Burning Man planning guide
Going to Burning Man: the tickets, and everything that comes after them.
Burning Man 2026
What is Burning Man?
A temporary city of around 80,000 people that rises from the dust, burns bright for a week, then vanishes.
Burning Man isn't a festival with a main stage. It's Black Rock City, a temporary city that gets built, lived in and taken away again on the open playa of Nevada's Black Rock Desert, about 120 miles north of Reno. The 2026 city runs 30 Aug – 7 Sept 2026, ending at 6pm on Labor Day Monday, and this year's theme is Axis Mundi. No vendors. No headliners. No spectators. Every piece of art and every mutant vehicle out there was brought by somebody who showed up.
Location
Black Rock Desert, Nevada. A flat dry lakebed, the playa, about two hours north of Reno. Dust, heat, freezing nights, enormous sky.
2026 dates
Burning Man 2026 runs 30 Aug – 7 Sept 2026, the week leading into US Labor Day. Theme: Axis Mundi.
Scale
Roughly 80,000 people. Built by the participants, taken away again by the participants, under a hard population cap and a Leave No Trace promise.
The thing people come back for
People go once to tick Burning Man off a list, then discover it was never really a list item. For one week a working city exists in the middle of nowhere purely because everyone agreed to build it. Art you can climb inside. Strangers handing you the exact thing you needed. Sunrises after nights that went nothing like you planned.
It's demanding and dusty and occasionally brutal, which is part of why it sticks. You're a citizen for a week rather than a customer, and the version of you that turns up prepared and generous has by far the best time. Then it all comes down, the desert gets swept clean, and most people start quietly planning the next one.
The culture
The Ten Principles are the actual product, and gifting is not barter.
What holds Black Rock City together is a shared agreement rather than a programme. The Ten Principles are the closest thing to a rulebook: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation and immediacy. Nobody expects you to recite them. The week makes far more sense once you've felt a few of them happen to you.
Gifting & decommodification
No buying or selling out there except ice. Gifts come with no strings and no trade. Bring things to give away and offer your time. Don't bring a stall.
Radical self-reliance
Bring everything you need to survive and then some. Water, food, shelter, shade, warmth, power, a repair kit. The city won't sell you a forgotten basic.
Leaving no trace
Everything you bring can become MOOP (matter out of place). You pack it all out. A camp that leaves a mess undoes the whole promise of the city.
Participation & communal effort
There's no audience. You build. You volunteer. You look after your neighbours. The week is made of whatever people choose to put into it.
One distinction worth getting right before you go: gifting is not barter. A gift comes with no expectation of return, no trade, and no "I'll swap you". The city is decommodified. Apart from ice at Arctica there's nothing to buy out there, and trying to sell or advertise something will earn you a very cold reception. That's the point rather than a quirk to work around. Turn up ready to give things away and look after the people near you, and the rest of the culture clicks into place on its own.
Why it asks a lot of you
Getting a ticket is the easy bit. Arriving genuinely ready is the hard bit.
Here's the honest framing, and it changes how you should prepare: tickets are gettable right now. Burning Man hasn't sold out since 2024, there are payment plans for 2026, and the late routes are concrete. OMG Sale registration opened 20 July 2026 at noon PDT, the sale itself lands 29 July at noon PDT, and STEP runs all the way to 28 August. If you're reading this after the OMG Sale, STEP is your route and it's a perfectly good one. Either way, the old refresh-at-9am-and-pray energy doesn't apply here. The difficulty is everything that comes after the ticket.
There's no marketplace
Aside from ice, nothing is for sale. Plan on roughly 1.5 gallons of water per person per day, plus all your own food and fuel. Gate staff can and do turn away anyone who clearly won't survive the week.
The weather can rewrite your day
Expect daytime heat over 100°F, near-freezing nights, dust storms and whiteouts, and the occasional rain that turns the playa into deep mud (see 2023). Goggles, a dust mask and warm layers aren't optional.
The city is vast and dark
Black Rock City is miles across and pitch black at night. You need a reliable bike, a lock, and lights on both you and the bike. Riding dark isn't a look, it's a hazard.
Getting in and out takes patience
Gate traffic and Exodus can each run for many hours. Carry 12+ hours of water, food and shade for the queue itself, keep to the 10 mph Gate Road limit, and never turn up early without valid credentials.
