Data study

We analysed every mountain hut in the Alps

5,630

5,630 mountain huts across 7 countries and 41 regions — every one the public record knows about.

Alpine huts are one of Europe's great pieces of infrastructure and one of its least documented. We pulled together what every public source knows about all of them, and the gaps turned out to be the story.

Download the data (CSV) How we counted

Published 14 September 2026 · Figures recomputed daily · Free to republish under CC BY 4.0

Six things the data says

7.7%

Can be booked online

Of the 2,651 huts where the answer is recorded, 7.7% can be booked online — 2,651 of all 4,973 huts have a recorded answer.

2,390

Publish a website

Measured across all 4,973 huts: 48.1% publish a website.

44

Are staffed in winter

Of the 3,963 huts where the answer is recorded, 1.1% are staffed in winter — 3,963 of all 4,973 huts have a recorded answer.

86

Sit above 3,000 m

Measured across the 3,842 huts with a recorded elevation, out of 4,973 in total.

66,944

Beds counted

Summed across the 1,910 huts that publish a bed count — roughly 35 beds each.

2,746

Huts run by the seven largest clubs

Club ownership is recorded for 3,135 of the 4,973 huts we hold.

The Alps still run on the telephone

Of the 2,651 huts that say how they take bookings, 203 accept an online reservation. The rest want a phone call, and in a valley with no signal that is a real constraint on how people plan a hut-to-hut route.

  1. Phone 2,377
  2. Online 203
  3. Email 71
How Alpine huts take bookings, among the huts that publish a booking method.

And there is no single system

The huts that do take bookings online are spread across national club portals that do not talk to each other. Planning a route that crosses a border means holding several accounts at once.

  1. cai.it 307
  2. refuges.info 241
  3. ffcam.fr 149
  4. pzs.si 124
  5. dav-huettensuche.de 95
  6. rifugi.cai.it 70
  7. rifugi.net 51
  8. onlinebooking.sac-cas.ch 28
Booking platforms by number of huts, top eight.

How high is an Alpine hut?

The average sits at 1,757 m, the median at 1,719 m — most of the network is mid-mountain, not high-alpine. Only 86 huts stand above 3,000 m.

  1. 281
  2. 948
  3. 1,465
  4. 775
  5. 287
  6. 86
  1. Below 1,000 m 7.3%
  2. 1,000–1,500 m 24.7%
  3. 1,500–2,000 m 38.1%
  4. 2,000–2,500 m 20.2%
  5. 2,500–3,000 m 7.5%
  6. Above 3,000 m 2.2%
Elevation distribution across the 3,842 huts with a recorded elevation. 1,131 huts have no published elevation in any source, which is itself a finding.

The highest huts in the dataset

Ranked among huts with a recorded elevation — huts with no published altitude cannot appear here.

Hut Country Club Elevation
Rifugio Capanna Regina Margherita Italy CAI 4,554 m
Refuge Vallot France FFCAM 4,362 m
Bivacco Felice Giordano Italy CAI 4,166 m
Bivacco Città di Gallarate Italy CAI 3,960 m
Mischabeljochbiwak SAC Switzerland SAC 3,847 m
Rifugio Jean-Antoine Carrel Italy — 3,829 m
Refuge du Goûter France FFCAM 3,815 m
Schalijochbiwak Switzerland SAC 3,786 m
Mönchsjochhütte Switzerland — 3,650 m
Bivacco Rauzi Italy CAI 3,640 m

See the full ranking on the highest Alpine huts.

Who owns the Alps' huts

Not hotel groups. The Alpine hut network is overwhelmingly owned by member-funded alpine clubs, most of them founded in the 1860s and 1870s, and most still running their huts on subscriptions and volunteer labour.

  1. CAI 779 · 24.8%
  2. ÖAV 615 · 19.6%
  3. FFCAM 416 · 13.3%
  4. DAV 302 · 9.6%
  5. PZS 247 · 7.9%
  6. SAC 195 · 6.2%
  7. SAT 192 · 6.1%
  8. PNF 152 · 4.8%
  9. AVS 134 · 4.3%
  10. Naturfreunde 70 · 2.2%
Huts by managing club, top ten. Club ownership is recorded for 3,135 of the 4,973 huts; percentages are of the recorded set. Hover a club abbreviation for its full name.

Country by country

Mean elevation is calculated only across the huts in that country with a recorded elevation; the denominator is shown beneath each figure.

