The maximum capacity of the Glastonbury Festival, including staff, is 210,000 people. This figure refers to the total number of people permitted on site under the festival’s capacity arrangements, not simply the number of public tickets sold.
The total includes ticketed festivalgoers alongside staff, volunteers, performers, crew and other workers needed to operate the event. Glastonbury is effectively a temporary town: its infrastructure must support large-scale transport, security, medical care, water, electricity, catering and waste services across the Worthy Farm site.
The number can be confusing because older reports often quote much smaller ticketed-public figures, such as 135,000. Those figures describe general admission capacity for particular years, whereas the modern total-site figure also accounts for the many tens of thousands of people working at or supporting the festival.
The 210,000 figure is a licensed maximum, not a guarantee that every edition reaches it. Organisers have sometimes sold fewer tickets or reduced numbers to ease congestion. It also differs from historic crowd estimates: the 1994 festival reportedly drew as many as 300,000 people because of gatecrashers.