Attendance at arts and cultural organizations can help demonstrate the importance of the sector to the community and provide insight into the impact of cultural institutions and how institutions are engaging community members.

In 2022, nearly 4.6 million people visited an arts and culture organization in the MetroWest region. Approximately 1.4 million were paid attendees and about 3.2 million attended or engaged for free. Middlesex had the largest attendance at 3.5 million followed by Worcester at 826,000 and Norfolk at 224,000.

The count of attendees is not unduplicated, meaning people will be counted more than once if they attended multiple organizations or attended an organization more than once. Data reflects participation totals from MetroWest arts and cultural organizations' submissions to the DataArts project at Southern Methodist University. The number of organizations reporting attendance data varies significantly from year to year making it difficult to compare data across multiple years.