Reviewed: Some of the best festival tents for 2026

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You might have bought some festival tickets by now, so if you haven’t already found a decent tent it’s already on your to-do list. We’ve reviewed some of the best festival tents for 2026, so get something that’ll last for years before you start to panic.

You don’t wanna be stuck with whatever tent you got from Tesco the night before again, do you?

The Golden Rule: Get a dark bedroom tent

Before we get into specific models, our number one piece of advice for festival camping in 2026 is to buy a tent with “blackout” or darkened bedrooms. These block out the early morning sun, allowing you to actually sleep past 6 am and preventing the tent from turning into an absolute greenhouse by 9 am.

We have a dedicated guide to the best blackout festival tents and we strongly recommend you read that first. However, if you really don’t want a blackout tent (perhaps you want the extra light, or you’re up too early to care about the morning heat), we have rounded up the best standard festival tents below.

The other rules of festival tents

At a festival, if not at all times, you want to cut the number of people a tent says it can sleep in half. You’ll need somewhere to store all that beer and your muddy wellies. Even without much stuff, a supposedly 4-man tent would be far too cosy with four people sleeping inside it.

We’d also always avoid single-skin tents, such as most pop-up tents or cheap supermarket tents. These tents have only a single layer of fabric between where you sleep and the outside world. Decent tents have two layers (an inner bedroom and an outer waterproof flysheet) with a gap between the two, which prevents condensation and rain from getting inside.

If there’s a few of you going, get everyone to chip in. Then you can get a nice, tall tunnel tent, with room to sit about on your chairs and charge your phones inside when it rains all day.

High-quality tent for 2-3 people

Coleman Coastline 3+

This has become my go-to festival tent. It’s big enough for two people to have plenty of room and easily sleeps three if needed, though it’s small and light enough to carry, build and pack away easily on your own.

The bedroom walls are miles from the sides of the tent, which is probably why it was one of the only tents in the Kendal Calling crew campsite that didn’t get soaked through by the thunderstorms last summer. There’s even a porch area big enough to sit around on camping chairs inside – and it’s tall enough you can stand up inside to get changed.

I used it through the last few summers and expect to take it to pretty much every festival I go to this summer.

It’s a high-quality product from a well-known brand so if you go to multiple festivals every year, or go camping, spend the extra on this. If you’re off to Reading with your mates from college for the first time, maybe get one of the cheaper and bigger tents below.

When you’re used to cheaper tents you notice some of the luxuries the Coleman brand offers, like nicer zips that don’t get stuck and colour-coded poles. This one-man tent even gives you a choice of two side doors and one larger, front-facing door. If you get fed up of the view you can look the other way and you can use the door where the rain doesn’t blow inside. Fantastic.

It’s available from Amazon and pretty much anywhere else with a decent range of tents on offer.

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Best value festival tent for 2-4 people

Outsunny Two-Room Tunnel Tent

This tent gives you the essential ‘bit-in-the-middle’ where you can socialise and store stuff, whilst giving you separate sleeping compartments on either side.

You’ll have festival luxury with only two people, with the space and privacy of a bedroom each and a spacious living area – and with three or four people, you’ll still be ok, as you’ve got the big central area to store your (non-valuable!) stuff! It’s a pretty tried-and-tested design for a group festival tent. It’s not too hard to build either, just get the poles into the outer shell, hook up the sealed bedroom compartments, and with a sewn-in groundsheet, you’re already done!

Alternatively, it can be used without one or both of the bedroom compartments, creating a massive space that’ll sleep a bigger group. It’s not too heavy either, so taking turns, it’s not too bad for carrying into a festival campsite from the car without a trolley, and it’d be manageable on public transport.

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Best value festival tent for 3-6 people

ProAction 6 Man 2 Room Tent

This tent is a lot like the Outsunny tent featured above, making it brilliant for group festival trips. It is a slightly bigger 6-man tent, with room for three in each bedroom on opposite sides of the living and storage area.

Crucially, it is widely stocked in Argos for around £115. If you have left it until the absolute last minute, you can check stock in stores near you online and reserve one to pick up immediately.

Check stock at Argos here.

A cheap double-skin tent that’ll last

Coleman Darwin 3 Summer (Non-Blackout)

If you are on a strict budget, don’t care about blackout technology, and want the absolute cheapest double-skin tent from a reputable brand, this is it.

The standard Darwin 3 is a highly reliable dome tent. Unlike the “Plus” version, it doesn’t have an extended porch, so you will be keeping your bags in the bedroom with you, but it will keep you dry. It has a proper inner bedroom to stop condensation dripping on your face, and the fibreglass poles can withstand high winds. It’s perfect if you’re doing a festival solo or with a partner and just need a dry place to crash.

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Really want one? Cheap single-skin tents

Two kinds of cheap festival tent examined

Ok, so you want a really cheap tent. If you get any heavy rain, you will likely get wet, but you’re willing to take the risk.

You should never leave your tent behind after a festival. They go to landfill, not charity, and on average contain 8,750 straws worth of plastic. If the weather isn’t horrendous and you avoid the very cheapest options, it’s perfectly possible to look after a single-skin tent and use it again and again. Just don’t take too much stuff—anything touching the sides will make it leak instantly.

We’ve found some of the cheapest decent quality single-skin tents around, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

The single-skin dome tent: Milestone Camping 2-Person Dome

These are often sold explicitly as ‘festival tents’ and are a very common sight in the campsites, but they should really come with a warning label. To be fair, they can actually stand up pretty well to light rain, provided there’s absolutely nothing touching the sides of the tent.

To be fair, some of the larger ones like pictured above can actually stand up pretty well to the rain, provided there’s absolutely nothing anywhere near the sides of the tent.

Danny brought that one to Boomtown because it was cheap in Argos and he needed to buy one en-route. It was totally dry inside through the worst downpours, but keep in mind that’s one man in a 4-man tent.

Still, the tent’s coming to Glastonbury and back to Boomtown this summer. You don’t need to buy an expensive tent to re-use it again and again, you just need to avoid the very very cheapest and look after what you do buy.

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Pop-up festival tent

Pop-up tents are slightly more expensive, unless you go for a tiny one, but totally worth it if you hate pitching and packing away. They literally pops into place in about 5 seconds. Just stick some pegs in and you’re done.

There’s a bit of a technique to folding them away, but once you’ve mastered it you can pack your tent away in seconds. If you can’t manage, there’s always someone within earshot who knows how to put a pop-up tent away in a festival campsite.

They’re generally very lightweight and easy to carry, so it’s a shame so many people leave them behind because of the price. They’re probably the easiest tents to take home and re-use.

You can also usually find these pop-up tents on the high street at Go Outdoors or slightly more expensive versions at Argos.

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F.A.Q.

Main image credit: Éamonn Ó Muirí