by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 3:10 PM ET, Mon October 13, 2025
The decline in Canadian visitors to the United States continues unabated and appears unlikely to slow down any time soon.
September 2025 data from Statistics Canada shows that Canadian-resident trips from overseas countries by air increased 3.9 percent year over year to 1 million in September 2025. However, the number of returning Canadian-resident trips by air from the United States declined 27.1 percent during that same time frame, which amounts to just 372,000 Canadian visitors.
Automobile travel statistics tell a similar, if not more troubling story, as Canadian-resident return trips from the United States by automobile have dropped even more precipitously. Year-over-year between September 2024 to September 2025, the number of Canadian return trips by car declined 34.8 percent.
This is the ninth consecutive month of year-over-year declines, according to Statistics Canada. Moreover, the downward trend for September is even more significant than those last reported in August by Statistics Canada.
In August 2025, Canadian-resident return trips by air from abroad stood
at 1.6 million. And while the number of returning Canadian-resident
trips from overseas countries increased 6.6 percent from August
2024 to 1.2 million in August 2025, the number of returning
Canadian-resident trips by air from the United States declined a stunning 25.4 percent to 423,100.
As for travel by automobile, here too the decline is even worse in September then it was in August. The number of Canadian-resident return trips by automobile from
the United States totaled just 1.9 million for August. That amounted to a
33.9 percent drop from the same month in 2024.
The decline in Canadian travelers began earlier this year, shortly after Donald Trump returned to office. As many publications have reported, Canadians began boycotting travel to the U.S. after Trump announced his new tariff policies for Canada, a longtime U.S. ally.
Specifically, in August, Trump raised tariffs to 35 percent for all items that are not covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Canadians are also shunning the U.S. in response to Trump’s comments about making our neighbor to the north the 51st state.
Many travel companies have said that Canadians are increasingly opting to visit Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe instead of the United States.
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