The Austin City Limits Music Festival, one of the city’s biggest annual events, now has a permanent home for at least the next 15 years.
Austin-based concert promoter C3 Presents, which stages the two-weekend festival each fall, recently signed an agreement with the City of Austin that extends the event’s use of Zilker Park until the end of 2040. Zilker has hosted ACL Fest since the inaugural festival in 2002.
The agreement also sets an expectation that festival dates will continue to fall “on or about the first two weekends of October.”
The 2024 edition of ACL Fest contributed $534.8 million to the Austin economy. Since 2006, when C3 Presents started tracking the event’s economic impact, it has generated more than $4.1 billion for the local economy.
Also since 2006, ACL Fest has allocated nearly $71 million for improvements at Zilker and other Austin parks. Repairs at Zilker begin right after each festival’s six-day run.
“The Parks Department is back in there and assessing any damage, doing any sort of restoration that needs to be done,” Colin Wallis, CEO of the Austin Parks Foundation, told KUT before this year’s festival. “If it’s a really rainy year, you’re likely going to have some turf replacement. If it’s a really dry year, you’re going to have a lot of watering.”
The 2025 festival, held October 3-5 and 10-12, featured performers such as Sabrina Carpenter, Luke Combs, Hozier, Maren Morris, and The Killers. Dates for next year’s festival haven’t been announced.
In October, a similar agreement cemented the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix’s long-term status at the Circuit of The Americas (COTA). It will remain through the 2034 season, meaning Austin’s fall events calendar for the next decade is looking pretty unshakeable.