August is the busiest month for festivals
We counted 16 years of festivals. August had the most in 14 of them. The two it lost were 2020 and 2021.
August is the busiest month for festivals. That isn't a feeling about summer. It's the count.
We have the dates and lineups of 2,455 festivals that took place between 2010 and 2025. Count how many were running in each month, year by year, and August comes out on top in 14 of the 16 years.
August, almost every year
The two years August lost are easy to explain. In 2020 the busiest month was January, because by summer there was almost nothing left to count: one festival in July, one in August. In 2021 festivals came back in the second half of the year, and September edged August, 26 to 23.
Every other year, it's August. In 2025, 57 festivals were running in August, against 49 in July and 30 in September. January had eight.
If one DJ owns the month, it's Dillon Francis. He's on 45 August bills in our archive since 2010, more than anyone. Loco Dice and Sub Focus are next, at 43 each.
Festivals running in each month, 2022–2025
Europe's season fits in three months
August wins because of Europe. Of the European festivals in our archive from those years, 564 ran in June, July or August. That's more than five in every six.
August is the top of that. In 2025, 27 European festivals were running in August. For September, we have none. The season there doesn't taper off. It ends with August.
The names on the most European August bills are Andy C and Loco Dice, at 38 each. One drum and bass, one house.
The US season runs longer
American festivals don't crowd into August. They spread out. In 2025, every month from May to October had between 21 and 24 US festivals running. August had the most, by one.
Add the last four years together and more US festivals ran in October (93) and September (87) than in August (74). That's the shape of the inner bars in the chart: flat from May, highest in the fall.
The fall is where the bass acts work. Excision and Liquid Stranger have each played 37 US festivals in September or October since 2010, more than anyone else.
What to do with it
If you want the most festivals within a few weeks of each other, go in August, and look at Europe.
If you're in the US, you don't have to squeeze everything into summer. Over the last four years combined, September and October both had more US festivals than August.
South of the equator it runs the other way. In Australia and New Zealand, December is the busiest month, and we have no festivals there in June or August.
Next August already has 11 festivals on our calendar. Nine of them haven't named a single act yet. Balance Croatia already has 97. Follow the artists you want to see in the app, and each new date shows up as it's added.
Counts are from the Electric State festival archive on 10 November 2026: 2,455 festivals that started between 2010 and 2025, 1,413 of them in the US. A festival counts in every month it runs on at least one day. 2026 is left out because it isn't over, and because it's the first year we counted festivals as they were announced rather than afterward, so it doesn't compare cleanly with the years before it. Artists are matched regardless of capitalisation and punctuation, the same way their pages in the app count them.
Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — dates, lineups and the artist pages this post is computed from.
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