I spend most of my days building a museum app, and I have a confession: I don't really know how people go to museums.
I know how I go. Mostly alone, usually on a weekday, with an embarrassing number of browser tabs open beforehand. But I'm one person with strong opinions, and that's a bad basis for building anything.
So I went looking for data. It turns out there's plenty on how many people visit museums and very little on how they do it: how they decide to go, how they plan, who they bring, and what spoils the day. This post covers what I found, and then asks you to help fill in the rest with a three-minute survey.
Museums Are Busy Again. Mostly.
The pandemic emptied museums almost overnight. According to The Art Newspaper's annual survey, the world's 100 most visited art museums drew 54 million visits in 2020. In 2025 they drew more than 200 million. That's close to the 230 million recorded in 2019, but still a little short. The Louvre alone welcomed more than 9 million people.
The recovery is uneven, though. In the American Alliance of Museums' 2025 national snapshot, 55% of US museums said they still get fewer visitors than they did in 2019.
The interesting part is why. AAM's survey of museum-goers found that 33% of US adults visited a museum in the past year, slightly above pre-pandemic norms. The same share of people go, but they go less often. Frequency has been creeping back since 2021, yet there's "still a significant gap" compared with before.
The problem isn't that people stopped going. It's that the occasional visit got more occasional.
A Few Times a Year Is Normal
In England, the government asks a lot of people about this. In the 2024/25 Participation Survey, 41% of adults had visited a museum or gallery in person in the previous 12 months.
The newer Community and Engagement Survey, with more than 175,000 responses, shows how often visitors go. The most common answers were less than monthly but at least three or four times a year (32%), and twice in the last 12 months (31%).
Elsewhere the picture varies a lot. The US National Endowment for the Arts found that 17.7% of American adults visited an art museum or gallery in 2022, down from 23.7% in 2017. Across the EU, Eurostat's last complete count found that 43.4% of people over 16 visited a cultural site such as a museum, gallery or monument in 2015. That ranged from 67.2% in Sweden to 14.6% in Bulgaria.
So for most people, a museum visit is a handful of days a year. That makes each one matter more. Getting it wrong costs you a good chunk of your museum year.
We Rarely Go Alone
I've argued before that going alone is underrated. The data suggests almost nobody listens to me.
In AAM's 2025 research on solo visitors, 31% of frequent museum-goers said they only ever visit with family or friends. Among casual and sporadic visitors it was even higher, at 43% and 45%. Only about one in six frequent visitors mostly goes alone.
England's survey points the same way. "General interest in the subject" was the top reason to visit (66%), but "wanting to spend time with family or friends" came second at 52%.
The museum researcher John Falk explains part of this. He found that visitors take on different roles. Some are explorers following their own curiosity. Some are facilitators, there mainly so that someone else, often their kids, has a good time. Anyone who has walked through a natural history museum at a seven-year-old's pace knows exactly which role they were playing.
That matters for anyone designing a museum experience. The same person wants very different things on a solo Tuesday and on a family Saturday.
Why People Go, and Why They Don't
When the US research group Culture Track asked more than 4,000 people what motivates cultural outings, the top answer was refreshingly simple: having fun, picked by 81%.
The barriers are more revealing. The top reason people gave for staying away was the feeling that an activity is "not for someone like me". The second was "I didn't think of it". Both ranked above inconvenience, cost, and having no one to go with.
Cost still matters, of course. Among Americans who visit museums at least occasionally, 41% name cost as their main barrier. And in England, the most common reason for not visiting was "no reason in particular" (32%), ahead of "I'm not interested" (27%).
"I didn't think of it" and "no reason in particular" are the answers I keep coming back to. They don't describe people who dislike museums. They describe people for whom a museum never came to mind at the moment they were deciding what to do on a Sunday.
We Plan Online, Then Look for 17 Seconds
Before a visit, most of us go online. In a study of more than 1,200 museum website users, more than nine in ten said they were likely to look up opening hours, location and directions before going. The study is from 2007 and its respondents were found on museum websites, so it overstates things. Still, the habit of checking first is hardly news to anyone who has turned up to a museum that's closed on Mondays.
Once inside, we move fast. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, researchers timed visitors in front of famous works and found a median of 17 seconds per artwork. A 2017 follow-up at the Art Institute of Chicago found 21 seconds. Some of those seconds now go into taking a selfie with the painting.
I've written about why that happens in posts on museum fatigue and why we forget what we see. Short version: we try to see too much and end up seeing very little.
What Nobody Seems to Know
This is where the research runs thin.
Audio guides are a good example. They've been around for decades, but I couldn't find a recent, credible figure for how many visitors actually use one. The best I found was a researcher's estimate that roughly one in twenty British Museum visitors rent the audio guide. That's a single museum, and the figure comes from a short essay rather than a formal study.
The same goes for frustrations. There's plenty of data on why people don't go, and much less on what goes wrong once they've decided to. Is it the crowds? Confusing opening hours? Getting lost? Not knowing what you're looking at?
We build audio tours and a museum map at Mooseum, so these are not idle questions for me. I'd rather build on real answers than on my own habits.
Take the Survey
It's eight questions and takes about three minutes. It covers how often you go, what kinds of museums you like, who you go with, how you plan, how you feel about audio guides, and what frustrates you. The last question is optional and open: what would make you go more often?
There's no sign-up, and it never asks for your name or email. Where your answer might not fit the list, there's an "Other" option.
About 3 minutes8 questions
How do you do museums?
Eight quick questions about how often you go, who with, and what gets in the way. No sign-up or email needed, and we'll publish the results here on the blog.
We never ask for your name or email. Answers are stored in PostHog, our analytics tool, and only shared as totals. Privacy policy
What Happens Next
Once enough people have answered, I'll publish the results here on the blog: the totals, the surprises, and what we're changing at Mooseum because of them. No individual answers, just the patterns.
If you know someone with strong opinions about museums, and everyone has a friend like that, send them this post. The more different kinds of museum-goers answer, the more useful the results will be.
Mooseum helps you discover, plan, and remember your museum visits. Explore museums near you.