Mordor Intelligence prices the Asia-Pacific medical tourism market at USD 70.77 billion for 2026 and projects USD 145.66 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 15.53 percent. That is the headline number doing the rounds in press releases, and taken alone it flattens more than it explains. Over the past year Korea, Malaysia and Thailand have all published their own patient and revenue figures, and read side by side they describe very different businesses growing at very different speeds. The regional average is real. It just is not happening everywhere, or to everyone, in the same way.
What the forecast says, and what it hides
Start with what the report actually contains, because the detail is better than the headline. Mordor attributes the region’s pull to a durable price gap - elective procedures in Bangkok or Chennai cost 40 to 80 percent less than in the United States, the United Kingdom or Australia - and to an accreditation build-out that has taken the region past 1,100 JCI-accredited facilities, up from roughly 800 in 2020. India is the largest single market with 25.13 percent of regional revenue in 2025, on the back of 635,000 medical visas processed in 2023. Vietnam is the fastest riser, at an 18.51 percent annual clip through 2031.
The segment data is where it gets interesting. Cosmetic and aesthetic work is the largest treatment category at 28.55 percent of 2025 revenue, orthopedics is the fastest-growing at 18.25 percent, and ambulatory surgical centres are the fastest-expanding provider type at 19.85 percent. Put plainly, the centre of gravity of this market is outpatient, discretionary and paid in cash, not the complex tertiary surgery on the conference brochures. Keep that in mind for the country numbers below, because it explains how a national patient count can double in twelve months.
Korea doubled its patient count, mostly on dermatology
Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare counted 2.01 million international patients from 201 countries in 2025, the first time the figure has crossed two million since tracking began in 2009 and nearly double the 1.17 million of 2024. Chinese patients made up 30.8 percent and Japanese 29.8 percent, with Taiwan at 9.2 percent and the United States at 8.6 percent after a 70.4 percent jump to about 173,000 American patients. More than 62 percent of all foreign patients were treated at dermatology clinics, 11.2 percent had plastic surgery, and 87.2 percent were seen in Seoul. The Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade estimates those patients and their companions spent 12.5 trillion won, about USD 8.4 billion, of which 3.3 trillion won went to medical services.
No hospital system doubles its complex caseload in a year; retail does that. Roughly three out of every four won were spent outside the clinic, on hotels, flights and shopping, and the typical patient in this dataset is a short-haul visitor having a skin procedure between other stops. It is a genuinely lucrative model and Korea runs it better than anyone. It is also fragile in a specific way: nearly nine in ten of those patients pass through one city, and the flow depends on visa policy and the travel mood in Beijing and Tokyo. What doubled in a year can halve in a year.
Malaysia and Thailand are not even counting the same thing
Malaysia’s numbers come straight from the Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council. The country received 1.6 million healthcare travellers in 2024, up 14 percent on the year before, and MHTC puts 2025 revenue at RM3.35 billion with volume running at about 1.85 million travellers a year. The council’s stated goal is RM12 billion in annual revenue by 2030, and the government has declared 2026 the Malaysia Year of Medical Tourism, a campaign launched in July 2025 under health minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad, who chairs MHTC.
Thailand’s tourism authority frames its market in almost opposite terms. TAT expected around 580,000 medical tourists in 2025, about 1.74 percent of international arrivals, generating roughly 125 billion baht. Its deputy governor for tourism products, Nat Kruthasoot, described a deliberate pursuit of high-income patients from Qatar, Oman and Kuwait alongside nearer markets like Cambodia and Bangladesh, pitched on 61 JCI-certified hospitals. The traveller TAT wants earns over 2 million baht a year and spends about 107,662 baht per trip, a little over USD 3,000.
Do the arithmetic on Malaysia and the model shows itself. RM3.35 billion across roughly 1.85 million travellers is under RM2,000 a head, around USD 400, so the typical Malaysian healthcare traveller is a regional outpatient, not a surgical admission. Thailand is selling the inverse: a fraction of Korea’s headline volume at several times Malaysia’s revenue per visit. And note the measurement problem hiding in plain sight. Mordor’s own report credits Thailand with 1.2 million medical travellers in 2024, roughly double the figure TAT plans around. When the report publisher and the country’s own tourism authority differ by a factor of two, the field has no common unit; patients, visits, travellers and visas are being added up as if they were the same thing. My read on Malaysia’s RM12 billion target is that it cannot be reached by adding more of the same travellers. Quadrupling revenue in five years means shifting the case mix toward complex, high-ticket work, which is exactly the ground India and Thailand already hold.
What This Means
Strip the label off and the Asia-Pacific market is at least three distinct products. Korea sells high-volume outpatient aesthetics to short-haul visitors and had a spectacular 2025 doing it. Malaysia sells affordable routine care to its neighbours and compounds at a steady mid-teens rate. India and Thailand sell complex or premium treatment to patients who fly further and pay far more per case. Mordor’s 15.53 percent regional growth rate is a weighted average across businesses that barely compete with one another, which is why I think it is the least useful number in the report for anyone making an actual decision. The growth itself is not in doubt; every national ledger cited here is up. What differs is who captures it, in which specialty, and under which definition of a patient. Through 2026 I would watch two things: whether Korea’s dermatology boom survives its dependence on Seoul and on short-haul goodwill, and whether Malaysia’s 2030 target pushes it upmarket into territory where the competition is no longer on price. The regional headline will keep compounding either way. The country ledgers are where the story is.
