How much could resellers make from Summer 2026 events?
Introduction
A well-functioning resale market for tickets to live events should enable fans who can’t attend an opportunity to recoup costs while allowing fair access to others to sold out shows. Instead there are problems in this market, preventing consumers from accessing their favourite events and leaving them vulnerable to touts. The issues of high resale prices, touts buying up tickets from primary platforms, and fraudulent resale tickets in this sector are well-documented with stories of tickets listed for up to eight times the price on secondary ticketing sites.
In November 2025, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Department of Business and Trade (DBT) announced that it intends to make it illegal to resell tickets above the face value plus any unavoidable charges, an important step towards better protection for fans. However, the government needs to act quickly and show its commitment by including a relevant Bill in the King’s Speech.
To highlight the urgent need for this, our research aims to estimate how much resellers could make from some of this year’s live events alone. This was done by collecting and analysing ticket and face value prices listed on StubHub and Viagogo for 66 artists performing during April - September 2026.
Ticket resellers could make significant amounts of money from 2026’s April - September concerts
Our research estimates that resellers could make almost £24 million from live events put on by 66 artists in the upcoming months. This broke down as £13.3 million from resellers listed on Stubhub and £10.2 million for those on Viagogo. This is despite the fact that the number of tickets that were listed on Viagogo (129,443) was over two times more compared to Stubhub (61,032). Unsurprisingly, the artists which likely generated the most money were ones with high demand, like Harry Styles (£6.6 million), Ariana Grande (£4.9 million), and BTS (£1.3 million).
Not all of the money will have been made by professional touts. Both secondary resale sites require resellers to differentiate between resellers who are traders and those who are not. When we excluded resellers who are not identified as traders, professional resellers could have made £18.5 million, still a significant chunk of the total value.
We also looked at the currency listed of the face value of the tickets, which acted as an indication of whether the resellers were operating from outside the UK. Nearly three in 10 of the 190,475 tickets were listed by overseas resellers (29%), with the USA and Europe being the most common places they were likely operating from. It should be noted though that despite making up a decent proportion of tickets sold, the value of these types of tickets was only £1.3 million, only 5% of the total value.
What is Which? asking for?
The research findings clearly show that overall tickets are being listed at much higher prices and resellers could make vast amounts of money from this summer’s concerts without a price cap in place. Consumers were also likely to have paid much more than what they would have had if the tickets were available on primary platforms, which hits harder during a cost of living crisis as households have to navigate between discretionary and essential spending. Which? urges the government to bring forward a Bill in the next King’s Speech that caps secondary ticket sales at face value, including any unavoidable charges.
From October 2025 to February 2026, we collected details of tickets listed on Stubhub and Viagogo for live events across 66 mid-size and large artists with shows happening from April - September 2026. These details included:
- Price;
- Face value;
- Quantity of tickets listed;
- Seating information (area, row etc); and
- Whether the reseller was a professional trader
The collection was done multiple times for most live events and typically the same day they were sold on a primary platform, bar those that had been on sale for a while as fewer new tickets were likely to pop up. Where the collection was conducted multiple times, the tickets were deduplicated based on the face value, seating information and whether the reseller was a professional trader as prices can fluctuate between collections. Where the prices fluctuated, we took the price of the later collection as it is more likely to be the price which the ticket is subsequently sold at. For Viagogo where resellers could list various numbers of tickets, we took only the maximum number of tickets available based on the seller information, face value, and seating information. Where possible, we tried to deduplicate tickets across platforms but resellers may not always use the same name across platforms. Ticket price outliers were also removed from the sample.
The overall value of what resellers could make was calculated by subtracting the face value of the tickets from the ticket prices. As resellers would likely have paid fees when they bought it on the primary platform, we also took those into account. We assumed this would be 25% based on this analysis we had done and another internal analysis that looked at 30 events and found that add-on fees on primary platforms were up to 24%. Additionally, the ticket prices listed on the secondary resale sites include add-on fees that the sites take so this needed to be considered as well. We looked at events from a 10% sample of artists and found that these add-on fees were on average, about 20%, which was then used as the assumption for our calculations.
For tickets where the face value was listed with a foreign currency, we used HMRC’s December 2025 exchange rates to convert them into GBP.