What a massive folk festival! After two weeks filled with a lively atmosphere, music, and traditional costumes, the festival organizers have now released an impressive report on the Theresienwiese. Even the midpoint report for the Wiesn had already tallied an astonishing 3.8 million guests at the Munich Oktoberfest. With an estimated 7.4 million visitors, the 191st Munich Oktoberfest has broken the previous all-time record set in 2023. Back then, 7.2 million people came to the Wiesn, though the attendance was spread over 18 days due to an extended holiday period. This year, exactly 16 days of sunshine and warm late-summer temperatures—perfect for an Indian summer —were enough to set this fantastic new record.
Here’s how the 2026 Munich Oktoberfest wenthttps://www.instagram.com/p/DeEhP4tFJWs/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&stkn=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Wiesn Director Christian Scharpf spoke enthusiastically…
Oktoberfest Director Christian Scharpf spoke enthusiastically about the most-attended Oktoberfest in its long history. Munich Mayor Dominik Krause was also delighted with his first Oktoberfest in office. Despite the huge crowds, no critical overcrowding situations were reported thanks to skillful visitor management.
In addition to rides and traditional highlights like the traditional costume and marksmen’s parades, eating was, of course, also a top priority. Consumption of festival beer rose by 2.7 percent to around 6.7 million Maß of beer. The strikingly popular sour Radler was particularly trendy this year. In addition, sales of non-alcoholic beverages rose by a strong ten percent.
The “Oide Wiesn” was also a real crowd-pleaser. The nostalgic section of the grounds welcomed 447,000 guests —a significant increase over the 360,000 visitors from the previous year. Although the majority of revelers came from Munich and the surrounding area, there was a particularly large number of international visitors from the U.S., Italy, and Austria.
How Oktoberfest Is Celebrated Around the World
It has long been evident worldwide that the Munich Original possesses a unique appeal. Even without active advertising since the 1980s, its appeal is spreading rapidly today via social media.
This traditional Bavarian event inspires major spin-offs around the world. In Blumenau, Brazil, one of South America’s largest Oktoberfests is celebrated annually with approximately 600,000 to 700,000 guests. In Canada, the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest attracts over 700,000 visitors each year. In the U.S., too, beer festivals in cities like Cincinnati draw hundreds of thousands of revelers.
The beer festival in Qingdao, China, attracts over 20 million guests in some record-breaking years across multiple venues and is also nearly twice as large as the Munich Oktoberfest in terms of area. For a month, Asia’s—and the world’s—largest beer festival is celebrated there with dancing robots, drone shows, and techno music, which makes the Qingdao Beer Festival quite different from the original in Munich.
