We’re still a long way away from San Diego Comic-Con 2026, but the official start of the con season kicked off this morning with the Returning Registration badge sale.

This sale is the first of two San Diego Comic-Con badge sales, with this one designated only for eligible returning general attendees (meaning those who attended 2025 as a general attendee). 

Last year’s sale was plagued by several issues and glitches, so by comparison, how did Returning Registration for SDCC 2026 stack up?

The Waiting Room

The waiting room opened right on time at 7:30am PT. For many, it behaved as expected, showing the clock ticking down to 9am PT.

A large portion of attendees though had an issue where the background wouldn’t load, instead displaying a white page with only certain elements — and since the text on the page was also white, meaning they couldn’t see much. If you highlighted the text on the page, you could see it was all still there though, just difficult to read.

Luckily, this wound up being a minor inconvenience, as once the sale actually kicked off (and more on that in a moment), everything behaved as expected as the status bar with the toucan still showed.

Just like in years past, anyone could technically enter the waiting room, as you aren’t prompted to login until you actually are selected to checkout after 9am. This doesn’t mean anyone could purchase — but if you wanted to spend your morning sitting in a waiting room (or help an eligible friend), you certainly could.

Everyone waited patiently for 9am (even if they also had a lot of anxiety), when the great randomization would begin.

 

The Sale

Shortly after 9am, those in the waiting room were randomized. Just like last year, the randomization happens very quickly, in which everyone is randomly assigned a place in line. A status bar and a toucan gives you a rough estimation of how long until you’d be able to purchase badges — for some, only a minute or two away, and for others, more than an hour.

The good news is that, again, even those with the white page still had the toucan, and were able to progress as normal — even if they had some difficulty reading their estimated wait time.

From here, all you could do was wait. Sales started almost immediately, with several reporting getting in within the first few minutes.

There were a handful of issues, especially early on, but they seemed to be few and far between.

For the most part, though, things ran very smoothly — with Preview Night selling out first (as it always does), at 32 minutes — only a little under last year’s 35 minutes (and 29 minutes in 2024). Since 2025’s sale had several issues, we’re going to give both years of historical data, as for the most part, times were more in line with 2024’s sale.

From there, it was very business-as-usual (a nice change from last year), with thousands of badges continuing to be sold. Eventually, Saturday sold out at 65 minutes — right in line with 2025’s sell-out time of 75 minutes and 2024’s of 66 minutes.

Friday was next, at 70 minutes, just under 2025’s time of 81 minutes and 2024’s of 73 minutes.

Traditionally, Thursday and Sunday sell out at roughly the same time, and that continued to be true this year, with Thursday badges going first at 84 minutes (under 2025’s 94 minutes and 2024’s 89 minutes).

Sunday followed just four minutes later at 88 minutes, just under 2025’s 100 minutes and 2024’s 89 minutes.

 

Overview & Next Steps

This was the smoothest Returning Registration we’ve had in several years — and we’re hopeful that it bodes well for another smooth Open Registration. Even if you weren’t successful at scoring badges today, you have to admit there were certainly fewer technical issues than the last few years.

The good news is that according to our very un-scientific poll, it seems that the vast majority of our readers walked away from the sale with a badge — with 75% reporting as of press time that they were able to secure at least a single day badge.

That’s about on par with last year — and in even better news, only 2.5% reported a glitch, versus 8% last year. If you were someone who was affected by an issue during today’s sale, we highly recommend you reach out to Comic-Con International here.

All hope is not lost, if you weren’t able to get exactly what you wanted today. Open Registration — the badge sale available to anyone with a Member ID — will take place on Saturday, November 15. During that sale, all badge types will be available (so just because a badge sold out today, doesn’t mean it’s gone forever). So long as you didn’t purchase all four days plus Preview Night today, you’ll be able to participate to pick up any days you weren’t able to get today.

Badges will be mailed to the U.S. addresses in your Member ID. Make sure you verify your address.

As for all other badge types? General hotel sales should be sometime after Open Registration (likely in April), and all other badge registration events (volunteer registration for those on the interest list, Trade Professionals, and more) will be at a later date.

Were you able to get what you wanted today? Let us know in the comments.