How to get Electric Picnic tickets with your group

Electric Picnic fills the Stradbally Hall estate in County Laois with 80,000 people every late August - Ireland's biggest festival by a distance, and culturally closer to a national holiday than a gig. The 2027 edition is confirmed for Friday 27 to Sunday 29 August, with early-entry campers arriving Thursday. Who's playing it? Nobody knows. Organiser Melvin Benn has said outright that it's too early to reveal the 2027 lineup, and the tickets are going on sale anyway.

It's an all-camping weekend with its own folklore. There's the BYO campsite allowance of 48 cans and no glass, which is genuinely unusual at this scale, and there are the Sunday-night singalongs. And there's a country that will spend €300 a head on a bill it hasn't seen, twelve months out, because it always does. That last part is the problem this guide exists to solve.

Here are the two dates that matter. Three+ customers get a presale at 10:00 on Wednesday 2 September 2026. Everyone else goes at 10:00 on Friday 4 September, which is also when successful loyalty applicants can spend their discount codes. It's first come, first served throughout, and the last time Ireland did this the whole festival was gone inside 90 minutes.

The one cap that is confirmed for 2027 is the loyalty code: two tickets, and it buys you no priority whatsoever. It only ever saves you money, and the queue treats you like everybody else. The general-sale limit hasn't been published - it was two per person last time, so plan on two each and read the terms the moment the Ticketmaster pages appear. On the 2026 basis, a group of eight needs four buyers and a group of twelve needs six, which is the number worth having ready either way. Prices are the same story: no 2027 products published, and weekend camping ran €245.50 to €325.50 last time.

If the sale goes the way the last one did, some of you will miss out, and the route back is narrow but real. Ticketmaster's fan-to-fan resale is the only lawful one, with prices capped at whatever the seller originally paid. Whether the usual extras return for 2027 - early-entry passes, official coaches, the Pink Moon pre-pitched village for anyone with a ticket but no tent - isn't published yet, so treat them as likely rather than certain.

• There is no hero buyer at the Picnic. The 2026 sale allowed two per person and the 2027 limit is unpublished, so assume everyone is buying.
• A loyalty code cuts the price, not the queue. It goes to fans with previous Picnics on their Ticketmaster account, and it covers two tickets.
• You are buying with no lineup. Agree what the weekend is worth before 10:00, because there will be nothing on the page to talk you into it.
• Resale above face value is a criminal offence for this event - budget face value or nothing, and treat any premium listing as both illegal and void.
• Tickets are digital with moving barcodes; wristbands are non-transferable once exchanged, and duplicated barcodes admit only the first scan.

Electric Picnic is a designated event under Ireland's Sale of Tickets Act 2021, which makes reselling above face value - or buying beyond the ticket limit - unlawful, with fines up to €100,000 or two years in prison. That is why the only resale that exists is Ticketmaster's own fan-to-fan exchange, where sellers list at their original price or lower and the listings turn up inside the normal purchase flow. For a buyer that's genuinely liberating. Watching the resale becomes a patience game at face value rather than an auction you can lose.

The age rules are the other surprise, and they're stricter than almost any festival in this library. Children 12 and under come free, up to two per adult and registered in advance. But 13-to-17-year-olds are refused entry entirely, even with a parent. If your group is planning around a teenager, that needs knowing before anybody buys anything.

With a two-per-person cap, the Picnic method is pure coverage. Count the tickets you need and, on the 2026 limit of two each, halve it - that's how many people must be sitting in the queue at 10:00 with a working Ticketmaster login and a card that won't get declined. Anyone holding a Three+ number should be in on the Wednesday as well, because a presale that clears stock is stock the Friday queue never sees. Test the account logins in advance rather than at 09:58, which is when people discover the email address they used in 2019 belongs to an old job.

Wednesday 2 September at 10:00 for Three+ customers, Friday 4 September at 10:00 for everybody else and for the loyalty codes. Between now and then the work is unglamorous, and it's the whole job. Confirm who is actually coming. Agree a ceiling per ticket while nobody's under pressure. Check that every buyer can log in. Work out who covers whom if somebody's queue collapses. Do that and you walk into a 90-minute sale with the best odds Irish law allows anyone to have. Skip it and you'll be refreshing the fan-to-fan page until next August.

The Picnic memories that matter are the campsite breakfast, the act you stumbled into at the Salty Dog, the Sunday night when the whole field sings. What gets you there is a 90-minute window on a Friday morning in September, and a group that sorted itself out beforehand.

TicketSquad gives a Picnic squad one home for the whole cycle. Who needs tickets, and at what face-value ceiling. Whose Ticketmaster login actually works. Who goes in on the Three+ presale and who waits for Friday. Under-12 registrations, coach bookings, and who covers whom if a queue drops out.

With a two-per-person cap, being organised isn't an advantage so much as the only strategy available. Most groups just don't get round to it until the morning itself.