Plays Pay the Rent, Broadway's Season Runs 8 Percent Behind

Broadway took in $726,010,709 in the first 23 weeks of the 2026 to 2027 season, 8.0 percent less than at the same point last season, according to the Broadway League's weekly grosses report for the week ending Sunday, November 1. Attendance is down 3.2 percent. The gap between those two numbers is the story.

The League posts its figures every week on its grosses page, show by show and in total. We took the season totals and the 33 shows that played the latest week and ran our own numbers. The arithmetic is below so anyone can check it.

Fewer Dollars, Not Many Fewer People

Season to date, the League counts 5,929,169 tickets sold across 709 playing weeks. A playing week is one show running for one week. At the same point in the 2025 to 2026 season it counted 6,124,466 tickets across 718 playing weeks.

Divide the gross by the attendance and the average ticket this season comes to about $122.45. Last season it was about $128.90. By our arithmetic, that is a drop of 5.0 percent in what the average seat brought in. Divide the gross by the playing weeks instead and the average show earned about $1.02 million a week, against about $1.10 million last season, a fall of 6.9 percent.

Put plainly, Broadway is not losing most of its audience. It is getting less money from each person who comes. The League's numbers do not say why. They do not separate discounting from changes in which shows happen to be running.

That matters for a business whose costs are moving the other way. In a report released October 20, the League said the 44 new shows running in the 2024 to 2025 season cost $418 million to produce, 39 percent more than in 2018 to 2019.

Halloween Week, Show by Show

The latest week was a soft one. The 33 shows grossed $29,572,284, down 12.9 percent from the week before and 12.7 percent below the same week last season, when 35 shows were running. Halloween fell on Saturday, October 31, and the city ran its marathon on Sunday, November 1. The League's report gives no reason for the dip.

What the week does show is a split. We sorted all 33 shows by type, using the League's own Play and Musical labels.

The 22 musicals grossed $18,622,697, an average of about $846,000 each. Taken together they fell 18.3 percent from the previous week. Only two of the 22 grossed more than the week before. One was The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54, where Halloween is the whole point, and the other was The Fantasticks at the Hayes, still in previews. Four musicals lost more than 30 percent, & Juliet, The Outsiders, Operation Mincemeat and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).

The 11 plays grossed $10,949,587, an average of about $995,000 each. Of the 10 plays that also ran the week before, the group fell 5.2 percent, and four of them grossed more than the week before. Plays were a third of the shows on the list and took 37 percent of the money.

Plays were a third of the shows on the list and took 37 percent of the money.

Capacity tells the same story. Seven of the 11 plays sold at least 99 percent of their seats. Among the 22 musicals, only Hamilton did, at 100 percent. Two Strangers played to 57 percent of capacity and Six to 60 percent.

The Most Expensive Seat on Broadway

The top-grossing show of the week was a play. Other Desert Cities at the Hudson, the Jon Robin Baitz revival in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes her Broadway debut, grossed $2,347,158 at full capacity. That edged Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers, which grossed $2,317,475, by about 1.3 percent.

The two got there differently. Hamilton sold 10,629 seats. Other Desert Cities sold 7,792. By our arithmetic, the average ticket at the Hudson came to about $301, against about $218 at Hamilton. No other show on the list averaged more than $240.

Other plays with a familiar name over the title held up as well. Billy Crystal's 860 at the Imperial grossed $1,353,611, up 11.7 percent from the week before, at 99 percent capacity. A Few Good Men at the Vivian Beaumont, which opened to split reviews, played to 100 percent and grossed $1,277,792 across three previews and five regular performances.

How We Counted

All figures come from the Broadway League's grosses page as it stood on November 9, 2026, covering the week ending November 1. Gross means gross gross, the League's term for total ticket sales before deductions. Average ticket is our own division of gross by attendance. Week-to-week changes for each type compare only shows that reported both weeks, which leaves out Much Ado About Nothing, which played a single preview at the Winter Garden that week. Shows in previews are included in the totals.

The next report, for the week ending November 8, should post this week. It will show whether the musicals win back the ground they lost in Halloween week, or whether the plays keep carrying the street.