Hiking Statistics Updated November 2026

Human Written & Fact Checked · Updated

100 UK Hiking Statistics for 2026

How many people hike in the UK depends on what you count as hiking. A recent hillwalking survey, a visitor activity question and a mountain-rescue record describe different populations. You need those definitions before comparing the numbers.

This evidence hub separates England's participation series, Scottish visitor research, local trail evidence and rescue operations. It does not invent a UK-wide total from incompatible sources or substitute everyday walking for mountain hiking.

Headline figures

How common is hill and mountain walking in England?

Participation needs an activity definition before it needs a headline. Sport England isolates hill and mountain walking from ordinary walking, making its survey the strongest participation series used here.

How has participation changed across survey years?

  • England adults, November 2015–2016: 5.54% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2016–2017: 6.44% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2017–2018: 6.25% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2018–2019: 6.95% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2019–2020: 6.4% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2020–2021: 7.43% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2021–2022: 7.78% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2022–2023: 8.12% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England adults, November 2023–2024: 7.65% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)

The survey measures recent hill and mountain walking among adults in England, not everyone who hiked during the year. Annual labels identify survey windows; participation means activity at least twice in the preceding four weeks. The earliest waves used online responses only, limiting comparison with later postal-inclusive estimates. Differences require attention to sampling uncertainty.

What does the male participation series show?

  • England men, November 2015–2016: 6.01% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England men, November 2017–2018: 6.94% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2020)
  • England men, November 2018–2019: 7.54% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2020)
  • England men, November 2019–2020: 6.99% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2022)
  • England men, November 2020–2021: 8.09% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2022)
  • England men, November 2021–2022: 8.53% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2023)
  • England men, November 2022–2023: 9.02% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2024)
  • England men, November 2023–2024: 8.52% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England men, November 2024–2025: 9.04% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)

These percentages describe participation within the reported male population, not the male share of all walkers. Historical observations come from the original activity workbooks retaining the relevant periods. Rates are used consistently instead of converting rounded percentages into headcounts. The missing gender year is omitted instead of interpolated. England is not UK-wide.

What does the female participation series show?

  • England women, November 2015–2016: 5.1% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)
  • England women, November 2017–2018: 5.61% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2020)
  • England women, November 2018–2019: 6.4% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2020)
  • England women, November 2019–2020: 5.86% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2022)
  • England women, November 2020–2021: 6.81% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2022)
  • England women, November 2021–2022: 7.08% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2023)
  • England women, November 2022–2023: 7.29% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2024)
  • England women, November 2023–2024: 6.83% participated in hill/mountain walking. (Sport England, Apr 2026)

These estimates retain the source's historical reporting categories and activity threshold. They do not measure ability, route difficulty or distance. Group differences may reflect access, time, health and preferences, which this table cannot separate. Comparing female and overall rates also requires remembering that the latter includes other respondents. The latest observation appears in the takeaways; the entries below preserve the earlier sequence.

What do visitor surveys reveal about walking trips?

Tourism surveys answer who walks while visiting, not how many residents hike. Scotland's visitor evidence and individual English trail findings are useful precisely when their geographic and sampling boundaries remain visible.

How does walking participation vary by visitor origin?

  • Scotland 2023 UK-origin visitors: 36% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)
  • Scotland 2023 European-origin visitors: 51% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)
  • Scotland 2023 long-haul visitors: 46% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)

VisitScotland asked leisure overnight visitors about activities during their Scottish trip. The combined category includes hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking and rambling, so it is broader than strenuous mountain hiking alone. Origin describes where the visitor came from, not the country in which the activity occurred. The survey excludes a general census of local recreational walkers and should not be used to estimate Scottish resident participation. Comparisons between origin markets can inform visitor information and itinerary planning, but do not demonstrate that nationality causes different outdoor preferences. Trip length and destination choice may also influence the observed pattern.

How do life stages relate to walking on holiday?

  • Scotland 2023 families: 42% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)
  • Scotland 2023 older independents: 41% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)
  • Scotland 2023 retirement-age visitors: 31% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)

The life-stage comparison belongs to the same Scottish overnight visitor survey. Its categories combine household circumstances and age instead of representing a simple age-only breakdown. The combined walking activity is retained unchanged across the groups. These findings can guide questions about visitor services, but they do not show how frequently anyone walks at home or whether a trip was booked specifically for hiking. Smaller subgroup samples also create more uncertainty than the full sample. The strongest takeaway is that walking features across different visitor circumstances; the table cannot identify an individual visitor's needs or fitness.

What do touring and individual destination surveys add?

  • Scotland 2023 visitors staying in multiple locations: 52% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)
  • Scotland 2023 other visitors in the touring comparison: 33% reported hillwalking, mountaineering, hiking or rambling. (VisitScotland, Sep 2024)
  • In the Coast to Coast visitor survey, 77% of surveyed walkers stayed in local accommodation. (Natural England, Mar 2026)

Touring visitors stayed in multiple locations during their Scottish trip; the comparison group contains the other visitors in that analysis. The Cairngorms finding includes activities already undertaken or planned, so it is not a completed-trip count. The Coast to Coast release reports a separate trail survey about use of local businesses. Natural England's public release does not provide a full sample breakdown, limiting further subgroup interpretation. These regional findings support locally specific statements. They cannot be pooled into a national rate because the questions, places and respondents differ. No Northern Ireland estimate is inferred from these sources.

