The core shape of independent band tours has remained largely unchanged since COVID, according to a new analysis of 1,532 verified music tours completed between August 2025 and July 2026.
Bandago‘s State of Band Touring 2026 report compares the latest season with several earlier touring seasons. The average tour lasted 16.1 days and covered 4,334 miles. The median run was 12 days and 3,135 miles. Music tours placed 5.9 million miles on Bandago rented vehicles during the year.
Tour Length and Distance Remain Stable
Across all touring-scale rentals, defined as trips of at least 1,000 miles and four days, the median distance has stayed near 1,900 to 2,000 miles for most of the past decade. The standard van tour did not expand significantly after the pandemic.
The longest runs, however, did grow. A tour at the 90th percentile covered 6,769 miles in 2025-26, compared with 5,222 miles in 2018-19, an increase of almost 30%. One in ten music tours in the latest season exceeded 9,700 miles. This points to a split in the touring economy: artists and crews at the more ambitious end are asking more of every vehicle, routing decision, and person on board.
Booking Windows and Launch Markets
The average indie band reserved its van 35 days before departure last season, up from 21 days in 2015-16. The report does not attribute this to less spontaneity; vehicles, venues, crew, and affordable routing may now need to be locked together earlier for the numbers to work.
A decade ago, Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville accounted for 64.8% of Bandago music-tour launches. Last season, their combined share was 52%.
- Los Angeles: 294 tours
- New York: 242 tours
- Nashville: 217 tours
More runs now originate in markets including Chicago, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Columbus, and Denver. This challenges the older assumption that a serious touring career must be built from one of three industry capitals. The live network is becoming more distributed within Bandago’s 14-market footprint.
Routing is changing with it. The share of touring rentals returned in a different city from where they began rose from 11.7% in 2015-16 to 19.2% last season. More tours are functioning as point-to-point journeys rather than neat loops back home, with especially active corridors along the West Coast and between New York and Chicago.
International Touring Falls for Third Year
The report highlights a decline in international acts touring the United States. International customers accounted for 7% to 8% of Bandago music tours before the pandemic and recovered to 7.7% in 2022-23. Their share has since fallen for three consecutive seasons, reaching 4.7% in 2025-26, the lowest level in the dataset outside the border-closure period.
That translated to 72 international tours last season, down from 122 in 2018-19. Canadian acts experienced the sharpest decline, falling from 31 tours to roughly a dozen.
Bandago notes that this slide coincides with higher costs and tighter U.S. visa and border conditions, but its rental records cannot establish why it is happening. The data also identifies a customer’s country through billing information, meaning foreign artists renting through American management may not appear as international.
Even with those caveats, a three-year decline after a complete post-pandemic recovery is difficult to dismiss as a reopening hangover. For American audiences and venues, fewer visiting working bands means a narrower cultural exchange below the arena level. For international artists, it suggests the U.S. van tour is becoming a harder proposition to justify.
Departure Days and Seasonal Peaks
Wednesday was the most common departure day, and 59% of tour launches occurred between Tuesday and Thursday. The likely strategy is familiar to anyone who has ever routed a run: use smaller weekday shows to travel outward, then reach the strongest markets when audiences are available on the weekend.
September was the busiest launch month, while April and September produced some of the longest tours. Summer may own the public image of live music, but working bands appear to reserve spring and fall for the serious mileage.
Methodology
Bandago analyzed a fixed data set of anonymized rental records from 1,532 verified music tours completed in 14 U.S. markets. The company describes the dataset as a large sample of working touring groups, not a census of the touring industry. Simultaneous multi-van rentals are counted as separate vehicle-tours.
