How to Get Super Bowl Tickets

Until recently, regular football fans could enter a lottery to buy Super Bowl tickets at face value. But that lottery is mostly gone now, except for fans with disabilities. Now, whatever seats the NFL makes available are sold at a hefty face value through its teams, the league's official marketing partner or at a steep markup via ticket brokers on the secondary market.

In a normal year, the NFL distributes a certain number of Super Bowl tickets to each of the 32 NFL teams. Historically, the two teams playing in the Super Bowl split 35 percent of the tickets. Another big chunk goes to the host team; in 2023 that's the Arizona Cardinals, who welcome players and fans for the game Feb. 12, 2023.

Each of the other teams in the league receives a smaller share of the total ticket allotment. Every team figures out how to split up its tickets among coaches and players, other team personnel, team season-ticket holders and various other team loyalists.

Historically, about 25 percent of the tickets are held back for the league, which it distributes to its rich and powerful friends, leaving a very limited amount to sell to the general public through the NFL's On Location Experiences.

For 2023, tickets certainly won't be as easy to come by for regular fans at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, despite a seating capacity that might be pushed to 73,000.

The NFL has changed how tickets are distributed, though. For instance, during the 2020 season played amid the coronavirus pandemic, the 2021 Super Bowl — officially, it was Super Bowl LV — was held at Tampa's Raymond James Stadium, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 31-9. The NFL provided 7,500 free tickets to vaccinated health care workers for that game and freed up an additional 14,500 tickets for others to honor them for their service.

It should be clear at this point that getting Super Bowl tickets is incredibly difficult and prohibitively expensive. The only real options this year, and in most years, are to buy them online through the NFL or on the secondary or resale market.

Resellers like StubHub and SeatGeek work by connecting buyers with people who already have Super Bowl tickets. Most often the sellers are team season-ticket holders who won a chance to buy the tickets, at somewhere around face value, through a team lottery. They then turn around and put those tickets up for sale through StubHub or SeatGeek or others. (The sites take a cut of the sales price and sometimes charge fees.)

Pricing for those tickets is pure supply and demand. Ticket prices go up or down based on the number of tickets available and how many people want to buy them. For example, last year when the Los Angeles Rams played the Cincinnati Bengals at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — becoming just the second team ever to play in the big game on its home field — ticket prices soared to some of the most expensive in the history of the game. Individual tickets averaged about $18,200, though the "cheapest" were about $4,900. Top VIP suite tickets were priced at $100,000.

Before this season's NFL's conference championship games Jan. 29, 2023 — the winners of the two conference title games advance to the Super Bowl — the cheapest price for a single ticket for Super Bowl LVII on SeatGeek was $5,999. And you had to buy two of them. And pay almost $2,000 in fees on top of that. (You could get a single ticket at that time on SeatGeek, but you would have had to pay more than $6,000 for it, not including fees.) As of this writing, the cheapest price for a pair of tickets on SeatGeek was about $5,000 each, for upper level, not including fees.

The On Location Experiences official ticket packages sold through the NFL — the packages include a ticket along with celebrity-studded events, exclusive entertainment from big-name performers, and the chance to mingle with former athletes — for Super Bowl LVII start at $5,312.50 apiece. The exclusive Club 57 package, which gets you a host of add-ons including catering, starts at $9,975 per ticket.

Ticket prices on the secondary, re-selling market do fluctuate. They tend to spike right after the conference championships and fall as Super Bowl game day approaches two weeks later. So, if you happen to live in or near the city where one of the conference title games is played, it might be smart to wait until the very end to snag a ticket. You just might score a relative "bargain."

Originally Published: Oct 13, 2010