Farnborough 2026: $84.7 Billion in Deals, 141,580 Visitors, and What Exhibitors Should Do About 2028

The number everyone quoted when Farnborough closed was $84.7 billion.

The number exhibitors should be looking at is twelve. That’s how many months before the doors opened that exhibition space and chalets sold out. Organisers then added a sixth hall, roughly 5,000 square metres of extra floor, and sold that out too. More than 50 organisations spent the week of 20 to 24 July watching the show from the outside.

If you’re planning your 2028 aerospace calendar, that’s the finding that should shape your budget conversation. Not the deal value.

What the show delivered

Farnborough International Airshow 2026 ran 20 to 24 July at Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre in Hampshire. The organiser’s post-show figures:

• Trade and public visitors: 141,580
• Change on previous edition: +41%
• Countries represented: 136
• Commercial business generated: more than $84.7 billion
• Firm commercial aircraft orders: 353
• Firm engine orders: 904

Attendance came in close to double the 2022 edition. Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, CFM’s LEAP programme and Pratt & Whitney carried the commercial announcements. BAE Systems, MBDA and Anduril Industries handled the defence side. Vertical Aerospace flew the first public eVTOL transition demonstration at the show, switching from helicopter mode to aeroplane mode and back.

The UK government sent its defence, AI and business secretaries. Pioneers of Tomorrow, the Friday public day, sold out before the show opened.

Read the deal figure carefully

$84.7 billion is a smaller headline than the roughly $105 billion analysts attributed to FIA 2024. That gap says less about demand than it looks like.

Delivery slots at both major airframers are sold well into the 2030s. When a manufacturer can’t promise an aircraft before 2033, the incentive to stage a headline order at a July airshow weakens. The industry’s combined backlog sits past 17,000 aircraft. Orders get announced when commercially useful, not when a show happens to be on.

There’s also a counting difference worth knowing about. The organiser reported 353 firm commercial aircraft orders. AirInsight, tallying orders alongside options, MoUs and letters of intent, put total commitments at 432 aircraft, with Boeing at 178, Airbus at 164 and Embraer at 90. Both numbers are accurate. They measure different things. If your board asks why two publications reported different figures for the same show, that’s why.

The floor changed shape

Farnborough has historically split its exhibition space roughly 60/40 between commercial aviation and defence. In 2026 that moved closer to 50/50, which Farnborough International’s chief executive attributed to the current geopolitical picture.

That shift shows up in who took space. Trade press covering the show reported that 22% of exhibitors were at Farnborough for the first time and 64% came from outside the UK, across more than 25 international pavilions including India, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil and Switzerland. A new Defence SME Zone, sponsored by Babcock International, gave floor space to defence and security suppliers turning over less than GBP 10 million.

The first-timers weren’t only traditional airframe suppliers. AI, aviation finance and supply chain logistics companies took a visible share of the new hall. That matters for anyone renewing space in 2028, because the neighbours you’re being compared against are no longer only the companies you’ve been benchmarking since 2018.

What a sold-out show does to stand strategy

Here’s the practical consequence of a show selling out twice over.

When floor space is capped, you can’t solve a weak exhibition by buying more square metres. The 40 square metres you had in 2024 is the 40 square metres you’ll have in 2028, and probably in the same hall. Every improvement in return has to come from what happens inside that footprint: how fast a visitor understands what you do, how many qualified conversations your team can physically hold in five days, and whether anyone can find you in a hall that just gained a few hundred new competitors.

That’s a design and operations problem, not a procurement problem. It’s also the one most exhibitors postpone until the year of the show, by which point the decisions that would have moved the number are already locked.

We’ve written about the same pressure at other venues in our IDEX 2027 exhibitor guide and the MRO Europe 2026 guide . Farnborough is the sharpest version of it, because the supply of space is genuinely fixed and the demand is not.

Planning for FIA 2028

The next Farnborough International Airshow runs 17 to 21 July 2028.

Based on how 2026 allocated, here’s the lead time we’d give a client. These are our recommended internal deadlines rather than organiser-published dates, so treat them as planning guidance and confirm specifics with Farnborough International directly.

Now to end of 2026. Decide whether 2028 is in your plan and register interest. Exhibitors who held space in 2026 get first call on renewal. If you weren’t there, you’re behind a waiting list that didn’t clear.

First half of 2027. Confirm space and position. Hall choice and stand location get decided long before most marketing budgets are signed off, which is exactly why so many companies end up in a corner they didn’t want.

Second half of 2027. Brief and sign off the stand design. Twelve months feels early. It isn’t, once you factor in internal approvals, export control review on anything you’re displaying, and the fact that every good contractor in the UK is quoting the same window.

First half of 2028. Build, logistics, permits, freight, on-site crew. Anything that needs a shipping certificate or a government clearance should already be moving by January.

Companies that treat a biennial show as an eighteen-month project consistently outperform companies that treat it as a Q2 marketing activity. That’s not a Farnborough observation. It’s true at IDEX, at Dubai Airshow, at every show where space is scarce and the good positions go early.

Where we come in

Orchestra Media designs and builds exhibition environments for aerospace and defence organisations across more than 100 countries, with 1,200+ international projects delivered over 20 years. Our clients include Boeing, Rolls Royce and Pratt & Whitney. You can see how that work looks on the floor in our success stories .

For a show like Farnborough, the two services that matter most are space booking , so you’re not negotiating for position from the back of a waiting list, and booth design and construction , so the footprint you do secure works harder than the one next to it.

The halls sold out twice. The waiting list didn’t clear. Whatever you decide about 2028, decide it before the companies ahead of you do.

Book a free consultation and tell us which shows are on your 2027 and 2028 calendar. We’ll tell you what the timeline actually looks like.