The best New Year's Eve festivals, 2026 into 2027

NYE festivals in the United States.

Countdown NYE is Insomniac's New Year's Eve festival, from the promoter behind EDC Las Vegas. For New Year's Eve 2026 it goes back to the NOS Events Center in San Bernardino, California, after a year in downtown Los Angeles, and runs over two days, 31 December 2026 and 1 January 2027, with five covered stages and more than 75 artists. Insomniac also runs Forever Midnight in Los Angeles, a New Year's Eve event it started in 2023. The Countdown festival bills itself as an alien invasion for electronic music fans in Southern California.

Decadence NYE fills the Colorado Convention Center in Denver on 30 and 31 December, with a second edition in Arizona. It is produced by Global Dance and AEG Presents Rocky Mountains and has been running since at least 2011, when its lineup included BT and Flux Pavilion. HiJinx, founded in 2018, takes over the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on 30 and 31 December 2026 and leans towards bass music. Eternal NYE in Orlando is a bass music festival too, at the city's amphitheater.

CRSSD Proper NYE is the house-leaning option, at Petco Park, the baseball stadium in San Diego, from 3pm on 31 December to 10pm on 1 January, with takeovers from This Never Happened and Daisy Chain for the 2026 edition. Lights All Night has run since 2010 and is often described as the longest-running EDM festival in Texas. It grew up at Dallas Market Hall and moves to Fair Park for its sixteenth edition, on 30 and 31 December 2026.

Smaller rooms do New Year's Eve too. The Concourse Project in Austin booked Tinlicker for New Year's Eve 2024, and filmed the set.

New Year's Eve in Europe: FCKNYE and the clubs.

Europe's biggest New Year's Eve festival is FCKNYE, at Brussels Expo. Three entrepreneurs from Charleroi started it about fifteen years ago, and its 2025 edition ran for three days, from 30 December to 1 January, with five stages, more than 110 artists and around 70,000 people expected, on a bill split between French-language rap and techno. It calls itself the biggest New Year festival in the world, and the next edition runs from 30 December 2026 to 1 January 2027.

Most of Europe still sees the new year in at clubs. Awakenings runs New Year's Eve nights at the Gashouder in Amsterdam, a round 19th-century gasholder that the Dutch techno promoter has used since its first edition in 1997, and the photograph above is from 31 December 2017. Check the Awakenings site for the 2026 dates.

That is Adam Beyer and Joseph Capriati at Awakenings' New Year's Eve special on 31 December 2013, filmed by Awakenings in the Gashouder.

Elsewhere in Europe, the New Year's music festivals are mostly club weekends. Berlin, London, Barcelona and Prague all have clubs that run long New Year's Eve nights, and the best clubbing cities in Europe guide covers them. For the clubs in each city, see the guides to Berlin, Amsterdam and London.

Australia and New Zealand: New Year in summer.

Rhythm and Vines started in 2003 at Waiohika Estate, a vineyard near Gisborne on New Zealand's east coast, when three University of Otago friends, Hamish Pinkham, Tom Gibson and Andrew Witters, put on a New Year's party for about 1,800 people. Gisborne is the first city in the world to see the new year's sunrise, so Rhythm and Vines is the first festival to see it too. It is now one of the country's largest camping festivals. New Zealand also has Rhythm & Alps, in a mountain valley near Wānaka.

Beyond the Valley has run over New Year's Eve since 2014, first on Phillip Island and since then at sites east and west of Melbourne, as a multi-day festival with several stages. Field Day, in Sydney, is a one-day festival on New Year's Day itself, in The Domain park, with hip-hop, house, indie and electronic acts. For the rest of the Australian season, see the best EDM festivals in Australia.

How to choose a New Year's Eve festival.

If you want the biggest production and a two-night rave, go to Countdown, Decadence or HiJinx. If you want house on New Year's Eve, CRSSD Proper NYE. If you want techno, go to Europe and pick a club, or Awakenings in Amsterdam. If you want New Year outdoors, in summer, with a tent, go to Rhythm and Vines or Beyond the Valley, and if you want to be among the first people in the world to see the new year, Rhythm and Vines is the only choice.

Some of them sell early: CRSSD put Proper NYE 26/27 on sale on 9 September 2026, almost four months before the night.

For the rest of the year, the Selector plays a set at random from all 72,458 in the catalogue behind this site, and the best electronic music festivals in Europe covers the summer.