Canadians Are Coming Back to the U.S., but Only Barely

The cross-border travel recovery between Canada and the United States is still running in one direction. Statistics Canada’s preliminary figures for October, released November 12, show Canadian residents made 1,880,915 return trips from the U.S. by car and plane, up 3.0% from October 2025. It is the seventh straight month of year-over-year growth, but it is a sharp slowdown from September, when Skift notes the increase was 6.8%.

The more telling comparison is with 2024, before the trade dispute and political tension that sent Canadian travel to the U.S. into steep decline. Against October 2024, Canadian return trips by car were still down 29.0%, and trips by air were down 19.6%. Within this October’s growth, air travel did better than driving, rising 5.6% compared with 2.2% for car trips. Canadians also kept looking elsewhere: return trips from overseas countries by air edged up 0.5% to 968,528.

Travel the other way is growing much faster. U.S. residents made 1,537,039 trips to Canada by car and air in October, up 8.1%, the ninth straight monthly increase. Car trips rose 8.7% to about 1.1 million, and air trips rose 6.5% to roughly 414,400. Overseas visitors to Canada also increased, up 5.0% to 465,296. The busiest single day for Canadians coming home was Thanksgiving Monday, October 12, with about 172,900 return trips.

For U.S. border towns, ski resorts and Sun Belt destinations that rely on Canadian snowbirds, the numbers suggest the winter season will improve on last year but remain well short of normal. Statistics Canada cautions that this leading indicator is preliminary and that new NEXUS highway data affects comparisons from August onward. Full October counts arrive on December 21, and the November indicator is due December 10.

Sources: Statistics Canada, Skift