Jackie Hai/KJZZ

Tourists at the Grand Canyon's South Rim.

More people visited Arizona last year than ever before and spent record amounts of money, according to research released Wednesday.

Arizona’s pre-recession high for visitation and visitor spending was in 2007. In the 10 years since, the state added 4.5 million visitors. The state welcomed 43.9 million overnight visitors in 2017 and those visitors collectively spent $22.7 billion during their stays.

"What strikes me is almost all of those additions are out-of-state visitors," said Scott Dunn with the Arizona Office of Tourism.  "That is important to us and it should be important to Arizonans because that what makes tourism and export industry."

According to the Office of Tourism’s annual research, which was released at the annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism, visitor spending directly supported 187,000 jobs in the state last year. Tourism-related jobs generated $6.9 billion in employment revenue.

"I think the big difference that we saw this year was in visitor spending. It jumped about 7 percent. That’s the biggest year over year gain we’ve had in more than a decade," said Dunn.

Spending by visitors generated $3.4 billion in tax revenue last year — nearly $2 billion of which was collected at the state and local levels. Tourism-related state tax collections were up 9 percent. Visitor spending in Arizona has steadily climbed every year since 2009.