Sabah Visitor Arrivals 2026 — 3.79M by Market & Month

Entry Points & Ports

No official breakdown of arrivals by air, sea or road is published. Sabah Tourism Board counts visitors by nationality; Malaysia Airports counts passenger movements. Those are two different things, and one cannot be divided into the other.

Kota Kinabalu International Airport (KKIA) is the main gateway and was Malaysia's second-busiest airport in 2023, handling 7.04 million passenger movements — the last year Malaysia Airports published airport-level totals, having released none since being taken private. That figure counts arrivals and departures together and is mostly domestic traffic, so it is not a count of visitors.

Seaports handle a far smaller share: primarily Kota Kinabalu Port, where cruise ships berth at the main wharf and ferries run from the Jesselton Point terminal at South Jetty. Cruise tourism has been recovering, with 23 ship calls across Sabah bringing 24,634 passengers in 2025 — up from 16,727 in 2024, but still below the 36,183 of 2019.

Overland arrivals come mostly from Sarawak and Brunei by road. No published figure counts them, so claims that Pan Borneo Highway improvements are shifting traffic this way remain untested.

Top Source Markets

Sabah Tourism Board publishes arrivals by nationality for about 40 countries and groupings. The top ten account for 91.7% of international arrivals and China alone for 43.9% — so the market is a good deal more concentrated than the length of the list suggests, and a single country drives much of the total.

Seasonality & Peak Periods

The 2025 monthly counts from the Sabah Tourism Board show a clear seasonal pattern.

Peak (December): December is comfortably the busiest month of the year at 428,560 arrivals, some 16% clear of the next highest, at the year-end holidays. Accommodation is hardest to find and prices are at their highest.

Also busy (July, August and September): September (369,978) outranks both July (362,287) and August (336,599) — which is not what most guides say. September's rise was led by Malaysian visitors (237,383, against 161,383 in August).

Quietest (April and May): April is the trough at 253,992 arrivals, with May close behind at 259,869. These are the best months for avoiding crowds and finding value, and west coast weather is generally good.

A second dip (October and November): October (267,279) and November (271,480) form Sabah's other quiet stretch. January and February, often described elsewhere as low season, sit mid-table at over 300,000 arrivals each.

How is 2026 going?

From January to August 2026 Sabah recorded 2,556,823 arrivals, up 4.1% on the same months of 2025: 1,100,546 international (+6.9%) and 1,456,277 Malaysian (+2.1%). China grew 21.6% to 578,681, while South Korea fell 25.7% (91,074), Brunei 5.5% and Taiwan 18.7%. April 2026 was the busiest month so far, with 447,860 arrivals (Sabah Tourism Board, preliminary; Malay Mail, 20 September 2026). To reach the state's 4 million target for 2026, September to December would need about 1.44 million arrivals, against 1.34 million in the same months of 2025 (our calculation).

Length of Stay

Sabah Tourism Board publishes arrival counts, not lengths of stay. The only official measure attached to Sabah comes from the Department of Statistics, whose domestic tourism survey put the average at 3.01 nights for domestic visitors in 2024. No equivalent figure is published for international visitors, so any single average covering both is an estimate rather than a reported statistic.

Trip lengths do vary a good deal by what people come for. Mount Kinabalu climbs are built around a night on the mountain; Sipadan diving is normally sold as a multi-day package; city stays in Kota Kinabalu tend to be short, and Danum Valley or Kinabatangan lodges longer. Those are typical itinerary shapes rather than measured averages.

Frequently asked questions