Tourism Spending Jumps in 2025
Folks love the Friendly City! And we love outside dollars flowing into city businesses. So, let’s talk tourism spending.
The Virginia Tourism Corporation tracks annual spending by tourists visiting Virginia and its beautiful locals. The numbers tell a story of success for Harrisonburg, the MSA (Harrisonburg and Rockingham County) and the Shenandoah Valley. In comparing 2024 tourism spending in Harrisonburg versus 2025 spending, the total amount increased 7.9%!
Why is this important? Bringing in outside dollars builds our economy (as opposed to recirculating local dollars). Tourism spending supports our hotels, restaurants, retail businesses, and enables those businesses to sustain and add jobs. Additionally, the fiscal revenue generated by tourism supports public services like schools, parks, police, and fire.
Just the facts ma’am. Here is how much money tourists spent visiting Harrisonburg in 2025, broken down by spending category.
Total spent: $262,300,000
Lodging: $60,300,000
Food and beverage: $119,300,000
Retail: $29,900,000
Transportation: $24,500,000
State fiscal revenue generated: $8,900,000
Local fiscal revenue generated: $14,100,000
As Harrisonburg and Rockingham really serve as one area for spending, lodging, and just generally touring around, it’s informative to look at tourism spending data for the Harrisonburg MSA. For our MSA, the total spending jumps to nearly half a billion dollars! Total spending in the MSA in 2025 was $495,800,000.
For the entire Shenandoah Valley, tourism spending was $1.7 billion dollars! Hey, the Valley is an amazing and beautiful place, did you expect any different?
For all localities west of the Blue Ridge, Harrisonburg had the 3rd highest tourism spending behind Roanoke and Montgomery County/Blacksburg.
