here in the first place. The ski slopes, the trails, the waterfalls, the small downtown scenes in places like Waynesville and Brevard, the slower pace. That is what tourism in WNC is selling, and based on the numbers, the market for it keeps growing.

Governor Stein said it plainly in this week's announcement: "Even in the face of challenges from Hurricane Helene recovery last year, we saw record visitor spending." That sentence is worth reading twice if you are paying attention to what is happening in this region.

Sources consulted: NC Governor's Office press release (May 7, 2026), NC Department of Commerce, NC Commerce September 2025 Economy Watch report.