With the dust settling on another Edinburgh Fringe, I am going to do my best to explain and analyse exactly what happened this year and the reasons why the drop-off in ticket sales proved so spectacular in the final week, using the limited data that I have and my experience on the ground.
Rest assured, there will be more positive stuff in the final section. Until then, it’s time to put on the waders and get stuck into this thick sludge.
Edinburgh Fringe has been a massive part of my life for the past 16 years. I hold the festival in great affection, and it has been how I’ve planned my entire comedy year since 2010. I want to continue attending the fringe, but there are many things that need fixing. I have never known a final week to be so dead, and that did not happen by coincidence.
Put simply, nothing about the current Edinburgh Fringe operating model is sustainable. Many have been expecting everything to culminate in an eventual crash, but I think a gradual deflation over time is what we are seeing.
Not content with having the golden goose of August in Edinburgh, there are those who also want to pluck its feathers for eiderdown, extract its fat for baking, and funnel corn down its neck for foie gras – then still expecting it to lay golden eggs. Something is going to break sooner or later.
As for the reasons, there is currently much finger-pointing, buck-passing, and claiming that actions of their organisation had no impact on fringe visitor numbers this year.
It is easy to apportion the blame for the problems with Edinburgh Fringe. Take your pick. The Fringe Society, Edinburgh City Council, Edinburgh Summer Sessions, and the universities are all culpable to some extent for actions that have negatively impacted Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year. While tickets are also more expensive this year, it is a drop in the ocean compared with the other costs of attending the festival.
All parties need to sit down with the promoters, businesses, and performers and work out a way to make Edinburgh Festival Fringe work better for everyone involved. Although I am not optimistic, given how tin-eared and mutton-headed many at the top of these organisations are. This has already been proven by at least two from these named organisations already saying their decisions had no negative impacts and they are going to do exactly the same thing next year.
For this reason, I fear we will be in exactly the same place in 12 months’ time. Another fringe affected by low attendance, everyone pointing the blame in various directions, but nothing ultimately changes.
The Fringe Society
While many people direct their scorn at the Fringe Society, who, it must be said, are pretty useless, they don’t ultimately hold that much power other than to set the dates of the fringe. Many have attributed the later start of the festival this year to have an impact on the final week due to the Scottish schools going back a week earlier. While this may have had some impact, I am not convinced it is as big an issue as claimed. I’ve been to previous fringes that have run for the same dates and never noticed quite such a spectacular drop off in visitor numbers in the final week, or even from Saturdays to other days of the week.
What I can say definitively about the Fringe Society is that spending £8m on new offices has had absolutely no positive benefits for performers or visitors to Edinburgh this August. Indeed, it is difficult to see these expensive offices ever having a positive impact for performers and punters. Only an organisation truly out of touch with reality would ever think that such expenditure would be a good idea. I wouldn’t know where to begin with spending £8m on offices. I would expect a swimming pool and a helipad for that price.
When you think of all the good you could do with £8m – possibly grants for performers unable to pay the staggering costs, funding interesting ideas for shows that lack financial backing but deserve to be heard, or even actually buying some accommodation to rent out – they chose to spend it on new offices. Still, I hope their chairs are comfy.
The disaster with the Big Difference Company destroying Leicester Comedy Festival this year should send alarm bells to the Fringe Society, but I doubt they will hear them through their newly insulated walls.
Edinburgh City Council
I believe that its Edinburgh City Council that hold more responsibility for the festival woes, with the short-term letting licence (SLL) causing accommodation costs to sky rocket for performers and visitors alike.
Case in point, in 2019, I paid £600 to rent someone’s room in their flat in Edinburgh for a month. This year, a friend paid £1,500 for a similar arrangement for one week. Admittedly, my room was much less central. But it is a stark illustration of just how ridiculous the costs are these days. This year, I was paying £1,300 to stay in student halls for a month, four miles out of town. This is considered affordable these days.
I understand the logic for SLLs is to make private rentals more competitive with hotels, but it is forcing performers and punters to either stay much further out of town or decide to avoid the festival entirely. I know veteran performers who have decided the costs are no longer justifiable. The council also introduced the tourist levy, but this is unlikely to have as big an impact as the SLL.
As for hotel prices, when you hear about some of the budget hotel chains charging in excess of £500 a night, it is little surprise that people are coming to Edinburgh for far fewer days than they used to.
There is a regularly trotted out argument that the Edinburgh Fringe needs to work for the city as well. This is true, but it also needs to work for Edinburgh Fringe. I don’t think it’s working for either at the moment.
Edinburgh Summer Sessions
Edinburgh City Council also permitted the expanded version of the Edinburgh Summer Sessions this year, which arguably had a worse impact than the three Oasis gigs did last year.
