Outside Lands wraps its 2026 run in Golden Gate Park today. Every ticket tier sold out ahead of the weekend, with Charli xcx, The Strokes and RÜFÜS DU SOL topping the bill. Three-day general admission opened at $509 before fees and climbed to $599 by the final tier.
We covered all the bougie parts of OSL in 2019, and the same wristband was $385 at early sale. Tariffs!
The festival is good. The lineup is good, and the food is allegedly great, with more than 100 Bay Area restaurants making real money in three days. But the luxury tiering has crossed from expensive into a little cartoonish.
The Golden Gate Club's skydeck.
The top tier is Ken Fulk's Golden Gate Club, and a single day of it starts around $3,369 with fees included. That is one day. A three-day deal costs a little more than $5,000.
What you get: front-of-stage viewing areas at all three main stages with drinks brought to you, complimentary all-day food from Tyler Florence, Melissa King, and Nancy Oakes and Dana Younkin of Boulevard, air-conditioned restrooms, coat check, Wi-Fi, a concierge, a gift, and a private golf cart fleet officially branded Mr. Fulk's Wild Ride. New this year is the Skydeck Parlor, a lounge suspended above the Lands End stage. Three-day members are also enrolled as patrons of Fulk's Saint Joseph's Arts Society for a year.
If you've never been to St. Joseph's, it's really lovely. Albeit I wonder if all this dough is going to help Ken Fulk's recent ills.
Sam Mondros
Bottle service at a music festival. In a public park.
The SOMA Social Club is table service at the dance stage in Marx Meadow: a private lounge roughly 30 feet from the stage, a personal host, a premium bottle service menu, two gourmet food deliveries a day, reserved parking inside Golden Gate Park, and a private golf cart to shuttle you between SOMA and Lands End.
It starts at $1,550 per person per day and requires a group of eight to twelve. If you already hold a VIP ticket, the upgrade is $900 a head, still with an eight-person minimum. A full table on a single day clears five figures.
Above even that sit the Suites: 450 square feet of private space with a main stage view, twenty passes and four in-park parking passes daily, an in-suite bartender, catered meals and customizable decor. Boxes are the compact version at ten passes and one parking pass.
Your AI portrait on the main stage screens.
So there's this thing called Take the Stage presented by Adobe Firefly: snap a photo, run it through the model, then watch a generated version of yourself appear on the Lands End and Twin Peaks screens between sets. Adobe approached our OG Outside Lands reporter about this one, and she instead gave him a piece of her mind about how much she loathed Adobe at work. Apparently he listened thoughtfully, lol.
You can also get married.
City Hall is back for a third year, relocated to a reimagined space called The Mission in Hellman Hollow, with legally binding ceremonies and vow renewals running all three days. The standard package is $449 all in, which honestly sounds cheap next to everything else.
It launched in 2024 to mark the 20th anniversary of San Francisco's Winter of Love, a portion of every booking goes to Lambda Legal, and it produced 21 weddings that first year, then 19 ceremonies and a vow renewal in 2025.
For 2026, Outside Lands introduced a premier tier at $15,749 that would have put couples on the Lands End main stage, exchanging vows before a crowd of up to 50,000, with the marriage announced on the video screens, a Just Married golf cart ride, a two-hour reception at the soundboard for 20 guests, four bottles of champagne, cupcakes and flowers from Flower Lands.
It was the most expensive add-on the festival has ever offered, steeper than a three-day Golden Gate Club pass. It also never happened because not enough couples signed up. San Francisco will pay more than $3,000 for one day of caviar and air conditioning. It will not pay nearly sixteen thousand dollars to say "I do" in front of fifty thousand strangers who are waiting for Charli xcx.
Courtney Muro
Vintage fits and accessories.
McLaren Vintage rotates twelve Bay Area vintage sellers across the three days, including Mercy Vintage, Valencia Street Vintage, Love Street, Roommates, Indigo and Moody Goose, plus upcycling from Snip Tease and live screen printing from San Franpsycho. It is an actual slice of San Francisco retail rather than a branded hut with a phone charger, and it is the rare 2026 addition that costs the festival something instead of extracting it. But still bougie.
It is an expensive weekend, but a good kind of expensive.
I don't know who else remembers TanaCon or Fyre Fest. We always look at big-money pulls and wonder about the evil or fraud behind it; not that anyone said it about OSL. It's just expensive. Personally I never understood crowds anyway. I have been to Outside Lands, but I enjoyed it once again in 2026 streaming it from home.
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A Bay Area Council Economic Institute study commissioned for the 2025 festival put the impact at $97.5 million regionally and $71.8 million inside San Francisco, supporting 485 full-time-equivalent jobs and nearly 25,000 hotel room nights.
On its community impact page, the festival says it has contributed $49 million to San Francisco Recreation and Parks since 2008 and generated $1.3 billion in regional impact over its lifetime. Those are OSL's numbers.
Golden Gate Park hosts free music too, and it always has. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass returns October 2 through 4 with no tickets, no RSVP and no admission charge, because Warren Hellman endowed it to stay that way permanently. Stern Grove is in its 89th season and still free, though you now enter a lottery six weeks out or line up at one of the community box offices, which release 1,500 tickets per show.
Patti LaBelle plays Stern Grove this afternoon, for free. Down the street, someone is paying $3,369 for caviar on their tater tots; and an awesome concert, too.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
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Photos of the Golden Gate skydeck I found on Haute Living via–I take it–from Alive Coverage. More from them below.
I'm also writing about
Filing more in the new "What It's Like" series. Here's what it's like at Tartine and Orphan Andy's.
Saul Sugarman
Saul Sugarman
Other OSL reactions
Our OG reporter T Von D is at Outside Lands all weekend. She's mostly relayed some dullness like did you know Conan O'Brien was here and, "It's the first time its sold out in 5 years, so it's denser." She also mentioned Bingo, which ngl is probably where you would've found me. And that Grasslands is bougie.
I'll try to get some more exciting takes for a dispatch this week. In the meantime, some of our past coverage:
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- Festival fashion at Outside Lands: ‘I woke up like this’
- Ladies: There’s a New Way to Pee at Outside Lands
And a few photos from 2026.