None of that is meant to put you off. People of every age and budget do this and come home changed by it. It's meant to set the bar honestly. Black Rock City rewards the prepared and quietly punishes the casual, so the planning is the trip, and it starts months before you reach the Gate.
Getting there
Tickets, vehicle passes, and the buyer limit that decides your group's shape.
Burning Man sells in waves rather than one big drop, and every route has its own rules. The last public route for 2026 is the OMG Sale, with registration from 20 July and the sale itself on 29 July. STEP is the calmer ongoing fallback for face-value resale, and it stays open long after the OMG Sale closes. For a group, though, the number that shapes everything is the buyer limit: 2 tickets plus one vehicle pass per purchase, enforced per person and per card. A crew of six therefore needs three buyers on three different cards. Work that out now, not in the sale.
Don't treat the vehicle pass as optional admin
Every vehicle except a motorcycle needs a $165 pass to get in. They're limited, and they're usually tied to a ticket purchase at one per two tickets. Work out who is genuinely driving before anyone checks out. Miss it and your fallbacks are the Burner Express from Reno or San Francisco, a rideshare into a camp's vehicle, or a STEP vehicle pass if one surfaces.
Drive in
Maximum cargo freedom for water, shelter, bikes, the lot. You'll need a vehicle pass, Gate patience, and a parking plan at camp, because you don't drive around the city once you're in.
Burner Express bus
Scheduled coaches from Reno and San Francisco for people who already have a ticket. Skips the vehicle-pass pressure, but has luggage limits, ID check-in and its own water/bike logistics.
Camp transport / rideshare
Join a camp convoy or RV with a vehicle pass. Sort who is on which vehicle, and remember every person in a car handles will-call together rather than splitting up at the Gate.
Ticket rules
Named or transferable? We checked.
Officially transferable and name-change eligible; STEP resale and face-value caveats apply.
Whoever holds the ticket gets in. So the crew move is simple: buy what you can when the sale opens, then use the TicketSquad Tickets board to declare spares and needs, and confirm each hand-over so nothing gets lost in the group chat.
Planning it as a group
What gets a whole crew onto the playa is a shared plan, not luck.
Before TicketSquad existed, group Burning Man prep was a shared spreadsheet and a chat channel run by the one person willing to chase everybody. The app has never been the point. The discipline is. Who's on which ticket route, whose card is buying for whom, who's driving, and who is bringing the shade structure that keeps four people alive at 2pm.
Coordinator jobs before the playa
- Confirm each person’s ticket route and status: who already has one and who is still watching STEP.
- Map buyers to cards. Two tickets per buyer per card, so split a big crew into clean buying pairs before anyone reaches a checkout.
- Decide who drives, who needs the vehicle pass and who's on the Burner Express. Before checkout.
- Pick camps. Placed camp, open camping, art/project camp or Burner Express HOVerlandia, and make sure nobody is unplaced.
- Agree the survival split: water, shade structure, food, power, bike spares, dust gear and a shared MOOP plan.
- Set a per-person budget covering the ticket, the vehicle pass, fees, travel, food, gear, everything. Then say the number out loud.
The Burning Man group plan
Not a queue hack, just the shared coordination that gets a whole crew to the playa prepared rather than scrambling.
- 1
Routes
Settle who is buying through which official route, and who already has a ticket, so nobody double-buys or misses out.
- 2
Buyers of 2
Split the crew into clean buying pairs, each on its own card, to match the two-tickets-per-purchase limit.
- 3
Passes & camp
Assign vehicle passes to actual drivers, confirm everyone’s camp, and decide the Burner Express vs drive-in mix.
- 4
Bring-what
Divide the survival kit across the crew so water, shade, power, tools are all covered, with nothing quietly missing.
The plan isn't about control. It's about care. It means nobody arrives without water because they assumed somebody else had packed it, nobody is stranded because the only driver forgot the vehicle pass, and the camp goes up quickly enough that you get to enjoy the city you came for.
What burners wish they'd known
Advice that comes up every year, from people who have been dusty before.
None of this replaces the official Survival Guide, which everyone in your group should read at least once. But these are the lessons that veterans repeat to first-timers, distilled from years of playa experience.
Drink before you feel thirsty
Aim for around 1.5 gallons of water per person per day, add electrolytes, and check on each other. The desert dehydrates confident people fastest.
Light yourself and your bike
Carry spare batteries and a charging plan, and agree a landmark so you can find camp again. A glowing bike is how you get home at 4am.
