The Largest Concert Venues in the United States

The largest concert venues in the United States are not concert halls. The honest answer is a tier of 100,000-seat college football stadiums that book a touring artist every few years, a tier of NFL stadiums that anchor the modern stadium-tour circuit, the major outdoor amphitheaters that run the summer season, and a small group of enclosed halls topped by the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City. Stadium shows routinely draw between 70,000 and 110,000 ticket-holders on a single night: George Strait's June 15, 2024 concert at Kyle Field drew 110,905, the all-time stadium attendance record for any event at the venue, and Taylor Swift's six-night Eras Tour run at SoFi Stadium in August 2023 moved 420,000 tickets across the residency. The twelve venues below cover the largest US sites in active use for live music, with a 50-venue capacity table at the end.

Michigan Stadium, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Michigan Stadium, nicknamed the Big House, holds 107,601 and has been the largest stadium of any kind in the United States since the mid-1970s. It opened on October 1, 1927, designed by architect Bernard L. Green to a model based on the Yale Bowl, and has held an attendance over 100,000 for nearly every home football game since 1975. As a concert venue the stadium has hosted only a small number of paid shows, most notably a Garth Brooks performance in 2014 that drew approximately 84,000, the largest paid concert in the venue's history. The stadium also hosted the largest outdoor hockey game ever played, the 2014 NHL Winter Classic between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, with an announced attendance of 105,491.

Ohio Stadium, Columbus, Ohio

Ohio Stadium seats 102,780 in its current configuration, set in 2019 after a four-year renovation reduced the previous 104,944 figure to add luxury suites and premium seating. The stadium opened in 1922 with an original capacity of 66,210, was designed by Ohio State alumnus and architect Howard Dwight Smith in its distinctive C-shape (the source of the "Horseshoe" nickname), and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The stadium is one of a small number of US college venues that books major touring concerts on a regular basis, with Pink Floyd, U2, the Rolling Stones, Metallica, One Direction, Taylor Swift, and Garth Brooks among the acts that have performed there. The football attendance record of 110,045 was set against Michigan on November 26, 2016.

Kyle Field, College Station, Texas

Kyle Field holds 102,733 after the 2014-2015 redevelopment that nearly doubled the stadium's previous size of 82,589 (a $484 million project designed by Populous and among the largest single college-stadium expansion projects in US history). The venue's all-time attendance record for any event is not a football game: George Strait's June 15, 2024 concert drew 110,905 spectators, exceeding the football record of 110,633 set on October 11, 2014 against Ole Miss. Texas A&M has played its home games at the site since the original wooden grandstand opened in 1904.

MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey

MetLife Stadium holds 82,500 and is the largest stadium in the NFL by listed seating, shared by the New York Giants and the New York Jets (the only NFL venue split between two franchises along with SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles). The stadium opened in 2010, hosted Super Bowl XLVIII in February 2014 (the first cold-weather outdoor Super Bowl), and is scheduled to host the final of the 2026 FIFA World Cup on July 19, 2026, during which it will be temporarily renamed New York/New Jersey Stadium under FIFA sponsorship rules. The concert attendance record at MetLife is 89,106 ticket-holders, set by Ed Sheeran during the +-=÷x Tour on June 11, 2023.

SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California

SoFi Stadium seats 70,240 with concert configurations expandable to 100,240, has a 3.1-million-square-foot footprint, and is the only indoor-outdoor stadium in the NFL under a transparent ETFE roof canopy. The venue opened in 2020 as the home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, hosted Super Bowl LVI in 2022, and will host the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2028 Summer Olympics. The Eras Tour residency drew 420,000 fans across six sold-out nights in August 2023; Metallica's M72 weekend later that month moved 156,000 tickets across two performances with the band's in-the-round stage configuration.

Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs, New York

The Saratoga Performing Arts Center, known locally as SPAC, holds 25,000 total: 5,103 reserved seats under the amphitheater roof and 20,000 on the sloping lawn behind. The venue opened in 1966 inside Saratoga Spa State Park and serves as the summer home of both the New York City Ballet and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Live Nation books the popular music calendar, which has hosted Cardi B, Imagine Dragons, Sting, Pink Floyd, Jennifer Lopez, and the Dave Matthews Band. The annual Freihofer's Saratoga Jazz Festival anchors the summer programming.

