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Creamfields 2026 is officially heading back to Daresbury, Cheshire for four huge days across August Bank Holiday Weekend, running August 27-30.
And this one carries some extra history. Creamfields is celebrating 20 years at Daresbury in 2026, turning the fields in Cheshire into one gigantic electronic music anniversary party.
The lineup absolutely got the memo. Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, Disclosure, Martin Garrix, Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, Alesso, John Summit, Fisher, Underworld, Amelie Lens, Dom Dolla, Carl Cox, Faithless and a ridiculous amount more are on the bill.
This is less “a few DJs in a field” and more a temporary city where almost every possible version of dance music gets its own corner.
➜ The real story: Creamfields doesn’t seem interested in aging gracefully for its 20th year at Daresbury. It’s doing the opposite, booking an enormous cross-section of dance music and turning four days in Cheshire into one giant argument over which stage you’re supposed to run to next.
The ticket situation is getting tight too.
Camping tickets are sold out, multi-day non-camping options are sold out and most individual day tickets are gone. The official site currently lists Standard Sunday admission as limited.
Set times are already live in the official Creamfields app, so this has moved firmly into the planning-your-clashes phase.
Creamfields 2026 takes place Thursday, August 27 through Sunday, August 30 in Daresbury, Cheshire.
It lands across the UK August Bank Holiday Weekend, which has basically become Creamfields territory at this point.
The 2026 edition is especially significant because it marks 20 years since Creamfields moved to Daresbury.
The festival itself dates back to 1998. It began as a one-day event in Winchester, moved to Liverpool the following year and eventually settled into its current Cheshire home in 2006.
From there, it kept expanding.
What started as a single-day dance festival has become a four-day camping event with massive outdoor stages, giant indoor structures, club-style arenas and basically every major branch of electronic music fighting for your attention at the same time.
Thursday is part of the official festival schedule for four-day camping ticket holders, with artists including Laidback Luke, Vikkstar, Pretty Pink, Ferreck Dawn, Matt Sassari, Richard Durand and Shugz.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday then open things up into the much larger full festival programme.
Creamfields is strictly 18+. The festival also operates a Challenge 21 policy, so bringing valid photo ID is important even if nobody has asked your age since approximately 2019.
Get current information directly from the official Creamfields website.
The easiest way to describe the Creamfields 2026 lineup is that almost every major lane of electronic music appears somewhere on it.
House, techno, trance, drum and bass, hard dance, progressive sounds, classic rave music and giant crossover EDM all get serious space.
Friday puts Disclosure live on the Arc stage while Fisher and John Summit take over Apex.
Carl Cox leads HALO alongside Franky Wah and Ben Sterling, while the Steel Yard goes significantly harder with I Hate Models, Holy Priest, NOVAH, Restricted and more.
Then you’ve got Ben Nicky, Darren Styles, Lilly Palmer and Maddix over at Nation, plus Paul Oakenfold and Giuseppe Ottaviani helping keep the trance side of the weekend fully awake.
Saturday somehow gets even bigger.
Calvin Harris is on Arc, while Apex has Alesso, Armin van Buuren, Martin Garrix, Ben Hemsley, Dimitri Vegas and MK spread across its programme.
Steel Yard gets Underworld live, Amelie Lens presents AURA, CamelPhat, Dom Dolla, Eli Brown, Kettama and Pete Tong.
There’s also an entire drum and bass programme with Andy C, Hedex, Hybrid Minds, Culture Shock, Kanine, Koven, Mozey and Sigma.
Sunday closes with Swedish House Mafia at Apex while Sonny Fodera, Becky Hill and Armand van Helden lead Arc.
Tiësto and Faithless perform inside Steel Yard, while Gorgon City and Prospa land at HALO and Fatboy Slim gets his own Fatboy Slim Loves programme.
There’s trance from Ferry Corsten and Aly & Fila, hard dance from Angerfist, Reinier Zonneveld’s Hardkar project and plenty happening well below the biggest names.
That’s really the Creamfields thing.
You can arrive for the superstar headliners and still spend most of your weekend disappearing into stage programmes that look like standalone festivals themselves.
Get the full day-by-day breakdown from the official Creamfields 2026 lineup.
The Creamfields 2026 set times are officially available now.
Creamfields is directing festivalgoers to the official app for the current timetable, which is definitely the move at a festival where scheduling conflicts can turn into an advanced mathematics problem.
The app also includes maps, festival information and planning tools, so you can build your own schedule before discovering that three people you absolutely want to see are somehow playing at exactly the same time.
With stages including Arc, Apex, Steel Yard, HALO, Teletech, Nation, The Forest, Sub_Aural and several hosted arenas, the timetable matters almost as much as the artist poster.
This isn’t a festival where you can casually wander toward “the other stage” and hope everything works itself out.
Download the official Creamfields app through the Creamfields website for the latest set times.
The first thing to know about Creamfields 2026 tickets right now is that most of the big ticket categories are already sold out.
All camping ticket categories are currently marked sold out by Creamfields.
The Standard four-day camping ticket originally cost £290 plus a £20 booking fee, bringing the total to £310.
Standard three-day camping was £270 plus a £20 booking fee, while Standard two-day Saturday and Sunday camping was £240 plus a £20 fee.
Those are all sold out.
