The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently announced that it welcomed over 5.7 million visitors to its two locations, The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters, in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. The Mets overall attendance grew by 5 percent since FY24, and for the second consecutive year, local visitorship (New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey residents) exceeded pre-pandemic figures, a 109 percent recovery compared to 2019. Local attendance made up 62 percent of all visitors in FY25, while domestic out-of-state visitors accounted for 23 percent. The museum also tracked its highest single-day attendance since 2017, recording 33,700 visitors during the public opening day for The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing on May 31. We are thrilled by the continued growth of our audiences, particularly across New York City and the surrounding area, with visitors showing incredible enthusiasm for our ambitious programming, said Max Hollein, The Mets Marina Kellen French director and CEO. Whether through our thought-provoking exhibitions, inventive educational initiatives, or wide-ranging digital offerings, The Met provides an array of ways to engage with our collection spanning 5,000 years of art from across time and around the world. Exhibitions were a key driver of visitation to the museum in FY25, with 40 percent of guests reporting that they planned their trip to The Met to view a specific presentation. Shows on view in FY25 that contributed to the strong attendance include the critically acclaimed summer exhibitions Sargent and Paris, which had attracted over 427,000 visitors to date, and Superfine: Tailoring Black Style (through Oct. 26), which so far has welcomed more than 291,000 guests. Other exhibitions that drew high attendance included Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature (with 300,000 visitors); Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 (298,000); and the last months of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (464,000) and Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion (401,000). This year, 42 percent of visitors benefited from the museums implementation of new, more expedited ways to enter the museums galleries. In addition to its already-active online ticket sales and scannable membership cards, The Met recently introduced an online ticketing option for New York State residents to reserve pay-what-you-wish tickets from the museums website. The Met offers tens of thousands of free classes, conversations, music, dance and performance programs each year that make art accessible to intergenerational audiences from New York City and beyond. Museum-wide public programming remained popular with audiences, including the annual Lunar New Year Festival (which drew 19,300), the opening festival for The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing (18,000), Museum Mile Festival (10,960), and the Museums inaugural Fall Festival (10,260). The Met additionally welcomed 184,945 K-12 students to participate in school tours and workshops, and over 200,000 children and their caregivers enjoyed the museums 81st Street Studio science and art play space. The museum also celebrated the achievements of local public school students through the exhibitions The Celebration: A Selection of Works by the 2025 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards New York City Gold Key Recipients, and P. S. Art 2025: Celebrating the Creative Spirit of New York City Kids (on view through Oct. 19). Throughout the year, the museum hosted over 250 interns and fellows, working closely with Met staff across 40 departments to explore career pathways in visual culture, science, education and museum administration. The Mets website (www.metmuseum.org) had more than 27 million visits in FY25, with 35 percent engaging from outside the United States. The museums social media reach is broad: its Instagram has more than 4.5 million followers, X(formerly Twitter) has more than 4.1 million followers, Facebook has more than 2.3 million followers, LinkedIn has more than 430,000 followers, and TikTok reached more than 1.2 million followers. This year the museum expanded its digital reach by launching official channels on Chinese-language social media platforms Weibo and WeChat, garnering 66,500 and 27,500 followers, respectively. Photo courtesy Filip Wolak.