Festival Resale Tickets UK: Where to Buy at Face Value

Start with the festival's own website

Most UK festivals explain how resale works in their FAQ or ticket information. Search the page for “official resale” or “fan-to-fan”. It will usually name one partner, and that's where to buy.

Sometimes the partner is a separate resale site. Open House Festival, for example, has signed Twickets as its official resale partner. More often the resale is built into the company that sold the tickets in the first place, such as Ticketmaster or See Tickets.

A few festivals don't allow fan-to-fan resale at all. Glastonbury is the best-known example. Its terms say tickets can't be sold or passed on, and orders that are resold get cancelled.

Three quick rules before the detail:

• Buy only where the festival tells you to. If a site isn't named on the festival's own pages, treat it as unofficial.
• Pay by card or PayPal (not friends and family), never bank transfer. Action Fraud's advice is that a credit card or a service like PayPal gives you a better chance of getting your money back if something goes wrong.
• Expect face value plus fees – occasionally less in the final week. Big discounts on official resale are rare. What you're really paying for is a ticket that scans.

Where the law stands

You may have seen headlines saying it's now illegal to resell above face value in the UK. It isn't, yet.

The King's Speech on 13 May 2026 included a draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill. The plan is to stop anyone reselling a ticket for more than they paid, including unavoidable fees, to limit what resale sites can charge in fees, and to stop people reselling more tickets than they were allowed to buy. The government says the draft will be published for MPs and the industry to examine before a final Bill goes through Parliament. There's no date yet for it to become law.

A separate vote on 4 November caused some confusion. MPs voted 286–62 against a Liberal Democrat amendment to a different law, the Sporting Events Bill, that would have banned above-face-value resale for major sporting events. The minister argued that Bill was the wrong place for the change. It doesn't affect festivals directly, and the wider ban is still planned.

For now, the festival's own terms decide whether your ticket gets you in.

Official resale, platform by platform

Platform	Price cap	Buyer fee	Seller fee	Good to know
Twickets	Face value plus original booking fee	10–15%, depending on the event	Free (PayPal charges may apply)	You need PayPal to sell
Ticketmaster Fan-to-Fan	What the seller paid, or less	Shown at checkout, not published	Free to list	Only for tickets first bought on Ticketmaster
See Tickets Fan-to-Fan	Original price or less	10% of listing price, plus delivery	No seller fee; buyer pays 10%	Seller paid five days after the event
Skiddle Re:Sell	Face value	Skiddle's usual booking fee, shown at checkout	Seller can't set the price	Only when that ticket type has sold out

Twickets

Twickets started in 2011 as a way for fans to pass on spare tickets at cost. It's now a fan-to-fan marketplace for thousands of events. Sellers can't ask for more than the face value plus the booking fee they originally paid. It sells at face value or less, and nothing more.

The fees are easy to follow. Selling costs nothing on Twickets' side. Buyers pay a booking fee of 10–15%, and you see the exact amount before you pay. If the tickets are paper, delivery is extra: £9.95 for Special Delivery or £3.80 for 1st Class Signed.

One feature is worth knowing about. Some sellers mark their listing “open to offers”, and you can offer up to 70% below the listed price. The booking fee is still worked out on the listed price, not your offer. In the last week before a festival, when sellers know they can't go and just want some money back, this is where you'll sometimes find tickets below face value.

The catch is competition. Face-value tickets for sold-out festivals go quickly. Set up an alert for your event on Twickets rather than refreshing the page all day.

Ticketmaster Fan-to-Fan

If a festival sold its tickets through Ticketmaster, its resale is usually the official route. Several big UK festivals use Ticketmaster, including Reading & Leeds, Download and Wireless, so check there first for those.

Sellers can list at what they paid, meaning face value plus the original fees, or lower. Buyers pay a resale fee on top. Ticketmaster doesn't publish the amount, but the full total is shown before you confirm.

Two things to know. The festival, not Ticketmaster, decides whether resale is switched on, and it can change its mind. And once you've bought a resale ticket, you can't resell it again. On the event page, the colours tell you what you're looking at: pink means another fan is reselling, blue means a new ticket straight from Ticketmaster.

See Tickets Fan-to-Fan

This only covers events that See Tickets sold in the first place. It sells at the original price or less.

On top of the listing price, buyers pay a 10% resale fee, plus delivery. The seller is responsible for getting the ticket to you, and you pay the delivery cost. See Tickets' Ticket Plan Protection doesn't apply to resale tickets, so if you need cover in case you can't go, you won't get it here.

Skiddle Re:Sell

Skiddle sells a lot of club nights and smaller UK festivals. Its resale works more like a returns queue than a marketplace. Sellers don't set a price – everything goes back on sale at face value, and the original ticket is cancelled as soon as it's listed, so the one you buy is new and in your name.

There are two conditions. The promoter has to have switched Re:Sell on for that event, and the ticket type has to have sold out first. Resold tickets then appear on the normal event page like any other ticket. If a sold-out Skiddle event suddenly shows tickets again, that's usually why.

Glastonbury plays by its own rules

Glastonbury tickets for Wed 23 – Sun 27 June 2027 sold out within an hour of going on sale on 4 October 2026. There's no fan-to-fan resale. Each ticket carries a photo of the registered holder, and the festival says only See Tickets is authorised to sell them.

