Colombia medical tourism statistics: the 2026 reference sheet

Colombia medical tourism is often discussed in numbers that come with no source — a world ranking here, a patient count there. This page collects only the figures we could trace to the organization that produced them, with a link and a date on every row. Where a widely repeated number doesn’t hold up, we say so at the end.

Journalists, researchers and clinics are welcome to use these statistics. Please cite this page and the original source; the suggested citation is at the bottom.

01The headline numbers

Procedure counts and the foreign-patient share come from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s annual Global Survey¹. Revenue figures come from ProColombia, the government trade-promotion agency, as reported by El Tiempo².

02How many procedures are done in Colombia?

03Where does Colombia rank? Only the ranks ISAPS publishes

ISAPS publishes Colombia’s position in individual categories. It does not publish an overall country ranking, so any claim that Colombia is “first” or “third” in the world for plastic surgery isn’t an ISAPS figure.

04Medical tourism: Colombia’s foreign patients and revenue

Medical tourism in Colombia is best measured by ISAPS’s foreign-patient share. ProColombia’s wellness-tourism figures are shown separately because they cover spas and wellness travel, not surgery.

05Accreditation and outcome studies

*The satisfaction and complication figures come from one private practice in Cartagena, and the authors are that practice’s own surgeons (Premium Care Plastic Surgery)³⁴. They describe one clinic, not the country. The JCI counts come from its live directory⁵.

06Unlicensed-clinic enforcement

07BBL mortality: the international evidence

These studies are not specific to Colombia; they are the international evidence on gluteal fat grafting. They show the risk falling as surgeons adopted grafting above the muscle only.

08US context: how big is the home market?

ASPS’s 2025 report gives procedure counts only. US fee averages published by ASPS are surgeon’s fees only and are not comparable with all-in Colombian quotes.

09Travel and safety

The US advisory explicitly warns that US citizens have suffered serious complications and died after elective surgery in Colombia⁶.

10Figures we don’t use — and why

Some numbers circulate widely in Colombia medical marketing. We couldn’t trace these to a primary source, so they aren’t on this page:

• “Colombia is the #3 (or #1) medical tourism destination in the world.” ISAPS publishes no such overall rank.
• A rise from 25,000 medical tourists in 2015 to 85,000 in 2023. We found this only secondhand, not in a ProColombia publication.
• A target of 2.8 million tourists and US$6.3 billion by 2032. We found it only on a third-party site, not in an official ProColombia document.

If you have a primary source for any of these, we’d like to see it — our standards are on the how we verify page.

11How to cite this page

Please cite the original source alongside ours when you use a single figure — for example, “ISAPS Global Survey 2024, via MedTravel Colombia.” Before you publish, check the row’s date: ISAPS, ASPS and the State Department update on their own schedules.