Something strange is happening with Machu Picchu ticket availability in 2025. I think I figured out what is happening. I just don't know why. I've discussed it with my peeps in Peru and they agree that I may be on to something. But none of us are best buds with any of the head haunchos. We're stuck with this information. It's possible a grievous error may have occurred. Or not.

When I'm not chatting to enthusiastic travelers, one of my side gigs is to track trends in Machu Picchu ticket availability. Back in the good ole days around 2018 or so, the official government website would store a full year's data displaying how entry tickets were distributed by gender, nationality and age. Not to mention by date. Sadly, they no longer store information about ticket sales. 

So each year, I manually count the tickets. One by one. It's a laborious task. But now I'm invested in the story about how the Peru government manages capacity at Machu Picchu. 

It was with great curiosity that a recent story announcing that Machu Picchu daily capacity would be limited to 5600 people, struck me like a bolt of lightening.Because my count showed over 10,000 visitors per day! So sit back and read on. This is a doozy.

The Process Travelers Would Follow to Select Entry Tickets to Machu Picchu

For all the years I've been tracking tickets for entry to Machu Picchu there was always two groups of ticket buyers. Foreigners and Promotional rate for Peruvians and CAN (citizens of Andean Nations). There's another category for Cusquenos, but the number of these tickets are so low, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not including them. Neither am I including hikers who amount to a maxium of 450 per day. The discrepancy I'm revealing here involves thousands. Hundreds are not a huge impact.

How Buyers Choose Entry Tickets to Machu Picchu on The Official Government Website

Until August 2024, when you arrived at the website to buy Machu Picchu tickets, the first thing you would do is choose the pool of tickets you could buy from. Foreigners went to their pool of tickets and CAN went to their pool of tickets. In all the years that I tracked tickets, each pool always offered the same quantity of tickets and the same schedule. If the pool for foreigners had 4200 tickets per day, so did the pool for CAN. The CAN buyers could buy their tickets at a cheaper rate than Foreigners. And if all the CAN tickets sold out, CAN could buy tickets from the foreigner pool at the same rate foreigners paid. However foreigners were not permitted to buy tickets from the CAN pool. This was the process for all the years I can remember. 

What was interesting about the quantity of tickets available per day, is that it was as if only one pool of tickets existed when discussing the dailiy capacity at Machu Picchu. The authorities would describe the daily capacity as 4200, 5600 or various similar numbers. But that number was the amount in one pool according to my tracking. It was as if the other pool didn't exist. The capacity discussed in articles and reports only mentioned the daily capacity as if there was only one pool. I complained for years about this! Just ask our manager in Cusco! 

In January 2024, the Peru government handed over the tickets sales, for a short time, to a third party Peruvian company called JOINNUS. (similar to TICKETMASTER.) Ticket buyers would follow the same process to view ticket availability by going into the pool for foreigners, or the pool for CAN. But the move to this website riled some Peruvians, who threw a fit. Protestors stood vigil on the railroad tracks in Aguas Calientes until the government promised to build a brand new website worthy of selling the entry tickets to the hallowed Inca grounds.

In August 2024 Peru Launches New Website for Buying Machu Picchu Tickets

Come August 2024, a shiny new website was launched. Tu Boleto would be open to anyone in the world who wanted to buy an entry ticket to Machu Picchu at any time of day. Eventually we all learned how to navigate the new space and went about buying tickets as needed. And everyone lived happily ever after. Until. we noticed that tickets seemed to be selling out much more quickly then ever before. Yet our teams in Cusco did not notice any change to the size of the constant flow of visitors coming through Cusco on their way to the sacred site. Availability for hotel rooms and trains to Machu Picchu remained about the same with occasional seasonal fluctuations.

It wasn't until December 2024 that I figured it out. The new website had only one pool which displayed all the tickets available.  Foreigners and CAN all entered the same pool with a fixed number of tickets. And here was the key to the mystery. The capacity of tickets in one pool was equivalent to ONE of the previous two pools. I can't tell you how it hit me. It was one of those moments. However, I couldn't test my theory until the new entry tickets for 2025 were released in January. So come January I manually documented ticket availablity per day. Keep in mind that they changed the routes in Machu Picchu to 10 circuits on June 1, 2024. But the dailiy capacity should be about the same. All they did was redistrubute the number of visitors each day into certain times on certain circuits. 

It's not unuaual for Peruvian authorities to raise, or lower, daily capacity. But the amount would be in the hundreds, not thousands. There were years when the capacity may have been 3600, or 4400 or this year it's supposed to be 5000. When I saw that number in print I knew something was up. My count from 2024 was a whopping 10,000 + visitors per day (including hikers). Here's a link to see my post from 2024 with the numbers. 

So I went back and reviewed some of my previous posts. I copied the numbers below from another post in Sept 2016 showing Machu Picchu total capacity per day based on data from the government website. who at that time openly shared all kinds of interesting information. 

2016 - 2500 tickets per day
2017 - 6400 tickets per day
2019 - 5600 tickets per day

In January 2025, I manually counted Machu Picchu ticket availability per day in one main pool.

Low Season Total all online tickets per day= 3500
Includes foreigners, CAN and Peruvians
Plus hikers estimated max is 450-500 per day
Plus AC tickets in person - max 1000 per day

Total max visitors per day in low season - 5000

Hi Season Total all online tickets per day= 4560
Includes foreigner, CAN and Peruvians
Plus hikers estimated max is 450-500 per day
Plus AC tickets in person - max 1000 per day

Total max visitors per day in hi season - 6060

Here's the distribution of tickets for each circuit in 2025

What's happing with Machu Picchu Ticket Availability in 2025?