Edinburgh Summer Sessions featured around seven concerts over a week full of big-name bands and singers, with an estimated 150,000 attending in total. There was also Bon Jovi playing the 67,000 capacity Murrayfield in the final week. This equates to approximately 200,000 people in Edinburgh for these events.
Anyone who tells you that the Edinburgh Summer Sessions did not have an impact on ticket sales from the final third of the fringe is likely on the payroll of Edinburgh Summer Sessions. If you spend £50-£80 on a music gig, you are less likely to spend the same amount on fringe shows. Yes, people who came into town just for the music gigs did come to watch fringe shows, just not in significant numbers.
I cannot understand the logic of crowbarring these massive music events into the final week of August, when there is an entire month in July going spare. If July doesn’t work, how about June or September? It would surely make more sense to spread out the number of people coming into Edinburgh for the other summer months, instead of trying to cram everything and everyone in during August.
Although it looks as though this will also run again next year, with the event organisers claiming the visitor drop-off was nothing to with them. However, my evidence suggests otherwise.
How my show compared with previous years
For those reading my ramblings for the first time, firstly: hello. Secondly, I will get you up to speed on my record at Edinburgh Fringe. I have four official sold-out runs to my name, with the laurel JPEGs to prove it, in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2024.
Last year was a tough year because of the three Oasis gigs held in the first week. But 2026 was tougher.
I will now demonstrate the difference between 2025 and 2026 based on sales figures for my show. It is not a complete comparison, as it does not include the people who turned up to watch the show but didn’t pay in advance in 2026. The majority of my audience was always pre-sales. Also, my show was on at 11.45am in 2025 and at 1pm in 2026.
My total ticket sales for Edinburgh Fringe 2025 amounted to £14,038, compared with £12,433 for 2026. This was £1,605 lower than last year, with tickets £2 more expensive than last year at weekends. The gap could have closed by another £200 or so had there not been an issue with payments going through from people paying at the door. In any case, this would not have closed the gap substantially.
In terms of the number of people who came to see my show, there were 1,334 in 2025. Compared with approximately 1,110 recorded for 2026. I am going with approximates for this year, because 1,080 tickets were issued, with at least another 30 paying on the door but not recorded in sales figures. I sold 224 fewer tickets in 2026. But this does not tell the whole story, as this year started off much stronger.
From the first Friday to the third Thursday in 2026, I sold 682 tickets. This included three out of my four largest audiences ever. While my fourth largest show audience ever came in the quieter second period, it also included several of my lowest paid audiences for my show at Edinburgh Fringe – with the lowest ever coming on the final Sunday with just 11 sales. Although this lofty total rose higher on the door by an entire two people showing up and not paying.
The important figure here is 682, which was 7.4% higher than the 635 for the same period last year.
Then it all flipped in the final third of the fringe. From the third Friday to the final show on the Monday in 2025, I sold 699 tickets. But from the same stage this year, once Edinburgh Summer Sessions started, I sold 398. A decline of 43%, with almost 300 fewer tickets sold. I am pretty sure ESS did have an impact.
The positive stuff
Are you still there at the back? Okay, good. I promised there would be something more positive in the final section. Congratulations, you have reached it.
Despite the challenges, the soul-sucking final week and the 43% drop-off from 2025, I still consider my Edinburgh Fringe to be a success. Being delusional helps in this game.
It may not have been as successful as the glory days, but I still sold almost 1,100 tickets, and that amounted to £12,000 in sales. I should add that I do not get to keep all of this amount. I also had four of my largest audiences ever for the show.
I took a risk this year. I could have stayed in my New Town comfort zone in the 40-seater room and the later time slot I was offered. There’s a possibility that audience numbers would have evened out a bit more in the later time slot. However, I would have missed out on performing to crowds more than double the size on four occasions. Not only did I sell out the room a few times, but those shows went amazingly well and proved that the show works with a crowd that size and positively flies. I really liked performing in the new venue and had a lot of fun in that room.
Many acts also had to cancel shows due to having no audience. My shows went every day. And more often than not, they were great fun. The smaller crowds meant I had to adapt the show, which made it different every day, and there was never any risk of me going through the motions. And for the second fringe in a row, I did not take one Strepsil or even buy any.
No one is forcing me to do Edinburgh Fringe and no one is automatically entitled to an audience. I go up because I enjoy it and can make a decent amount of money having fun. But if the costs continue to rise and the amount of profit I make falls, I may be another of the fringe veterans who can no longer justify going up. I hope it doesn’t come to this and fully intend to be back next year. I have already had a couple of brief chats about it
In the meantime, there are many discussions to be had about the future of Edinburgh Fringe. I am happy to contribute if needed, provided I haven’t burnt too many bridges with this deluge of words.