Bronze, Silver and Gold camping have sold out too.
The four-day Bronze camping ticket was £330 plus a £20 booking fee, Silver was £360 plus £20 and Gold was £430 plus £20.
Multi-day non-camping passes are also sold out.
The Standard three-day Friday through Sunday non-camping ticket was £275 plus a £20 booking fee.
The Standard Friday and Saturday two-day pass was £180 plus an £18 fee, while Saturday and Sunday was £200 plus £20.
For day tickets, Friday Standard was £75 plus a £10.75 booking fee and is sold out.
Saturday Standard was £125 plus a £14.25 booking fee and is also sold out.
The remaining bright spot is Sunday.
The official Creamfields site currently marks Standard Sunday tickets as limited at £125 plus a £14.25 booking fee, making the checkout total £139.25.
That ticket gets you into the event arena on Sunday only. It doesn’t include campsite access.
There are no pass outs at Creamfields either. Once a day ticket has been scanned, leaving means you can’t come back into the festival that day.
Get the latest inventory from the official Creamfields tickets page.
With the festival now only a couple of weeks away, that remaining Sunday availability is the part of this guide most likely to change fast.
Camping is a huge part of Creamfields, but if you haven’t already bought a 2026 camping ticket, the official inventory has reached the uncomfortable part of the story.
All Creamfields camping tickets are currently sold out.
The festival uses several camping levels, including Standard, Bronze, Silver and Gold.
Your campsite access is tied to the level printed on your ticket, so having a Bronze, Silver or Gold camping ticket doesn’t automatically mean you can move into another campsite because your friends somehow picked a different one six months ago.
Silver and Gold camping include access to showers, proper toilets and pamper facilities inside their campsite areas.
Gold also includes access to the PayPal+ Hospitality Arena, with complimentary food and parking included with applicable Gold camping tickets.
Creamfields also has separate accommodation concepts including Pre-Pitch and Dreamfields.
Pre-Pitch gives you a tent that’s already waiting on site, which means one less opportunity to discover at 11 PM that nobody brought the tent poles.
Dreamfields is the more upgraded accommodation option, with its own private campsite, reception, site security, showers, proper toilets, pamper facilities and phone charging.
Dreamfields accommodation doesn’t include festival admission. Everyone staying there still needs an appropriate Creamfields camping ticket.
Dreamfields and Pre-Pitch are scheduled to open at noon Thursday, August 27 and close at noon Monday, August 31.
Get current accommodation details from the official Creamfields website.
Creamfields is massive, but the interesting part isn’t simply the number of people or names on the poster.
It’s the number of completely different dance-music worlds operating at the same time.
Arc gives you the huge open-air festival experience. Apex functions more like a gigantic enclosed rave. Steel Yard has become one of Creamfields’ signature structures, while HALO, Teletech, Sub_Aural and the smaller hosted spaces go deeper into particular scenes.
You can move from Calvin Harris-sized main-stage dance music into techno, drum and bass, trance, hard dance or underground house without leaving the site.
That’s why the lineup can contain Swedish House Mafia, Underworld, Andy C, Fatboy Slim, Amelie Lens, Paul Oakenfold, Carl Cox and John Summit without feeling like somebody accidentally merged six different festival posters.
Creamfields has been doing this for a long time.
The festival began in 1998 as an extension of the Cream club brand, and that club-culture DNA is still obvious even after the event grew into one of the UK’s biggest electronic music festivals.
It doesn’t just build stages. It builds different rave environments inside one enormous festival.
Then tens of thousands of people spend the weekend trying to see all of them.
Creamfields has survived almost three decades of electronic music changing its mind about what’s cool.
Superclubs came and went. EDM exploded. Tech house became enormous. Hard techno got faster. Drum and bass returned to huge festival stages. Trance never actually disappeared no matter how often somebody announced that it had.
Creamfields kept absorbing all of it.
That’s probably the biggest reason the festival has lasted.
Its identity isn’t one narrow sound. It’s the broader culture around dance music, DJs, live electronic acts, rave history and whatever people are currently obsessing over at 140 BPM.
The 2026 lineup makes that especially obvious.
Swedish House Mafia, Calvin Harris and Martin Garrix can coexist with Underworld, Carl Cox, Amelie Lens, I Hate Models, Andy C, Paul Oakenfold and artists who weren’t even old enough to attend Creamfields when some of those names first played it.
Twenty years at Daresbury also gives this edition a nice full-circle feeling.
The scale has changed dramatically since Creamfields arrived in Cheshire in 2006, but the basic plan remains pretty simple: build an unreasonable number of dance floors in a field and see who’s still standing Sunday night.
Creamfields 2026 takes place Thursday, August 27 through Sunday, August 30 in Daresbury, Cheshire over the UK August Bank Holiday Weekend.
The Creamfields 2026 lineup includes Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, Disclosure, Martin Garrix, Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, Alesso, John Summit, Fisher, Underworld, Amelie Lens, Dom Dolla, Carl Cox, Sonny Fodera, Becky Hill, Faithless, Gorgon City, Fatboy Slim and many more.
Most Creamfields 2026 ticket categories are sold out. As of August 13, Standard Sunday tickets are listed as limited at £125 plus a £14.25 booking fee. Standard four-day camping was £290 plus a £20 booking fee and is sold out.
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