Munich's 191st Oktoberfest will run from Saturday, September 19 to Sunday, October 4, 2026, on the Theresienwiese fairgrounds, per the city's official festival portal. The program opens at 9 a.m. on the first Saturday with the traditional entry of the tent landlords and the keg-tapping at noon that switches on the festival's sixteen days. Closing is set for 11:30 p.m. on October 4.
This is a planning report; it publishes event information, not booking advice, and tent policies should be confirmed with each landlord.
Why the dates matter more than usual
Because the festival's real currency is the tent table. The fourteen large halls — Augustiner, Paulaner, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu among them — each seat thousands, and nearly all weekday-evening and all weekend seating goes through advance reservations through each tent's own channels. With dates now fixed more than three months out, the reservation window that matters is the late-summer one: travelers without reservations still get in on weekday mornings and early afternoons, when queues move and the beer halls work as they were built to.
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What is there beyond the beer tents?
The food case for Oktoberfest is stronger than its reputation suggests. Each large tent runs a full kitchen — half roast chicken (Hendl), pork knuckle, weisswurst with sweet mustard, giant pretzels, and the Obatzda cheese spread — and the festival's side streets hold the classics: steamed fish from the Ammersee stalls, Reiberdatschi potato pancakes, and gingerbread stamped with festival slogans. The Oide Wiesn, the nostalgic fair on the festival's southern edge, keeps the older, quieter format with its own tents and traditional music, and its entrance is included in the festival ticket.
How do you plan around it?
Three practical anchors. First, weekdays beat weekends on every dimension: entry, seating, and hotel rates. Second, the traditional costume parade on the first Sunday and the open-air concert on Sunday, September 27 at 11 a.m. are the non-tent highlights worth routing a morning around. Third, Munich's hotels price the full sixteen days at peak — sleeping outside the city center, or in suburbs on the S-Bahn, is the standard local workaround. The 2027 edition, per the city's published calendar, runs September 18 to October 3, useful for anyone already planning a year ahead.