Pace the week, mind the humans
Sleep, shade breaks, sunscreen, sober drivers and a camp fallback point. Burnout and heat make people fragile, so plan check-ins before anyone needs one.
Participate before you consume
There's no correct itinerary. Volunteer, gift something, build something small, talk to strangers, and leave room for the odd quiet thing that only happens because you turned up.
How TicketSquad helps
We built the app for exactly this: a group trip with a hundred moving parts and one chance to get it right.
TicketSquad doesn't sell tickets and won't race a queue for you. What it does is hold the plan. Create the event, form your Squad, and collect the things that genuinely decide whether everyone makes it: Ticketing / MyTickets email, Sale route, Vehicle pass needed and Travel plan, and more.
Instead of five screenshots and a chat nobody can scroll back through, you get one place worth trusting. Who's buying through which route. Who needs a vehicle pass. Who's driving and who's on the Burner Express. The shared budget. And the survival kit split, so two people don't both quietly skip the water. The chat keeps the jokes and the countdown. The plan deserves somewhere quieter.
This one's personal for us. A temporary city works at all because enough people did the unglamorous preparation so that everybody else could be present. That's the instinct TicketSquad is built around. Do the dull bit well, together, so the trip gets to be the good bit.
This is one way we help
The event page becomes the plan, not just the place you store names.
Once the ticket method is clear, the next question is everything around it: where the official links are, what kind of ticket or package the squad is aiming for, what the lineup status is, how people get there, where they sleep, and what they should know before they arrive. TicketSquad keeps that event knowledge beside the data your squad needs to submit.
Event preview
Burning Man 2026
Burning Man 2026 runs from 30 August to 7 September in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, about 120 miles north of Reno, and ends at 6pm on Monday 7 September. For that week, tens of thousands of people build Black Rock City: a temporary city of camps, art and mutant vehicles, held together by ten principles including gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance and Leave No Trace. The 2026 theme is Axis Mundi. There is no lineup or main stage, and nothing for sale inside except ice. Everyone is expected to arrive...
Official links and sale routes
In the app, these links sit next to the sale-day plan so nobody is digging through old chats for the official route when the queue opens.
Ticket and package choices
Lineup
Lineup details are still TBC. The event page keeps a clear slot for them so the squad can update the plan when official announcements land.
Buying tickets
Buy direct while OMG is open
no registration is needed. The $550 tier has sold out, but $675, $775, $975, $1,500 and $3,000 tickets plus $165 vehicle passes remain in the official checkout. Check the live basket before committing because inventory can change without notice.
Travel & accommodation
Decide between driving and Burner Express early
a car carries everything you need but wants a $165 vehicle pass and real patience at Gate and Exodus. Burner Express is faster in and out and skips the vehicle-pass problem, but it comes with luggage limits, ID and check-in rules, non-transferable bus tickets, and you'll still have to solve water and a bike at the other end.
When you're there
Radical self-reliance is the entry fee
bring water, food, shelter, shade, warm layers, medication, a dust mask, goggles, lights, a bike, a repair kit and a way to hold your camp down in wind. Black Rock City won't sell you the thing you forgot.
Your data for this event
This is the form Burning Man 2026 members would fill in for themselves, so the coordinator is not translating screenshots into a buyer sheet at the worst possible moment.
More hard-mode ticket guides
Planning another big one?
The buying-group method changes shape by event: different ticket agents, account rules, limits, products, travel plans and fallback routes.
Ready to plan Burning Man?
Turn the method into a squad plan.
Create the event, invite your camp, collect each person’s ticket route, travel plan, vehicle-pass need and survival kit once, then head to the playa with a plan the whole crew can actually follow.
Sources
Official pages and context checked for this guide.
This guide is based on extensive, well-groomed research by TicketSquad, checked against official Burning Man ticketing, the event FAQ, the Survival Guide, the Gate and Exodus pages, the Ten Principles, and reputable history and demand sources, with community threads used only as lived-experience context. Burning Man changes its rules and dates every year. When the official pages and this guide disagree, believe Burning Man.
Written by people who have argued about who's bringing the shade structure, and who has forgotten to charge the bike lights at least once.
- Black Rock City 2026 official page
- Burning Man 2026 ticketing information
- Burning Man event FAQ
- Burning Man Gate arrival guide
- Burning Man 10 Principles
- Burning Man official history timeline
- Britannica Burning Man history
- Burning Man OMG Sale page
- Burning Man STEP support article
- Burning Man ticket terms and conditions