Oktoberfest Munich 2026

Oktoberfest is the largest folk festival on earth: sixteen-plus days on Munich's Theresienwiese, six to seven million visitors, and beer from exactly six breweries — Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner, and Spaten — poured by the litre in fourteen great tents. The 2026 edition, the 191st Wiesn, runs from 19 September to 4 October. Entry is free, the beer is strong, and the whole thing began with a wedding.

A royal wedding that never ended

On 12 October 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria — the future King Ludwig I — married Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen, and Munich threw a party on the meadow outside the city gates. The climax was a horse race before the royal family, and the field was named Theresienwiese, 'Therese's meadow', in the bride's honour. Locals shortened it to 'Wiesn', which is still what everyone calls the festival. The race was repeated the following autumn, an agricultural show attached itself, and a one-off celebration quietly became an institution.

From horse race to the world's fair of beer

The festival grew the way Munich grows things: slowly, then completely. Beer stalls became beer halls of canvas and timber; the horse race faded; carousel builders and rotisserie cooks moved in; and the start crept forward into late September for the kinder weather, keeping only the first October weekend as its anchor. The agricultural show from which it grew still returns to the southern end of the meadow every four years, a quiet reminder that this began as a fair for farmers, not drinkers. It has not been unbreakable: war, hyperinflation, and two cholera epidemics cancelled it repeatedly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the pandemic silenced the meadow in 2020 and 2021 — which is why 2026, more than two centuries after the wedding, is only the 191st Wiesn.

The festival also carries a scar. The far-right bomb attack at the main entrance on 26 September 1980 killed thirteen people, including the attacker, and wounded more than two hundred — the deadliest far-right attack in the Federal Republic's history. The memorial stands at the spot where it happened; pausing there, between the security lanes and the first tent, is part of knowing what this place is and what it has survived.

The beer: one word, six breweries

'Oktoberfestbier' is a protected designation: only Munich's six breweries, brewing within the city limits, may use it, and only their beer is poured on the Wiesn. What fills the Maß today is festbier — deep gold, softly malty, dangerously drinkable at around six percent — a style the breweries began shifting to in the 1970s in place of the amber, heavier märzen that had ruled the festival for a century. Nothing pours until the ritual is done: at noon on the first Saturday, in the Schottenhamel tent, the Lord Mayor of Munich drives a tap into the first keg and shouts 'O'zapft is!' — 'it's tapped' — followed by a twelve-gun salute and, by tradition, a first Maß for Bavaria's Minister-President.

The tapping is a civic performance with real stakes: mayors are judged for life on how many mallet blows they needed (the record stands at two strokes, and every incumbent knows it). From that moment the metric of the festival becomes the pour itself — a proper Wiesn Maß carries a head you could rest a coin on, and the tents' spot-checkers measure fills seriously, because at these prices Munich drinkers audit their litre.

Fourteen tents, each a different party

The big tents hold around 100,000 seats between them, and each has a personality worth choosing deliberately. Schottenhamel is where the first keg is tapped and where young Munich celebrates; Hofbräu-Festzelt is the largest and the most international, the one tent with a standing area in front of the band; Augustiner-Festhalle is the locals' and families' favourite, serving its festbier from traditional wooden barrels; Hacker-Festzelt drinks under a painted Bavarian sky — its nickname is 'Himmel der Bayern', the heaven of the Bavarians — and turns into a concert by evening. Around them: the Ochsenbraterei roasting whole oxen for Spaten, Fischer-Vroni grilling fish on sticks for Augustiner, and the Oide Wiesn corner, where the festival recreates its own past with historic rides and beer in stoneware steins.

The numbers behind a normal year are their own attraction: six to seven million guests drink six to seven million litres of festbier, carve through several hundred thousand roast chickens and over a hundred oxen, and leave behind a lost-property office holding everything from passports and wedding rings to hearing aids, crutches, and the occasional dachshund. Some 13,000 people work the festival, thousands of them in service, and the waitresses who carry ten or more full Maß krugs at a time — over twenty kilograms of glass and beer — remain the single most impressive sight on the meadow.

Traditions worth timing your visit around

Two parades bracket the opening weekend. On the first Saturday morning the festival landlords and breweries enter in the Wiesn-Einzug — decorated drays, brass bands, the works — and on the first Sunday the Trachten- und Schützenzug winds seven kilometres through the city centre: some nine thousand participants in historical costume, riflemen's guilds, and alpine bands, led by the Münchner Kindl on horseback. Inside the tents, the rhythm is set by 'Ein Prosit', played every twenty minutes or so to make the room drink together. Dirndl and lederhosen are genuinely worn, not costume-party ironic; gingerbread hearts are still the souvenir; and Tuesday family days tame the fairground prices.

Oktoberfest 2026: the practical part

The 2026 Wiesn runs Saturday 19 September to Sunday 4 October. Entry to the grounds and every tent is free; you pay only for what you eat and drink, and a Maß will cost roughly fifteen to sixteen euros depending on the tent. Table reservations cost nothing but are claimed months ahead through each tent's own office and come with minimum-consumption vouchers — without one, arrive on a weekday before mid-afternoon and you will walk into most tents; weekends fill by late morning. Take the U4 or U5 to Theresienwiese rather than driving, carry some cash even though cards have spread, and leave big bags at home — security has banned them since 2016. Then find a seat, because in a Bavarian tent, no seat means no beer.