A number next to the word "safety" is a serious thing to publish. If we're going to put one on a festival page, you're entitled to know exactly how we got it, what it does and doesn't measure, and where we could be wrong.
So here is the whole method.
What the score is
Every festival we rate gets a score from 1 to 5. It reflects the infrastructure a festival puts in place to keep attendees safe — not how much fun it is, not how well-run the sound is, and not a prediction that nothing will go wrong.
A 5 does not mean nothing bad will happen to you. A 2 does not mean you'll get hurt. It means one festival has invested more in attendee welfare than another, and we think that's worth knowing before you buy a ticket.
The five criteria
Each carries equal weight. We score each from 1 to 5 and average them.
1. Medical provision
Is there on-site medical care, and at what level? We look for staffed medical tents rather than a first-aid kit at the box office, presence of paramedics or physicians, stated response capability across the whole site, and 24-hour coverage at camping events. Distance to the nearest hospital matters for remote sites.
2. Harm reduction
Whether a festival acknowledges that people use substances at festivals and responds like adults. We look for drug checking services, a sanctuary or safe space for people having difficult experiences, trained peer support, naloxone availability, and — importantly — an amnesty policy so that seeking help doesn't get someone arrested. A festival with zero-tolerance messaging and no support services scores low here regardless of how strict its security is.
3. Water, shade and heat
Free potable water access and enough of it. Shade structures. Heat protocols on hot-climate sites. This is the most-overlooked category and the one that causes the most preventable medical incidents.
4. Security and crowd management
Trained security rather than bouncers, a stated and enforced anti-harassment policy, a clear route for reporting an incident, crowd density management at main stages, and safe egress planning. We also look at how security treats attendees — a heavy-handed security posture is itself a safety problem, not a solution to one.
5. Track record and transparency
Incident history over recent editions, and — the part that separates good operators from lucky ones — how the festival responded. A festival that had a serious incident, acknowledged it publicly, and visibly changed its operation scores better here than one with a quiet history and no published safety information at all.
Where the information comes from
- Official festival safety and health documentation
- Published harm reduction partnerships and service provider announcements
- Local health authority and municipal reporting where available
- Coroner and news reporting on serious incidents
- First-hand attendance by our team and consistent, corroborated attendee accounts
We prioritise documented, verifiable sources over anecdote. A single bad review does not move a score. A pattern does.
What we do not do
- We do not accept payment to change a rating. Not from festivals, not from promoters, not from ticket partners. If we ever have a commercial relationship with a festival we rate, it is disclosed on that festival's page.
- We do not rate festivals we cannot source. If we can't find enough information to score a category, the festival gets no safety rating at all rather than a guessed one.
- We do not treat a low score as an accusation. Most low scores reflect missing published information, not proven negligence.
The limitations, stated plainly
This is a desk-and-experience assessment, not an audit. We are not inspectors, we have no enforcement power, and we do not have access to a festival's internal operations or incident logs.
Conditions change between editions. Staff turn over, contractors change, a new site brings new problems. A rating reflects the most recent edition we have information for, and the date it was last reviewed is shown on every festival page.
Most importantly: no rating on this site replaces your own judgement. Look after your friends, know where the medical tent is, drink water, and tell someone where you are.
Corrections and right of reply
If you're a festival organiser and you think we've scored you wrong — particularly if you have services we missed — tell us. Send documentation and we will re-review and update the page, and we'll note the date it changed.
If you're an attendee with first-hand experience that contradicts a rating, we want that too. It won't move a score on its own, but it tells us where to look.
Reach us through the contact page.
Last updated 2026-09-08.