Dorset & Weymouth Tourism Statistics (2026)

This page collects the key tourism statistics for Dorset and Weymouth in one place. Every figure below links to its original published source: official visitor-economy reports commissioned by Visit Dorset and Dorset Council, ONS datasets, VisitBritain's national tourism survey and named industry reports. Nothing is estimated or modelled by us; a handful of figures are simple sums or percentage changes of published numbers, and those are marked "computed" with the workings shown.

Journalists, bloggers, students and local publishers are welcome to use any statistic here. How to cite this page is at the bottom, with a contact for source PDFs and quotes.

Key statistics at a glance

Dorset's visitor economy: 22.8 million visits and £1.7 billion

Visits and spend

Dorset (the county) recorded 22,840,000 visits in 2024. Most of those were day trips: 20,042,000 in the year. The remaining 2,798,000 were staying trips - 2,447,000 from UK residents and 351,000 from overseas. Those staying visitors clocked up 11,829,000 visitor nights (8,583,000 UK, 3,246,000 overseas).

Total visitor-related spend reached £1,726,540,000 in 2024, of which day trips contributed £955,808,000.

Tourism jobs

Tourism supported 29,977 actual jobs in Dorset in 2024 (22,693 full-time equivalents). That is 8% of all employment in the county.

Seasonality: the July and August problem

Dorset's new Destination Management Plan (2026-2035) reports that 36% of domestic overnight visits are concentrated into July and August. The same plan opens with headline figures of more than 22 million visitors, £1.66 billion in direct spend and around 30,000 jobs, and sets out a strategy to spread demand across the year.

Sources: The South West Research Company, The Economic Impact of Dorset's Visitor Economy 2024 (Visit Dorset / Dorset Council, Oct 2025); Dorset LVEP Destination Management Plan 2026-2035, reported by Yahoo News UK.

Weymouth tourism statistics

Visitor numbers and spend

Weymouth's 2024 figures, from the town-level tourism summary produced by The South West Research Company for Visit Dorset:

Source: TSWRC / Visit Dorset, Weymouth Tourism Summary 2024.

Where the money goes

Accommodation is the largest staying-visitor spend category in Weymouth, worth £28,753,000 in 2024. The rest of staying and day-visit spend flows into food and drink, shopping, attractions and travel across the town.

Weymouth Beach awards

Weymouth Beach was named No.1 beach in the UK and 19th in Europe in TripAdvisor's Travellers' Choice Best of the Best Beaches awards (2024). Weymouth Central Beach retained the Keep Britain Tidy Seaside Award in 2025 - Blue Flag status was not awarded that year after the bathing water rating moved from Excellent to Good in 2024 testing - and holds the Seaside Award again for summer 2026.

Sources: TripAdvisor, reported by Waterside Holiday Group; Weymouth Town Council / Keep Britain Tidy; Love Weymouth.

The UK staycation in numbers

Fewer trips, bigger spend

GB residents took 106 million domestic overnight trips in 2024, down 10% on 2023. Spend on those trips went the other way: £32.9 billion, up 5%. Bednights fell 10% to 308 million. The average domestic overnight trip cost £312 per person, up 17% year on year, and the average night cost £107, up from £85 in 2022. On top of overnight trips, GB residents took 1.03 billion domestic day visits, taking total domestic tourism spend to £87.8 billion.

Source: VisitEngland / VisitScotland / Visit Wales, The GB Tourist 2024 report.

How Brits book now

The Sykes Holiday Cottages Staycation Index 2025 found 63% of Brits planning a UK break, with 34% making it their main holiday of the year. Average spend on a UK break rose to £1,292, up from £1,070 in 2024. Short breaks of 6 days or less now make up 48% of bookings, up from 41% in 2023, and the average booking lead time has shortened to 105 days, down from 114 in 2024.

Source: Sykes Holiday Cottages, Staycation Index 2025.

The holiday-let market in Dorset

ONS guest-night data

The ONS publishes quarterly guest-night figures for short-term lets booked through Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia. For the Dorset Council area, calendar 2024 totalled 1,066,160 guest nights (computed from the ONS quarterly dataset: Q1 132,460 + Q2 298,610 + Q3 453,210 + Q4 181,880).

The peak quarter, July to September 2024, delivered 453,210 guest nights across 39,650 stays - an average of 3.5 guest nights per stay. Nationally, the UK recorded 93,823,780 guest nights in short-term lets between July 2024 and June 2025, up 10.2% year on year (England up 10.8%).

Sources: ONS, Short-term lets through online collaborative economy platforms dataset (Q2 2025 edition) and bulletin, July 2024 to June 2025.

What holiday lets earn

Dorset holiday-let owners grossed an average of £27,000 a year, the third-highest of any UK region, against a UK average of £24,500 (Sykes Holiday Letting Outlook Report 2024, based on 2023 data). The 2026 edition of the same report puts the UK average at £25,600 for 2025, up from £24,700 in 2024, with gross incomes ranging from £16,800 for a 1-bed property to £48,200 for a 5-bed.

Sources: Sykes Holiday Letting Outlook Report 2024, reported by The Negotiator; Sykes Holiday Letting Outlook Report 2026, reported by Landlord Knowledge.

Second homes and house prices in Weymouth and Dorset

House prices

The average house price in the Dorset Council area was £326,000 in May 2026 (provisional), up 1.4% year on year and well above the UK average of £271,000. In Weymouth itself, the average sold price over the 12 months to April 2026 was £288,341, down 5% on the previous year and below the 2023 peak of £307,365. By property type: detached £455,062, terraced £251,207, flats £183,887.

Sources: ONS / HM Land Registry, Housing prices in Dorset; Rightmove sold-price data for Weymouth (HM Land Registry).

The second-home squeeze

Dorset Council counted 5,722 second homes in its area in November 2022, with 1,032 in Swanage alone. From 1 April 2025 the council applies a 100% council tax premium on second homes - a doubled bill - expected to raise an estimated £10 million a year in additional revenue.

Source: Dorset Council data, reported by Swanage.News.

Jurassic Coast facts and figures

The Jurassic Coast runs 95 miles from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland in Dorset and was England's first natural UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated in December 2001. Its cliffs record 185 million years of Earth history. The Lulworth area - Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door - alone draws around 750,000 visitors a year.

Weymouth sits at the centre of the World Heritage Site: our Jurassic Coast guide covers the key stops, walks and fossil beaches.

Source: Royal Geographical Society - Jurassic Coast and Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door.

Methodology and sources

Every statistic on this page was verified against the named source below in August 2026. Figures marked "computed" are sums or percentage changes of published numbers from the same dataset, with the workings shown next to the figure. Provisional figures (such as the latest ONS house price data) are labelled as provisional. Where a report is only available via press coverage, the reporting outlet is named and linked.

This page is refreshed as each source publishes new data: the Visit Dorset economic impact reports each autumn, The GB Tourist each May, ONS short-term let data quarterly and beach awards each spring.

How to cite this page