The US trade show market in 2026: recovered on volume, not on value

By the end of 2025, the US exhibition industry had almost made it back. The CEIR Index, which tracks net square feet sold, professional attendance, exhibiting companies and gross revenue across 14 sectors, hit a recent peak in the fourth quarter just 2% short of 2019 (CEIR via Skift Meetings, 2026).

That headline hides the shape of the recovery. In the same quarter, attendance was still roughly 6% below 2019 and inflation-adjusted revenue more than 10% below (CEIR via Skift Meetings, 2026). Net square feet and exhibitor counts are the index's best-performing metrics. The booths came back faster than the buyers.

For anyone deciding how much of a 2026 or 2027 event budget goes to other people's shows, that gap is the story.

The shape of the gap

The quarterly data makes the pattern plain. In Q4 2024, the index stood 4.4% below 2019. Exhibitors were essentially flat at negative 0.1%, net square feet was down 3.0%, and attendees were down 12.9% (CEIR via Business Wire, 2025). A year later the fourth-quarter attendance gap had narrowed to roughly 6%, though it swung widely in between. Real revenue went the other way: 1.1% below 2019 in Q4 2024, then 15.6% below in Q2 2025, 18.2% below in Q3 and more than 10% below in Q4 (CEIR via Business Wire, 2025; CEIR via IAEE, 2025; CEIR via Exhibitor Online, 2025; CEIR via Skift Meetings, 2026).

The largest shows show the same split. Among the Trade Show Executive Gold 100, 2025 brought net square feet up 1.5% and exhibitors up 0.5% on 2024, while attendance fell 1.5%. A third of those shows, 33 of the 100, reported 2025 as their largest edition ever (Trade Show Executive, 2026), in a year when attendance across the group fell.

Recovery is also narrow by sector. Only four of CEIR's 14 sectors have surpassed 2019: building, construction and home repair; transportation; government; and industrial and heavy machinery. Consumer goods and retail are the weakest (CEIR via Skift Meetings, 2026). If your buyers sit in those four, the floor may feel healthy. If you sell into the weakest, it probably does not.

Exhibitors are paying more for the same aisle

On the cost side, the exhibitor bill has grown in the place where value has not. CEIR's latest "How the Exhibit Dollar Is Spent" survey puts total exhibitor direct spend at US trade shows at $30 billion, with exhibit space taking 40.5% of that spend, up from 37.9% in 2017 (CEIR via TSNN, 2026). The rent is a larger share of the budget, and fewer people walk past the booth than in 2019.

Exhibitors have not walked away. For 2026, 47% plan to exhibit at the same number of shows and 28% expect to add shows (CEIR via TSNN, 2026). They have reason to stay: Freeman found 74% of attendees name face-to-face events as a top source for discovering products and services, ahead of company websites at 56% (Freeman, 2025). But satisfaction with what the floor delivers is thin. In Freeman's 2024 exhibitor research, 95% said meeting customers was extremely or very important, and only 59% were extremely or very satisfied with it. For lead acquisition the numbers were 88% and 49% (Freeman via Trade Show Executive, 2024).

Costs are also rising around the booth. More than 70% of meeting professionals expect per-attendee costs to rise in 2026 (Amex GBT via Business Travel News, 2025). Rod Siebels, a director at Hitachi Vantara, put it bluntly to Marketing Week: "Event costs have gone up 40% to 50% since the pandemic... we were charged $95 [for coffee]" (Marketing Week, 2025).

Las Vegas, and the travel math behind it

Las Vegas hosts 50 of the TSNN Top 250 shows, more than twice as many as Orlando's 20 (TSNN, 2025). It is the clearest single read on the market, and it tells the same story. The city hosted 6 million convention attendees in 2025, flat on 2024 and 10% below its 2019 record of 6.6 million, while total visitation fell 7.5% (Las Vegas Review-Journal citing LVCVA, 2026). The LVCVA projects Las Vegas Convention Center trade show attendance at 1.2 million in 2026, up from 1 million in 2025 (Las Vegas Review-Journal citing LVCVA, 2026). That is a projection, not a result.

The travel economy behind attendance is large and slow. The US was the world's largest business travel market in 2025 at $395.4 billion (GBTA, 2025). But the U.S. Travel Association forecasts US business travel spending of $319 billion in 2026, growth of just 0.7% (U.S. Travel Association, 2026). International visitors are a drag: Canadian travel to the US fell 25% in 2025 and a further 11% in the first four months of 2026 (via Skift Meetings, 2026). Tourism Economics has cut its 2026 US GDP growth forecast from 2.8% to 1.9% and raised its inflation forecast from 2.5% to 3.3% (via Skift Meetings, 2026). None of that points to a surge of new buyers on the floor next year.

What it means for the mix

B2B event budgets split almost evenly between hosted and third-party events, 49% to 51% (Forrester, 2026). Two signals suggest that split is moving.

First, planned growth is concentrated in owned, small formats. In Forrester's Q1 2026 survey, 63% of B2B organizations plan more hosted networking events under 20 attendees and 52% more hosted events under 200, against 31% planning more sponsored third-party events (Forrester, 2026). Second, the teams beating their numbers already lean that way. Forrester found organizations beating revenue goals by 10% or more put 63% of event budgets into owned or hosted events (Forrester, 2025).

This does not mean abandoning the show floor. A major show is still where a category gathers, and for some sectors it is where discovery happens. It means changing what the show is for. If the aisle is thinner and the rent is higher, the booth is a worse place to meet a buyer than it used to be, and the city around the show is a better one. The practical move is to treat a large show as a reason your target accounts are in the same city that week, and to put the money into the dinner or roundtable you host nearby.

That reframes the measurement too. A booth is judged on scans. A hosted event alongside a show can be judged on which target accounts sat at the table and whether their opportunities moved. The second number is the one finance will ask for.

What to watch

CEIR's quarterly releases will show whether attendance closes the last few points to 2019 or stalls, and whether real revenue recovers or keeps lagging. Watch the share of events beating their 2019 performance: 39.3% did in Q3 2025, up from 37.3% a year earlier (CEIR via Exhibitor Online, 2025). And watch the 1.2 million projection for the Las Vegas Convention Center. If it holds, the floor gets busier in 2026. If it does not, the case for spending less on space and more on owned rooms gets stronger.