That leaves one route: the official resale of cancelled and returned tickets, which the festival says will happen in spring 2027. No date has been announced yet. Tickets cost £408 each (including a £5 booking fee) plus £11.25 postage per order. You'll need a valid Glastonbury registration to take part, so check yours is in order before the resale date is confirmed.

Viagogo, StubHub and social media – why festivals cancel those tickets

Viagogo and StubHub are real companies, both owned by StubHub Holdings. On these sites sellers set their own prices, which can be above face value. For festival-goers, the bigger question is whether the festival will let that ticket in.

In early 2025, Which? found Reading Festival tickets listed at £596 on Viagogo and £616 on StubHub International, at a time when face-value tickets at £325 were still available from the official sellers. Those were Which?'s searches in January and February 2025, not current listings, but they show how big the gap can be.

Which? also pointed out that Reading Festival names Viagogo and StubHub International as unauthorised sellers and warns fans not to buy from them. Reading's terms say tickets resold for profit without its permission can be cancelled, and the holder can be turned away without a refund.

Viagogo's own terms say that if a buyer is refused entry because of an invalid ticket, “we may refund the buyer at any time”. Note the word “may”. And a refund normally covers the ticket price only. Your train, coach and camping kit won't be paid back.

Resale sites often show up near the top of search results, so it's easy to land on one without realising it isn't the festival's own shop. Type the festival's web address yourself and follow its ticket links from there.

Social media carries more risk still. Facebook groups, Instagram messages and Reddit threads have no checks and no buyer protection unless you pay by a protected method. Action Fraud's campaigns specifically warn about criminals selling tickets on social media for popular and sold-out events.

Fees explained – face value, booking fees and the all-in price

Three terms matter when you compare prices.

• Face value – the total the first buyer paid. Twickets' founder, Richard Davies, defined it as “the total amount it was first purchased for, including any booking fee.”
• Resale fee – what the resale site adds on top for the buyer.
• All-in price – face value plus the resale fee plus any delivery. This is the number to compare.

A worked example: a seller paid £200 for a weekend ticket, booking fee included, and lists it at £200 on Twickets. With a 10–15% buyer fee, you pay £220 to £230 all-in. The same £200 listing on See Tickets Fan-to-Fan would be £220 plus any delivery. On Ticketmaster, the resale fee isn't published, so check the total before you confirm.

That's the honest trade-off with official resale. You pay a little over face value, but the ticket is real and it's in your name or account.

Red flags – PDFs, bank transfer, wristband photos

Action Fraud's figures for 2024, published in April 2025, put UK ticket fraud losses at £9.7 million, up nearly 50% on 2023. June and July had the most reports.

Walk away if you see any of these:

• Bank transfer only. It's one of the clearest warning signs Action Fraud lists. PayPal “friends and family” has the same problem – it skips buyer protection.
• A PDF or screenshot of a barcode. The same file can be sent to ten people, and only the first to scan gets in. Official resale cancels the old barcode and gives you a new one.
• A photo of a wristband. It shows someone had a wristband once. It doesn't show they still have it, that it hasn't been registered or activated, or that they'll post it.
• “Let's sort it out by DM.” A seller who finds you on Twickets or in a Facebook group and wants to finish the deal by message or email is taking away your protection.
• A ticket the festival says can't be transferred. For Glastonbury and any festival with named or photo tickets, a resold ticket won't get you in, whatever the seller says.
• Requests for your login or registration details. Glastonbury has warned fans not to share registration details or buy from unofficial sellers.

If it goes wrong, report it at www.actionfraud.police.uk or call 0300 123 2040 (Police Scotland on 101). Then contact your card provider or PayPal straight away.

Selling your own ticket

Can you resell a festival ticket? Usually yes, if you use the route the festival allows.

• Twickets: list at anything up to what you paid, booking fee included. Selling is free, but you need a PayPal account.
• Ticketmaster: choose which tickets to list and set a price up to what you paid. Listing is free.
• See Tickets: your money (face value plus the delivery fee) is paid to your registered debit card five days after the event, as long as nobody has raised a dispute. Plan for that wait.
• Skiddle: request resale from your orders. There's no promise it will sell. If it does, you'll get an email confirming your face-value refund.
• Glastonbury: you can't sell it. Cancelled tickets go back into the official spring resale.

List as early as you can. The closer to the festival, the more sellers there are, and the more likely you'll have to drop your price. If your festival has no resale option, contact the organiser – some allow a name change, some don't.

Live deals from promoters, and free alerts

Official resale gets you a ticket at around face value. If you want to pay less, your best chance is often the promoter rather than another fan – especially close to the date, when some would rather sell the last tickets cheaper than leave them unsold.

That's what Festival Abroad lists. Promoters put up real reduced-price tickets sold by the festival itself, not resale. Each listing shows the all-in price, any catch (camping not included, 18+, no refunds) and when the price ends, in UK time.

See live deals on festivalabroad.com. If you'd rather not keep checking, set up free deal alerts for the genres, budget and festivals you care about. You'll only get an email or text when something fits.