Glastonbury Festival

Glastonbury 2027: dates.

Glastonbury 2027 runs from Wednesday 23 to Sunday 27 June 2027, at Worthy Farm. The festival confirmed the Glastonbury 2027 dates on its own site, and set its ticket sales for October 2026: ticket and coach packages from 1 October and general admission from 4 October.

When is the next Glastonbury? That one, in 2027. When is Glastonbury 2027 in the usual calendar? Where it usually is, in the last week of June.

Why there is no Glastonbury this year.

Glastonbury takes fallow years. The fallow year meaning comes from farming: a field left unplanted for a season to recover. Worthy Farm is a working dairy farm, and roughly every five years the festival stays away to give the land, the villages around it and the organisers a break.

The pattern goes back decades: there was no festival in 1988, 1991, 1996, 2001 or 2006, and 2012 was skipped for the London Olympics, which moved the sequence on and made 2018 the next fallow year. The pandemic cancelled 2020 and 2021. During the 2025 festival the Eavis family announced that there would be no festival in 2026, the first planned fallow year in eight years.

So is Glastonbury on this year? Not in 2026. How often is Glastonbury, then? Most summers, with a year off about every fifth year; the Glastonbury fallow years are announced well in advance.

Where Glastonbury Festival is.

Where is Glastonbury? The festival is at Worthy Farm in Somerset, in South West England, between the villages of Pilton and Pylle, six miles east of the town of Glastonbury and overlooked by Glastonbury Tor. The nearest town is Shepton Mallet, three miles to the north-east. The Glastonbury location is the reason for the name, but the festival is not in the town itself.

The farm lies in a valley at the head of the Whitelake River, between two low limestone ridges at the southern edge of the Mendip Hills. That valley floods: the site was badly hit in 1997, 1998 and 2005, and the drainage has been rebuilt since. Extra coaches run to the site from across the country, and festival trains from London run to Castle Cary station, with shuttle buses to the gates.

Where is Glastonbury festival held within the farm? Around a backstage compound, with the Pyramid Stage to the north and the Other Stage to the south, the acoustic, comedy and circus areas to the east, the Green Fields to the south, and the late-night stages in the south-east corner. The Glastonbury festival location has grown beyond Worthy Farm itself: in 1985 the neighbouring Cockmill Farm was bought when the festival outgrew it.

When Glastonbury is, and how long it lasts.

Glastonbury is in late June, over five days from Wednesday to Sunday. The gates open on the Wednesday, the main stages run from Friday to Sunday, and the Glastonbury dates for 2027 are 23 to 27 June.

When does Glastonbury finish? On the Sunday night, when the Pyramid Stage headliner closes the festival; people leave on the Monday. When does Glastonbury end in 2027? On Sunday 27 June.

How big Glastonbury is.

How many people go to Glastonbury? Around 200,000. Wikipedia gives a capacity of 210,000 in 2022 and more than 210,000 on site in 2023, when 142,000 tickets were sold. The Glastonbury capacity has grown under licence from the local council, which set the first crowd limit at 30,000 in 1983.

How many people attend Glastonbury when the fence fails? More than the licence allows. In 1994 the Levellers played to as many as 300,000 people, and in 2000 about 100,000 gatecrashers pushed the Glastonbury attendance to an estimated 250,000, which led the council to refuse further licences until the problem was solved. The answer, from 2002, was a "superfence" around the site.

How big is Glastonbury Festival on the ground? It covers some 1,500 acres of farmland, with its own water supply from two reservoirs, more than 4,000 toilets and generators providing over 27 megawatts of electricity.

A short history, and who runs Glastonbury.

The first Glastonbury festival was the Pop, Blues & Folk Festival of 19 September 1970, headlined by Tyrannosaurus Rex after the Kinks pulled out. In 1971 came the Glastonbury Fair, with David Bowie on the bill and the first Pyramid Stage, a one-tenth scale copy of the Great Pyramid built from scaffolding and metal sheeting.

