AUSTIN, Texas — South by Southwest Conference and Festival (SXSW) organizers said attendance for this year’s event will be on par with last year’s numbers, according to reporting from Axios.
Organizers told Axios they haven’t received the final attendance numbers yet, but they expect it to be close to the 309,300 attendees in 2025. A spokesperson for SXSW told Spectrum News in the days immediately following the festival that they also expected overall attendance to be steady.
SXSW was a couple of days shorter this year and faced a major change with its normal hub of the Austin Convention Center being under a multi-year redevelopment.
Axios also analyzed data on demand for hotels in Austin during SXSW’s seven-day run and found that demand was up 12% compared with last year’s first seven days. But the data from Visit Austin also showed that 20% fewer hotel rooms sold because of the shorter timeframe of the festival.
SXSW is expected to release its economic report later this year.