McKinney tourism brings $325 million, boosts jobs, tax revenue

McKinney’s tourism pitch is no longer just about drawing a crowd to the downtown square. Visit McKinney said visitor spending reached $325 million in 2025, up from $301.3 million the year before, and that activity generated $34.9 million in local tax revenue while supporting more than 2,200 hospitality jobs.

Those numbers help explain why city leaders are treating travel like an economic base, not a side benefit. National Travel and Tourism Week, running May 3-9, put that strategy in sharper focus as McKinney leaned into the 2026 theme, “Postmarked: Essential.” Visit McKinney tied the local push to broader national figures, saying the U.S. travel industry generates $3 trillion in economic output and supports 15 million jobs. The city’s bet is that McKinney can capture more of that spending by keeping visitors in town longer and widening what they do once they arrive.

The money is spreading across restaurants, hotels, retail, festivals and sports events. Visit McKinney said the city’s hotel occupancy tax revenue topped $3.3 million in fiscal year 2024-25, up $200,000, or 6.7%, from the previous year. Occupancy held at 71.2%, with more than 20 hotels and about 300 short-term rentals now operating in the city. June and July each posted double-digit hotel revenue growth, 12.6% and 12.4% year over year, a sign that the tourism calendar is doing more than filling a few peak weekends.

The city’s development pipeline shows how far that ambition has gone. The JW Marriott Resort McKinney Craig Ranch is planned for the northeast corner of Collin McKinney Parkway and Van Tuyl Parkway with 290 rooms, and the McKinney Community Development Corporation considered a $25 million grant and a $10.25 million loan request for the project on June 26, 2025. That kind of public support underscores the tradeoff in McKinney’s destination strategy: the payoff could be more rooms, more visitors and more sales, but it also puts taxpayer-backed incentives behind a luxury-scale hospitality buildout.

McKinney’s new tourism identity was reinforced when the Texas Governor’s Office designated it a Tourism Friendly Texas Certified Community on April 30, 2025. City leaders are also expecting more lodging capacity, including Avid Hotel, AC Marriott, and a dual-property La Quinta and Hawthorn Suites in 2026.

Big events are already showing the return. During the 2025 CJ Cup Byron Nelson, visitors accounted for 29% of total spending, up from 28% the year before, and 57% of visitors came from outside Texas, compared with 52% in 2024. For McKinney, the challenge now is turning those one-time trips into longer stays, stronger local business growth and a tourism economy that lasts beyond the event calendar.