Museum Facts

Museums Serve the Public

Museums provide many social services, including programs for children on the autism spectrum, English as a Second Language classes, and programs for older adults with Alzheimer’s or other cognitive impairments. Some museums also facilitate job training programs, provide vegetable gardens for low-income communities, and serve as locations for supervised visits through the family court system.

Many museums also offer programs tailored to veterans and military families. In 2012, more than 1,800 museums participated in the Blue Star Museums initiative, offering free admission to all active-duty and reserve personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Many other museums offered military discounts or free admission throughout the year.

Americans view museums as one of the most important resources for educating our children and as one of the most trustworthy sources of objective information.

Museums are considered a more reliable source of historical information than books, teachers or even personal accounts by relatives, according to a study by Indiana University.

There are approximately 850 million visits each year to American museums, more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined (483 million in 2011). By 2006, museums already received an additional 524 million online visits a year just from adults, a number that continues to grow.

Museums tell important stories by collecting, preserving, researching, and interpreting objects, living specimens and historical records.
Museums help communities better understand and appreciate cultural diversity.

Museums spend more than $2 billion a year on education activities; the typical museum devotes three-quarters of its education budget to K-12 students.

Museums receive more than 90 million visits each year from students in school groups.

Museums provide more than 18 million instructional hours each year for guided tours for students, staff visits to schools, school outreach through science vans and other traveling exhibits, and professional development for teachers, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Museums help teach the state, local, or core curriculum, tailoring their programs in math, science, art, literacy, language arts, history, civics and government, economics and financial literacy, geography, and social studies.

Museums directly contribute $21 billion to the U.S. economy each year. They generate billions more through indirect spending by their visitors.

Trips including cultural and heritage activities account for over 23% of all domestic travel, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

78% of all U.S. leisure travelers participate in cultural or heritage activities.

The nonprofit arts and culture industry annually generates over $135 billion in economic activity, supports more than 4 million full-time jobs, and returns over $22 billion in local, state, and federal tax revenues.

Governments that support the arts see an average return on investment of over $7 in taxes for every $1 that the government appropriates.

About 17% of museums are located in rural areas with fewer than 20,000 residents; other museums reach these communities with traveling vans, portable exhibits, and robust online resources.

In 2011, 40% of museums were free at all times or had suggested admission fees only; nearly all the rest offered discounts or free admission days.
Teachers, students, and researchers benefit from access to trustworthy information through online collections and exhibits, although many museums need more help digitizing their collections and enhancing online access and interpretation need more help in developing their digital collections to meet this need.
Museum websites serve a diverse online community, teachers, parents, students (including students who are home-schooled) and the general public among them.

Only a small (and shrinking) percentage of America’s 17,500+ museums receive federal funding of any kind.

The weak economy has led to declines in charitable gifts and reductions in state and local support for museums.