The Cities Where Concert Tickets Are Most and Least Expensive

Whether you missed the initial sale or just couldn’t get in the virtual queue fast enough, resale concert tickets are a common back-up plan for highly anticipated tours. But though the show on each leg of the tour may be similar, tickets in some cities cost more than others. This could be due to local demand, cost of living, or even the timing of the show on the calendar.

The team at FinanceBuzz wanted to figure out where the most affordable resale concert tickets are for when your favorite artist goes on their next tour. To find out which cities have the best deals, the team analyzed data from 10 of the most popular recent tours that visited major U.S. cities and Toronto.

Key findings

• San Francisco is the most expensive city for resale concert tickets, with an average cost 29% higher than similar tickets in 21 other cities.
• Nashville is the least expensive city for concerts — resale tickets are 27% cheaper on average in the Music City.
• Taylor’s Version: Compared to similar artists, it’s no surprise that Taylor Swift tickets are the most expensive. The median cost of Taylor’s resale tickets was over $2,000 in 6 different cities, though one city cost lower than $500.

Which are the best and worst cities for resale concert tickets?

Certain cities across the country are hotspots for the biggest names in music, with nearly all major artists scheduling a tour stop there. But the cost to see those artists can be drastically different from city to city.

Compared to their peers across the country, music lovers in San Francisco pay a premium to see their favorite musicians. Tickets for the 10 major acts we analyzed cost 29% more on average in SF compared to all 22 cities we studied. Prices in Toronto weren’t far behind — they cost 26% more than average.

Aptly enough, Nashville, also known as Music City, is where music lovers tend to get the best deals. Tickets for nationally touring acts that stopped in Nashville cost 27% less on average, just edging out Las Vegas (25% less than average) as the city with the best deals on concert tickets.

You can explore the full data for each artist and city in the interactive chart above. Click on names or dots representing different artists to remove or add them to the chart, so you can compare any combination of artists you want.

A closer look at Taylor Swift resale tickets

No concert tour in recent memory can match the cultural impact of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. The show is so popular that, in addition to breaking stadium records around the globe, a concert film documenting the tour earned more than $260 million at the movie theater box office.

The median price for tickets to see Taylor was over $2,000 in six different cities, led by a cost of $2,907 in New York City.

Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City, and Seattle are the other cities where median costs exceeded two grand. The overall average cost of Eras Tour tickets across the cities we looked at was $1,713, which means cities with median ticket prices over $2,000 were at least 24% more expensive on average (with New York being almost 70% higher).

Phoenix was the most affordable place to see Taylor Swift, with a median resale ticket price of just $353 — 79% less than the overall average cost. Eras Tour resale tickets cost more than double that amount in every other city. Even Las Vegas, which had the second-cheapest resale tickets with a median cost of $735, was $382 more expensive than tickets to Taylor’s Phoenix show.

A closer look at Beyonce resale tickets

Another one of last year’s biggest tours was Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, which saw Queen Bey set records in several of the cities our team evaluated.

Tickets for the historic tour were most expensive in Beyoncé’s hometown of Houston, Texas, where the median resale ticket sold for $932. Across all cities where Beyoncé performed that we included in our analysis, the average Renaissance World Tour ticket cost $441. That means tickets in Houston cost 112% more than average.

As with Taylor Swift, Phoenix was the city where tickets cost the least for the BeyHive, with a median sale price of just $103. The ticket price for only one other tour stop was less than $200 — tickets to Beyoncé’s show in Minneapolis-St. Paul had a median cost of $134.

Bottom line

• Earn cashback rewards on concert tickets. Some credit cards offer rewards for entertainment purchases, especially if you buy tickets through certain online retailers (think Vivid Seats or StubHub). By using one of the best credit cards for concert tickets, you can earn cash back or rewards points with your ticket purchases.
• Choose a card issuer that qualifies for presale tickets. To get tickets for those once-in-a-lifetime shows, presale tickets are a must. Learn how to get presale tickets with your credit card and avoid missing out on that must-see concert.
• Earn travel rewards when flying to a show. By using one of the best travel credit cards to book your trip, you can earn points before you even leave the house. Additionally, many top travel cards come with trip delay and cancellation insurance to protect your purchases.

Methodology

FinanceBuzz collected resale ticket sale data from SeatData.io for each artist’s most recent concert stop in each city. Data was limited to tickets sold within seven days of each concert. In instances where an artist performed multiple concerts in a given city during a single tour, data was collected for each concert and combined together to find the overall median cost for that artist in that city. Median costs were then averaged for comparison purposes.

Image sources

Taylor Swift The Eras Tour Midnights Era Set (53109799784) (cropped).jpg by Paolo V under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Beyoncé - Tottenham Hotspur Stadium - 1st June 2023 (14 of 118) (cropped).jpg by Raph_PH under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.