Country Huts Mean elevation Highest hut Beds counted
Italy 2,102 1,834 m of 1,659 known Rifugio Capanna Regina Margherita 4,554 m 30,606 across 994 huts
Austria 1,135 1,641 m of 876 known Erzherzog-Johann-Hütte 3,454 m 5,928 across 114 huts
France 640 1,890 m of 405 known Refuge Vallot 4,362 m 9,940 across 320 huts
Switzerland 631 2,016 m of 510 known Mischabeljochbiwak SAC 3,847 m 16,135 across 384 huts
Slovenia 221 1,176 m of 202 known Triglavski Dom na Kredarici 2,515 m 2,739 across 47 huts
Germany 188 1,354 m of 151 known Münchner Haus 2,959 m 1,211 across 35 huts
Liechtenstein 2 1,768 m of 2 known Pfälzerhütte 2,108 m 122 across 2 huts

The Alps are a summer-only system

The hut network all but closes for most of the year. Where staffing is recorded, 3,934 huts have a warden in summer and 44 in winter. What remains open is the unstaffed winter room — a bunk, a stove and an honesty box.

Staffed in summer
3,934
Of the 4,327 huts where the answer is recorded, 90.9% are staffed in summer — 4,327 of all 4,973 huts have a recorded answer.
Staffed in winter
44
Of the 3,963 huts where the answer is recorded, 1.1% are staffed in winter — 3,963 of all 4,973 huts have a recorded answer.
Winter room open
275
Of the 4,029 huts where the answer is recorded, 6.8% leave a winter room open — 4,029 of all 4,973 huts have a recorded answer.

Most Alpine huts are invisible online

This is the finding that surprised us most. Across a network that sleeps tens of thousands of people every summer, a majority of huts publish no website at all — and the facilities hikers most want to know about before committing to a nine-hour walk are recorded almost nowhere.

Publish a website
2,390
Measured across all 4,973 huts: 48.1% publish a website.
Publish a phone number
2,001
Measured across all 4,973 huts: 40.2% publish a phone number.
Publish an email address
1,198
Measured across all 4,973 huts: 24.1% publish an email address.
Have WiFi recorded
83
Of the 567 huts where the answer is recorded, 14.6% have WiFi recorded — 567 of all 4,973 huts have a recorded answer.

A word on how to read these. Contact details are measured across every hut, because we went looking for them hut by hut across OpenStreetMap and all seven club registries — a blank means no public source lists one, which is the finding. WiFi is different: nobody has surveyed it, so a blank there means unmeasured, and those huts are left out of the denominator rather than counted as a "no". Every figure on this page names the huts behind it, so you can see which of the two you are reading.

Methodology

Sources. Hut records were collected from OpenStreetMap and the public registries of seven national alpine clubs — CAI and SAT in Italy, the ÖAV in Austria, the SAC in Switzerland, the FFCAM in France, the DAV in Germany and the PZS in Slovenia — in March and April 2026.

De-duplication. The seven country extracts contain 7,764 records but only 5,640 distinct huts. The bounding boxes of neighbouring countries overlap, so a hut on a border is collected twice — once in each country's extract. We report the de-duplicated count. Anyone quoting the raw record count would overstate the size of the Alpine hut network by more than a third.

Known versus unknown. Most fields in the public record are blank. Every rate on this page is therefore stated against the number of huts where the answer is actually recorded, never against the full 5,630. Where nothing is recorded at all, we say so rather than inferring a "no".

What counts as a hut. A building qualifies if OpenStreetMap tags it tourism=alpine_hut (staffed mountain huts) or tourism=wilderness_hut (unstaffed refuges and bivouac boxes), or if it appears in one of the club registries. Valley hotels and campsites are out. So are emergency shelters mapped as amenity=shelter — which is why you will not find the Solvay hut on the Matterhorn's Hörnli ridge in the elevation ranking, despite it standing at 4,003 m.

Which huts the rates are measured across. Rates are computed across huts with a published directory page. A minority of records are too fragmentary to publish; they are counted in the headline total but excluded from the rates, and each figure names the number of huts behind it.

Country attribution. A hut's country comes from the source extract it was collected in. On border ridges this occasionally attributes a hut to the neighbouring country; we correct these as we find them.

Freshness. Figures are recomputed daily from the live directory, so the numbers above may differ slightly from the day this study was published. Last recomputed 19 September 2026.

Cite this study

This report is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). Republish the figures, redraw the charts, quote whatever is useful — the one condition is a link back.

Citation

HutLists (2026). The Alpine Hut Report: 5,630 mountain huts in the Alps, analysed. Retrieved from https://hutlists.com/alpine-hut-report

Attribution snippet

The data

Every table on this page is available as a single CSV — one row per metric, each with the number of huts it was measured across.

Download alpine-hut-report.csv

Questions about the method, or a correction to a hut record? Get in touch — corrections are welcome and are applied to the live directory.

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