What brings Scottish hillwalkers and mountaineers into rescue records?

Incident records describe the work reaching rescue teams, not the probability that a hike ends badly. Scottish reporting separates hillwalking from other mountaineering activities, then records potentially overlapping contributing factors.

Which activity and immediate factors appear in reports?

Scottish Mountain Rescue separates summer and winter hillwalking, while its factor entries cover wider mountaineering, including climbing and scrambling. Multiple factors may describe the same incident, so adding categories would overcount separate events. Reporting member teams do not cover every rescue in Scotland. These records cannot establish risk per walker or outing without participation exposure data.

What other circumstances complicate mountain incidents?

These circumstances come from the same mountaineering table. Missing equipment, tiredness and technology reliance are reporting classifications, not experimental explanations of individual accidents. They may overlap with navigation, weather and medical factors. Assistance to other services describes an operational circumstance. Membership and reporting changes complicate comparisons over time; incident factors also remain distinct from casualty and injury records.

What injuries are recorded in Scottish mountain rescues?

The injury tables reveal response needs without measuring the health of the hiking population. They cover mountaineering casualties and distinguish types of injury from the body sites recorded by teams.

Which injury types feature in the casualty records?

The report classifies injuries and medical entries among mountaineering casualties. A person can have more than one injury type, and the source also includes a multiple-injury category that is not reproduced here. Consequently, these entries should not be summed as a count of unique injured walkers. The source's labels mix traumatic injuries with medical conditions, so this is an operational record instead of a clinical diagnosis dataset. An ambiguous duplicated hypothermia label in the original table is excluded from the inventory. The fracture observation is already presented above; the remaining categories retain the source's terminology and counts.

Which body sites appear in the injury table?

Injury sites answer a different question from injury types: an ankle record does not identify a sprain or fracture. The source says casualties generally have a single recorded site or none. Keep the table's original unit instead of relabelling entries as individual hikers. Counts preserve the published observations without introducing rounded percentages. These records cannot show whether specific footwear would have prevented an injury, or establish exposure-adjusted differences between routes.

What patterns appear in England and Wales rescue activity?

A broader rescue workload provides safety context, provided it remains clearly labelled. These records cover all reported mountain-rescue activity in England and Wales, including operations unrelated to hiking.

When and how do rescue operations occur?

Mountain Rescue England and Wales separates call-outs from deployments, so the terms are not interchangeable. Its headline profile also describes timing, people involved and helicopter assistance. None of these observations is restricted to hiking participants. Seasonal and weekend patterns can reflect the volume of outdoor activity as well as circumstances faced by rescuers; the report does not provide the exposure data needed to separate those effects. Helicopter assistance is likewise different from helicopter transport, which appears in the intervention table. Keep the reporting unit attached when quoting a figure, especially when comparing it with the separate Scottish system.

Which contributory factors do teams record?

The contributory-factor list is an operational description of rescue cases. Labels such as poor decision making or inexperience reflect the source's classification and should not be turned into claims about the general competence of walkers. Weather, equipment and visibility can accompany other recorded factors in the same response. The counts therefore do not form a set of mutually exclusive causes. They also include the broader activities handled by mountain-rescue teams. These observations are useful for identifying topics that deserve plainer preparation information, while a causal evaluation of training or equipment would require a different study design.

What resources do England and Wales rescues require?

Rescue is a combination of transport, care and specialist coordination. Intervention and skill records show that workload more clearly than a single incident total, but overlapping entries must remain separate.

How are casualties moved or supported?

The intervention categories describe actions recorded during mountain-rescue responses. Transport by team vehicle and walking off are not measures of route accessibility across the whole countryside. A response may involve several stages and more than one kind of assistance, so the list is not a breakdown into exclusive patient groups. Stretcher use is showed in the takeaways and is not repeated below. Limb splintage concerns a recorded intervention instead of a diagnosis of every limb injury. These figures are best used to explain the hands-on work carried out by teams, with their broad rescue coverage retained.

Which other interventions support a rescue?

The remaining interventions extend from transport to protection, warming and advice. They show different response activities, not levels in a severity ranking. Helicopter transport should remain separate from the report's headline helicopter-assistance measure because assistance does not necessarily involve evacuation by air. Advice can also accompany other actions instead of standing alone. The source does not describe these counts as distinct patients, and this article does not add them together. Reporting interventions in their original categories makes the evidence useful to readers interested in rescue operations without implying that these procedures are required on a typical hiking trip.

Which specialist skills are recorded?

These capabilities can contribute to the same mountain-rescue response. A skill record is neither a separate rescue nor a unique trained volunteer. Terrain and operational circumstances differ, preventing direct conversion into staffing requirements for individual routes. The list includes non-hiking operations. Future comparisons should check reporting definitions before interpreting changes as workload trends.

Glossary

Methodology and sources

Every figure on this page comes from the organisation that produced it: regulators, statistics offices, public bodies, research institutes, and companies reporting their own data or surveys. Each one links to the original report or dataset and carries its release date. Survey results keep their population and fieldwork period, and financial figures keep the measure the producer used. Figures from different producers are not added together or ranked against each other. The page is reviewed monthly and updated when a producer releases newer data.