LDS Conference Center, Salt Lake City, Utah

The Conference Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds 21,000 seats in the main auditorium (21,200 including the rostrum behind the pulpit) and is widely cited as the largest theater-style auditorium ever built. The 1.4-million-square-foot building was completed in spring 2000, in time for the church's April 2000 general conference, and replaced the 1868 Salt Lake Tabernacle for the church's biannual general conferences. The auditorium uses cantilevered balconies to deliver unobstructed sightlines without interior columns. Cultural programming includes regular Tabernacle Choir performances and free organ recitals on the 7,667-pipe Schoenstein pipe organ at the rear of the rostrum.

Madison Square Garden, New York, New York

Madison Square Garden, marketed as "The World's Most Famous Arena," holds 20,789 for concerts in its current building, which opened in 1968 atop the Penn Station rail terminal. The venue is the fourth in New York City to bear the name (the original at Madison Square and 26th Street dated to 1879) and is the home arena of the NBA's New York Knicks, the NHL's New York Rangers, and the WNBA's New York Liberty. As a concert venue, MSG was the highest-attended music venue in the United States in 2025 per Pollstar and Billboard, with Billy Joel's monthly residency and Phish's holiday runs among the longest-running booking traditions in American concert history. The smaller Hulu Theater inside the building seats 5,600 for smaller-scale events.

The Sphere, Las Vegas, Nevada

The Sphere seats 17,600 (and up to 20,000 with standing-room configurations) and opened on September 29, 2023 with a residency by U2. The venue stands 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, cost $2.3 billion to construct, and contains a 16K wraparound LED screen, a 580,000-square-foot external "Exosphere" LED display, and an audio system of 164,000 speakers using beam-forming spatial audio technology. In 2025 the Sphere hosted 105 shows that drew 1.2 million paid visitors and grossed $370.3 million, the highest gross of any arena worldwide per Billboard, ahead of London's O2 Arena and Madison Square Garden. The Eagles residency, opened May 2024 and continuing through March 2026, became the longest-running show in the venue's brief history at over 40 dates.

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California

The Hollywood Bowl is an outdoor concert amphitheater set into the Hollywood Hills with a current seating capacity of roughly 17,500 spread across terraced benches that follow the natural slope. The venue has been the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1922, runs a roughly six-month main concert season (late June through October), and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in December 2023. In November 2025, the concert stage was named the John Williams Stage in honor of the composer's eight-decade relationship with the orchestra and the venue. Programming spans classical, opera, jazz, rock, pop, and live-orchestra film concerts.

Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, Colorado

Red Rocks Amphitheatre seats 9,525 in 70 rows of bleacher-style benches set between two sandstone monoliths, Ship Rock and Creation Rock, about 15 miles west of downtown Denver. The venue was officially dedicated in 1941, designed by Burnham F. Hoyt with Civilian Conservation Corps labor, and is owned and operated by the City and County of Denver. In 2025 Red Rocks was the best-attended amphitheater in the United States per Pollstar, drawing 1.75 million paid fans across 236 events, which made it the second-most-attended music venue in the country behind only Madison Square Garden. The annual Film on the Rocks summer series runs alongside the concert calendar.

Peacock Theater, Los Angeles, California

The Peacock Theater seats 7,100 at the L.A. Live entertainment district in downtown Los Angeles, across the street from Crypto.com Arena. The venue opened in 2007 as the Nokia Theatre, was renamed the Microsoft Theater in 2015 after Microsoft bought Nokia's mobile business, and was renamed again on July 11, 2023 under a multiyear naming-rights deal between AEG and NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service. The theater has hosted the Primetime Emmy Awards annually since 2008 (except for 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic) and also stages the ESPY Awards, the BET Awards, the American Music Awards, and the Game Awards. The venue is scheduled to host events during the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.

The Largest US Concert Venues

Honorable mentions belong to a handful of additional concert-circuit venues that drop just outside the top 50 by capacity but anchor major touring routes. Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California (22,500) hosts the Bay Area summer season; Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia (25,000) anchors the Washington-Baltimore amphitheater run; the United Center in Chicago (23,500) holds the largest concert-capable indoor arena footprint in the Midwest; PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey (17,500) and Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkston, Michigan (15,274) round out the historic Live Nation summer-shed circuit. Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, ranks 51st by capacity at 9,525 but drew the second-highest total attendance of any US music venue in 2025 (1.75 million paid fans across 236 events), behind only Madison Square Garden.