Data study
We analysed 5,698 mountain huts across the Alps
5,698
Across 7 countries and 42 regions — from famous club huts to remote bivouacs.
Alpine huts are one of Europe's great pieces of infrastructure and one of its least documented. We pulled together what OpenStreetMap, the Club Alpino Italiano's hut registry and our own AI-assisted enrichment record about each of them, and the gaps turned out to be the story.
Published 14 September 2026 · Figures recomputed daily · Free to republish under CC BY 4.0
Six things the data says
7.6%
Can be booked online
Of the 2,650 huts where the answer is recorded, 7.6% can be booked online — 2,650 of all 5,042 huts have a recorded answer.
2,391
Have a website on record
Measured across all 5,042 huts: 47.4% have a website on record.
49
Are staffed in winter
Of the 3,966 huts where the answer is recorded, 1.2% are staffed in winter — 3,966 of all 5,042 huts have a recorded answer.
89
Sit above 3,000 m
Measured across the 3,913 huts with a recorded elevation, out of 5,042 in total.
67,083
Beds counted
Summed across the 1,916 huts with a recorded bed count — roughly 35 beds each.
1,899
Huts run by the seven largest clubs
Club ownership is recorded for 2,118 of the 5,042 huts we hold.
The Alps still run on the telephone
Of the 2,650 huts whose booking method is recorded, 202 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.
- Phone 2,377
- Online 202
- Email 71
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.
- cai.it 307
- refuges.info 241
- ffcam.fr 149
- pzs.si 124
- dav-huettensuche.de 94
- rifugi.cai.it 70
- rifugi.net 51
- onlinebooking.sac-cas.ch 28
How high is an Alpine hut?
The average sits at 1,763 m, the median at 1,726 m — most of the network is mid-mountain, not high-alpine. Only 89 huts stand above 3,000 m.
- 286
- 958
- 1,483
- 788
- 309
- 89
- Below 1,000 m 7.3%
- 1,000–1,500 m 24.5%
- 1,500–2,000 m 37.9%
- 2,000–2,500 m 20.1%
- 2,500–3,000 m 7.9%
- Above 3,000 m 2.3%
The highest huts in the dataset
Ranked among huts with a recorded elevation — huts with no recorded 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.
- CAI 492 · 23.2%
- FFCAM 397 · 18.7%
- DAV 290 · 13.7%
- ÖAV 208 · 9.8%
- SAC 203 · 9.6%
- PZS 181 · 8.5%
- PNF 128 · 6%
- Naturfreunde 98 · 4.6%
- SAT 58 · 2.7%
- ÖTK 39 · 1.8%
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 | 2,011 | 1,830 m of 1,588 known | Rifugio Capanna Regina Margherita 4,554 m | 29,111 across 964 huts |
| Austria | 1,295 | 1,699 m of 1,019 known | Erzherzog-Johann-Hütte 3,454 m | 7,352 across 147 huts |
| France | 641 | 1,886 m of 404 known | Refuge Vallot 4,362 m | 9,961 across 320 huts |
| Switzerland | 608 | 2,018 m of 491 known | Mischabeljochbiwak SAC 3,847 m | 15,990 across 378 huts |
| Germany | 200 | 1,395 m of 163 known | Münchner Haus 2,959 m | 1,371 across 37 huts |
| Slovenia | 192 | 1,232 m of 182 known | Triglavski Dom na Kredarici 2,515 m | 2,881 across 53 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, 3,935 huts have a warden in summer and 49 in winter. What remains open is the unstaffed winter room — a bunk, a stove and an honesty box.
- Staffed in summer
- 3,935
- Of the 4,329 huts where the answer is recorded, 90.9% are staffed in summer — 4,329 of all 5,042 huts have a recorded answer.
- Staffed in winter
- 49
- Of the 3,966 huts where the answer is recorded, 1.2% are staffed in winter — 3,966 of all 5,042 huts have a recorded answer.
- Winter room open
- 281
- Of the 4,032 huts where the answer is recorded, 7% leave a winter room open — 4,032 of all 5,042 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 have no website in any source we hold — and the facilities hikers most want to know about before committing to a nine-hour walk are recorded almost nowhere.
- Have a website on record
- 2,391
- Measured across all 5,042 huts: 47.4% have a website on record.
- Have a phone number on record
- 2,005
- Measured across all 5,042 huts: 39.8% have a phone number on record.
- Have an email address on record
- 1,204
- Measured across all 5,042 huts: 23.9% have an email address on record.
- Have WiFi recorded
- 84
- Of the 568 huts where the answer is recorded, 14.8% have WiFi recorded — 568 of all 5,042 huts have a recorded answer.
A word on how to read these. Contact details are measured across every hut, because we looked for them hut by hut in OpenStreetMap, the CAI registry and our enrichment — a blank means none of those sources 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 in March and April 2026 from OpenStreetMap and, for the Dolomites, the Club Alpino Italiano's public hut registry. Descriptions, FAQs and missing operational fields — season, bed capacity, booking method and, for many huts, the managing club — were filled in by AI-assisted enrichment (Anthropic's Claude Haiku). Every hut record carries its data quality and the date it was last updated.
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. The directory itself holds 5,698 of those: a further handful are huts OpenStreetMap stores twice under different identifiers, once as a node and once as a way, which we merge on import. Every figure on this page is calculated from the 5,698 in the directory. 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 5,698. Where nothing is recorded at all, we say so rather than inferring a "no".
Club ownership. Where OpenStreetMap does not name a hut's operator, the managing club was often filled in by the AI-assisted enrichment. On 12 October 2026 we verified every Austrian (ÖAV) and German (DAV) Alpine Club attribution against the Alpenverein hut list the Austrian Alpine Club publishes in its Hüttenfinder, matched by name and position: a hut that list does not include, and whose OpenStreetMap operator tag does not name the club, is now left unrecorded rather than guessed. Both clubs therefore show fewer huts here than their official totals, because some of their huts are not yet in the directory. On 22 October 2026 we did the same for CAI, SAT, SAC, PZS, AVS, Naturfreunde, ÖTK and the Vanoise National Park, each against the club's own published hut list. FFCAM and the other French national parks publish no list we could check against, so their counts are not yet verified and may still include attributions filled in by the enrichment.
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 the CAI hut registry. 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. The directory is therefore not a complete census: a hut nobody
has mapped with one of those tags is missing — including a number of Austrian and German Alpine
Club huts — and we add them as we find them.
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 3 November 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: 5,698 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.csvQuestions about the method, or a correction to a hut record? Get in touch — corrections are welcome and are applied to the live directory.