With its scheduled closing day canceled by flooding, Wisconsin State Fair attendance in 2025 fell under the fair’s recent million-plus standard.
The 2025 Wisconsin State Fair drew 892,968 visitors, the fair reported in an emailed statement Aug. 15. To have the fair “cut short by a 1,000-year rain event is heartbreaking,” CEO Shari Black said in the statement.
In 2024, the 11-day fair set an attendance record of 1,136,805 visitors, its third consecutive year of more than one million visitors. The 2025 attendance is the lowest figure since the COVID-19-affected year 2021, when the fair drew 841,074 visitors. Because of the pandemic, there was no 2020 fair. Prior to that, State Fair had attracted more than a million visitors for seven consecutive years.
This year’s fair closed early on Aug. 9, its penultimate date, due to flash flooding. The Aug. 10 scheduled closing date was canceled. The fair is developing an exchange program for tickets and vouchers from the Aug. 10 canceled date to be swapped out for 2026 Wisconsin State Fair equivalents. It promised updates on that exchange program on the Wisconsin State Fair website.
Other notable numbers from State Fair’s statistical wrapup:
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Flooding derailed Wisconsin State Fair’s million-plus attendance streak in 2025
Reporting by Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