From 1981 Eavis ran the festival himself, with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and it became an annual event apart from its fallow years. It made its first profit that year, and Eavis gave £20,000 of it to CND; since the end of the Cold War the main beneficiaries have been Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, which supply volunteers and features in return. The Pyramid Stage burned down a week before the 1994 festival and was rebuilt for 2000.

Dance music arrived from the edges. In 1989 unofficial sound systems played acid house around the clock, and in 1994 Orbital's set, broadcast live on Channel 4, made dance music part of the main event; a dance tent followed in 1995 and the Dance Village in 1997.

Who runs Glastonbury? Glastonbury Festivals Ltd, the company of Michael Eavis, who ran it with his wife Jean until her death in 1999 and now with his daughter Emily Eavis and her husband. From 2002 to 2012 Festival Republic managed the logistics and security; since then the festival has been independent. Most of the people working on it are volunteers, and most of its profits go to charity.

The Pyramid Stage and the rest of the site.

The Glastonbury Pyramid Stage is the main stage, 25 metres tall, and the one every headliner plays. The first pyramid stood on the site in 1971; the 1981 version doubled as a hay barn and cowshed through the winter, and the present Pyramid Stage dates from 2000.

How many stages at Glastonbury? More than 100, by the festival's own count, with more than 4,000 performances. After the Pyramid Stage come the Other Stage and dozens of tents and fields: the Park, opened in 2007; Woodsies, the former John Peel stage, renamed in 2023; the Green Fields and the Stone Circle; and the late-night areas. The Arcadia Glastonbury stage is the most famous of those: a 50-tonne, 15-metre mechanical spider built from recycled military hardware that breathes fire over a DJ, first seen at Glastonbury in 2010 and replaced in 2024 by the Dragonfly, a stage made from a former Royal Navy helicopter.

The site has always been more than its stages: there are theatre, comedy, circus and cabaret fields, and the Green Fields keep the festival's hippie roots, with crafts, healing and a stone circle aligned to the solstice.

Glastonbury headliners by year.

The Glastonbury headliners by year read like a history of British and world pop, rock and dance. The table gives the headliners Wikipedia lists for each festival, and the years there was none.

Coldplay hold the record, with five headline sets, the fifth in 2024. The Cure have headlined four times, and David Bowie played the 1971 festival and headlined in 2000.

The music

What the music actually is.

Glastonbury is not a genre festival. Its main stage has gone from Tyrannosaurus Rex and David Bowie to Oasis, Radiohead and Coldplay, then to Jay-Z in 2008, Beyoncé in 2011, Stormzy in 2019 and Billie Eilish, the youngest headliner, in 2022. Around the Pyramid Stage are more than 100 stages for everything else: folk, jazz, world music, comedy and theatre.

Dance music has had a steadily bigger place since Orbital in 1994. The Prodigy headlined in 1997 and the Chemical Brothers in 2000, and the late-night areas now run until morning. The Prodigy came back in 2025, and the BBC's clip of "Breathe" from that set has about 3.8 million views.

The festival also plays its own history. A Sunday "legends" slot is kept for older stars, and some of the most remembered sets have come from outside the headline lines: Radiohead in 1997, Orbital in 1994, and the Levellers' record crowd in 1994.

Hearing Glastonbury from home.

The BBC has televised Glastonbury since 1997, when it took over from Channel 4, so most people watch Glastonbury live on the BBC. In 2020, the year of the cancelled 50th anniversary, it broadcast classic sets instead, among them Taylor Swift, Adele, Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and R.E.M.

The most watched Glastonbury video on BBC Music's YouTube channel is Coldplay playing "Fix You" at the 2024 festival, with about 67 million views. For a whole set, R.E.M. have posted the complete BBC broadcast of their 1999 headline show on their own channel, where it has about 2.2 million views.

Glastonbury is the oldest of the festivals on this site. Our guides also cover Creamfields, the other big English festival, Coachella and Lollapalooza in America, and Tomorrowland. And the Selector plays one full DJ set at random from 62,877, if you would rather not choose.