Quick take
How big the sector actually is
UK Music, the umbrella body for the British music industry, reports that live music and festivals together attracted around 23.5 million music tourists in 2024 and added roughly 10 billion pounds to the UK economy, split between direct spending and the wider ripple through hotels, transport and hospitality. Festivals are a major slice of that, even though no source cleanly separates festival spend from concert spend.
The reason those numbers matter is scale and stickiness. A festival is not just ticket revenue; it is a few days where tens of thousands of people eat, sleep, travel and spend in one place. That is why local councils publish economic-impact studies running into tens of millions of pounds for a single weekend, and why the loss of a festival is felt well beyond the people who used to attend it.
How many festivals are left
The Association of Independent Festivals counted 592 UK music festivals in 2025, made up of roughly 360 greenfield events in fields and farmland and around 232 town or city festivals in fixed venues. That sounds healthy until you compare it to the pre-pandemic peak, which UK Music and AIF put nearer 800 to 900 events.
In other words, somewhere between a fifth and a third of the country’s festivals have disappeared in a few years. The survivors are not evenly spread either: the squeeze has fallen hardest on small and mid-size independents, while the largest corporate-backed weekenders have mostly held on.
The closures, year by year
There is no single official register of festival deaths, so the counts vary by who is doing the counting. UK Music’s 2025 regional report cites around 250 UK festival closures since 2019. AIF tracks the annual run rate and the picture is getting worse, not better: 36 festivals fell in 2023, then 78 in 2024, and 39 had already gone by the middle of June 2025.
The drivers are well documented: operating costs up 30 to 40 percent since the pandemic while ticket prices have risen far less, supplier shortages, weather risk and thin margins that leave no buffer for a bad year. For anyone planning a 2026 summer, the practical lesson is to book the independents you love early, because the gap between "running this year" and "gone" can be a single difficult season.
Why the data is such a mess
UK Music’s own methodology says it plainly: there is no single source for UK festival data, so it has to assemble its database from multiple places and make assumptions about capacity and attendance for smaller events. Council licensing pages, ticketing sites, sector reports and company filings all hold pieces of the picture, and none of them agree on format.
That fragmentation is the whole reason a cleaned, source-linked directory is worth building. We track this market because we run festival accommodation and crews across it, and the same gaps that make the data frustrating to compile are what make a single tidy reference genuinely useful. Every festival page on this site is our attempt to be that reference for one event at a time.
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FAQ
How many music festivals are there in the UK?
The Association of Independent Festivals counted 592 UK music festivals in 2025, made up of roughly 360 greenfield events and 232 town or city festivals. That is down sharply from a pre-pandemic peak estimated at around 800 to 900.
How many UK festivals have closed since 2019?
Counts vary by source because there is no single official register. UK Music’s 2025 regional report cites around 250 closures since 2019, while AIF tracks the annual run rate: 78 festivals fell in 2024 compared with 36 in 2023, and 39 had already gone by mid-June 2025.
How much is the UK festival sector worth?
UK Music reports that live music and festivals attracted about 23.5 million music tourists in 2024 and added roughly £10 billion to the UK economy, split between direct and indirect spending. Festivals are a major part of that figure, though no source isolates festivals from concerts perfectly.
Why is festival data so inconsistent?
UK Music’s own methodology states there is no single source for festival data and that it has to build its database from multiple places, making assumptions for smaller events. That fragmentation is why a cleaned, source-linked directory is genuinely useful rather than just another listings page.