For the second year in a row, CHI is nearing venue capacity and will likely sell out of tickets. We wanted to take a moment to talk about it, provide some transparency into what’s going on, discuss the waitlist with some detail, and give some steps the CHI conference can take into the future.
To be honest, this is a good situation for a conference chair to be in. It moves the conference away from potentially losing money. As a non-profit, we use that projected surplus to enrich the conference underway. There’s a number of ways we can (and are) expanding CHI 2026 given our registration numbers like improving food onsite, upping the WiFi bandwidth, and adding more registration booths. We’ve also introduced a local student scholarship program along with a few other surprises. When 2025 hit capacity, they did the same enrichment too.
So what happened? CHI moves around globally and because of our size as a conference and venues are picked 5 years in advance. Last year, in the weeks before the CHI 2025 there was a surge of new attendee registrations from East Asia. We hypothesized that these registrations were from people with easier travel access and they decided to show up last minute. This is great and a reason why we move the conference to new locations year after year, so we can reach different pockets of HCI scholars and practitioners across the globe. Even with a “remote attendee” option, CHI 2025 hit its onsite capacity. Our venue for 2026 has a similar capacity to the venue in Japan of approximately 5,000 attendees, so we set up a contingency plan just in case we were near capacity.
Then in the 30 hours before early bird discount closing, we saw 1,700 registrations show up! These registrations were distributed across three continents: Europe, North America, and Asia. We swung into action and created a waitlist as we were nearing capacity. This was to reserve spots so presenters (papers, posters, workshops, demos, and others) can still register. Our registration team went into gear with 8 people triaging waitlist requests every day all day. For those of you who went through the process (or are still in process), we thank you for your patience. It takes 1–2 business days to process a waitlist request. If you’re presenting, you get priority; you’ll need to be waitlisted to attend in person or to register for a remote video presentation (for papers and posters only). If you’re just attending, those requests will be processed once we clear the presenters.
Looking at the current numbers, we have roughly the same number of registrations from Asia as we do from North America. In 2023 when CHI was in Hamburg, Asia registrations were half that of North America. Right now it’s about 1,500 people from each continent with even more coming from Europe. South America, Africa, and Oceania have a smaller number of registrations (as is typical year over year). This is a great result as it shows by moving 2025 to Yokohama, we gained more worldwide attendance in 2026.
So we have a full CHI 2026 ahead of us in Barcelona. Our new program was designed to host more people and that’s what we’re seeing. What about future CHIs? We’ve given a few pointers to the steering committee:
- For future CHIs, require presenters to register before the early bird deadline. This will make sure they can easily get in without a waitlist.
- For the CHI site selection team, look for venues that can host more than 5,000 people. Each year we accept more papers and more content, so we need more space to scale with our community. Adding more rooms and shortening presentation times is not scalable either, so perhaps we need bigger rooms to keep the parallel session count.
- Also for future CHIs and future sites, remember everyone has a different head count. One day registrations, expo only, companion passes, child passes all have a different footprint from a full conference registration. Make sure to balance the count as the people filling sessions day over day are different from the other attendees.
On top of all this, the CHI Steering Committee and the SIGCHI Executive Committee have plans to expand the conference’s outreach; we’d encourage you to join their discussions. As always, if you have any concerns with the waitlist (beyond just waiting) or the current global situation (as your travel plans may be impacted) or anything else, just email us at: gc@chi2026.acm.org.
Ayman & Nuria
CHI2026 General Chairs