Charleston Statistics

“Charleston gets 7.9 million visitors a year.”

That figure counts overnight visitors only. The Office of Tourism Analysis states this plainly in its own notes, and day-trippers are not included. Quoting it as total visitation overstates it.

“Charleston is a cruise port / you can sail from Charleston.”

Not any more. Carnival ended 14 years of homeporting in January 2025, and on 30 June 2026 the Norwegian Jewel became the last cruise ship to call at Union Pier. Remaining port-of-call visits move to the Columbus Street Terminal, about 1.5 miles from the historic district. A great many travel pages have not caught up.

“Charleston is Travel + Leisure’s No. 1 city in America.”

It was, for 12 consecutive years — and that run ended in 2025. In the 2026 World’s Best Awards, Charleston placed second behind Santa Fe.

“Charleston is Condé Nast Traveler’s best city in the US.”

The award it won in the 2025 Readers’ Choice Awards is Best Small Cities in the U.S. — a separate category from the big-city list. The two get conflated constantly.

“Admission to Fort Sumter is $43.”

The fort is a national park and costs nothing to enter. The $43 is the ferry, which is the only way to reach it — there is no public landing otherwise.

“Tourism is worth $12.8 billion to Charleston.”

That was the 2022 figure. It is still the headline number on the research centre’s own landing page, which is three reporting cycles out of date. The current figure is $14.35 billion for 2025.

“Fort Sumter visitor numbers more than doubled in 2025.”

They did not. National Park Service records show 384,308 recreation visits in 2024 and 814,658 in 2025, but the jump is spread evenly across all twelve months and lands back in the 860,000–900,000 range the park saw from 2016 to 2019. It is a change in how visits were counted, not a surge in visitors. Compare 2025 with 2019, not with 2024.

“Charleston was founded in 1670.”

True of the colony, misleading about the place. The 1670 landing was at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley — today’s Charles Towne Landing. The peninsula everyone means by Charleston was not occupied until the move to Oyster Point, complete by 1680. And it was not called Charleston until incorporation in 1783; before that it was Charles Towne.

“The 1886 earthquake was a magnitude 7.3 that killed 110 people.”

Every figure for this quake is a reconstruction, because it predates seismographs in the region. USGS catalogues it at M 7.0; NOAA’s significant-earthquake database lists 7.3. On deaths, NOAA records 60 and the South Carolina Encyclopedia says 83, with higher counts usually including people who died later of injuries. Cite an agency and its number rather than a bare figure.

“Charleston sits about 20 feet above sea level.”

Not on the peninsula. Measured against the USGS 1-metre elevation model, Waterfront Park is 4.9 ft, the Battery seawall 5.4 ft, Broad and Meeting 10.4 ft, and Marion Square 13.8 ft. A single elevation figure hides the thing that actually matters, which is how little of the historic district sits far above the tide.

“Charleston covers 115 square miles.”

That is the modern annexed city — West Ashley, James Island, Daniel Island and Cainhoy included. It is accurate, but pairing it with descriptions of a compact walkable historic district is not: the peninsula is a small fraction of it.