The Best Time to Buy Concert Tickets

When is the best time to buy tickets?

Resale prices run on supply and demand, and as the event gets closer they break one of two ways. When something's hot (a tour selling out fast, a marquee game, a Broadway run everyone's talking about), the remaining seats get scarcer and prices climb, so waiting tends to cost you. When something's soft, the sellers still holding inventory near the date start cutting to move it, and patience pays.

How does the timeline usually run?

Most events follow the same arc. The announcement comes first, then a few days of presales for fan-club, venue and card-holder lists, then the public on-sale, where the primary seller prices the house (on the biggest tours with dynamic pricing, so face value itself moves). Resale listings appear within hours of the on-sale and are usually at their most expensive in that first week, when the market is thin and sellers are testing prices.

Then comes the quiet middle: weeks or months when listings pile up and prices settle. For soft events this is where the slow drift down begins. The final two weeks decide it: a hot show tightens and climbs as the last seats go, a soft one keeps falling as sellers race each other to the date. Read that last stretch with the signals below, not with a rule of thumb.

What do the numbers actually show?

To check the folk wisdom, we pulled the cheapest all-in seat for every event on this site with tickets in the next 90 days (about 56,000 events on September 8, 2026, with parking, tailgates and hotel packages left out) and took the median by category. The middle event is what a typical buyer meets, so that is the number below, not an average that one $1,400 listing could drag around.

Three things stand out, and the first is not what it looks like. Sports appears to reward waiting: the median get-in inside a week sits about a quarter below the same figure a month out. Most of that is the mix of games rather than the clock. Baseball, the cheapest inventory on the calendar, fills the near buckets as its season ends, and once the league is held fixed the pattern breaks up: hockey gets in at $51 inside a month against $60 further out, and soccer at $25 inside a week against $32, but football runs the other way ($136 against $123) and baseball is flat ($26 against $27). Concerts barely move: a few dollars either way, so timing matters far less than which night you pick. Theater goes the other way: the cheapest seats in the last two days cost more, not less, because the discounted rows sell first and what is left the week of the show is the pricier inventory. Comedy behaves like concerts with a small dip in the final week.

The caveat is bigger than a footnote. This table compares different events at different distances from their date, never the same event tracked over time, so a column can move because the mix of events moved rather than because any price did. That is exactly what the sports column is doing. We now record every event's get-in price once a day, and once there is enough history this table gets replaced with true price-over-time figures for the same events.

The weeknight rule holds for sports and essentially only for sports. The fair test is not the table above but each event against itself, so we took every production and fixture running on both a weeknight and a weekend at the same venue and compared its own two medians. Sports: 52 fixtures, 83% cheaper on a weeknight, median 21% below the weekend. Theater: 528 productions, 48% cheaper, median difference zero. Concerts: 69 runs, 43%, median zero. Comedy: 36 runs, 47%, median zero. Broadway is the one theatre exception and a small one, with 65% of New York productions cheaper on a weeknight by a median of $2.82. The Monday and Tuesday premiums in the table above are real rather than noise, but they belong to Las Vegas and Branson residencies and one-night comedy bookings, not to a weeknight penalty you can act on. Matinees are a wash as well: theatre matinees get in at $106 against $109 in the evening, while daytime sports ($44 against $36) and daytime concerts ($85 against $74) cost more, because those are weekend afternoons and residency shows rather than a cheaper hour.

By month, the calendar you are buying into matters more than the calendar you are buying from. This one line looks past the 90-day window above, out to the end of February, because the seasonal shape only shows up over a longer horizon. Sports get-ins climb from $32 in September to $58 in December as the cheap baseball tail ends and NFL, NBA and NHL inventory takes over, which makes it much the most seasonal category. Concert medians sit in the low $70s through the autumn, step up to the low $80s in December and hold there into the new year, when fewer tours are on the road. Theater runs from $104 in October to $126 in January. Comedy is the flattest thing on the site, $74 to $80 across the whole window. Prices in every table include all fees; sales tax applies in some states.

When should you buy concert tickets?

For a tour with real demand, the cheapest moment is often the initial on-sale, before the resale market wakes up. Miss that window and your best tool is the listing count (explained under the signals below): hundreds of listings mean room to fall, a last handful means a rising market.

Pull up current concert prices and look at two things together: how many listings there are, and the get-in price. That pair tells you far more than the price on its own.

When should you buy sports tickets?

A midweek regular-season game between two ordinary opponents is the textbook case for waiting: prices tend to drift down toward first pitch or tip-off as sellers clear what they're holding. Flip it for the games people circle on the calendar: rivalries, playoff runs, bobblehead and giveaway nights all behave like hot events and hold or climb.

To size up a whole league at once, our sports pages show each team's cheapest current all-in listing, updated through the day. The one game that runs on its own calendar is the Super Bowl: how much Super Bowl tickets cost covers where its prices peak and drift.

When should you buy theater tickets?

Weeknights are worth checking on Broadway, but the edge is smaller than the folklore says. Comparing each New York production against its own other dates, 65% get in cheaper on a weeknight than at the weekend, by a median of $2.82. Across theatre as a whole the effect disappears: of 528 productions running on both, 48% were cheaper on a weeknight and the median difference was zero. Move your date for the seats you want, not for a discount that mostly is not there.

What signals tell you prices are about to move?

Three things, read together, tell you which way an event is heading. First, listing depth: lots of listings mean soft, a thin list means tight. Second, the trend in the get-in price over a few days, not just today's snapshot. Third, how close the date is. When we have enough price history for an event, some pages surface a recent trend line. Lean on the direction it's pointing, not just the number sitting there today.

When does waiting backfire?

"Prices always crash at the last minute" is a myth, and an expensive one for anything in real demand. For sought-after events the opposite holds: last-minute buyers routinely pay the most, and the best seats are long gone by then. If an event is clearly hot and you know you're going, don't gamble on a drop that may never come. Buy once the price looks fair. And when you are deliberately playing the final days on a soft event, the last-minute guide covers how to do it without getting burned.