40C3 Presale: Modus Operandi

Even though 40C3 is moving a few doors down the road, our ticket presale will work pretty much the same as last year:

We’ll again be using our system of replicating vouchers. The presale will run in two phases: the voucher phase and the open sale.
We’ll explain this as briefly as we can here. If you want to read more about it, we also have a documentation page available, where we’ll add more information in the coming days.

The voucher phase will run from 2026-10-23 10:00 (CEST) until 2026-11-10 23:00 (CET) and works as follows:

• There is a fixed quota for this phase. Once this quota is reached, no more tickets will be sold until the open sale.
• All Chaos community groups that have received vouchers from us in the past and answer our inquiry email (see below) will again receive a set of vouchers this year. Each voucher allows the purchase of one ticket. Once this ticket is paid for, a new voucher will be generated (roughly once per day, and only on days when the banks are processing payments). This chain of vouchers will continue until either the quota is reached or the voucher phase ends. These vouchers are intended to be shared within the group and its extended community. It is up to the respective groups how exactly they handle this.
• At the same time, all 39C3 angels who have worked at least 15 hours will receive one voucher. This voucher guarantees the purchase of one ticket until 2026-11-10 23:00 (CET). If you redeem your angel voucher and pay for your ticket while there are still tickets available in the voucher phase, you will receive one additional voucher you can share with a friend. This additional voucher does not generate further vouchers.

Following the voucher phase, there will be three open sale dates, where tickets will be sold at tickets.events.ccc.de. The open sale can be A LOT for newcomers, so you might want to read the guide that we’ll publish in the coming days.
For each date, there is a fixed quota. That means that even after the first date sells out, there will still be tickets available on the second date. The dates are:

• 2026-11-08, Sunday, 11:00 (CET)
• 2026-11-11, Wednesday, 18:00 (CET)
• 2026-11-19, Thursday, 20:00 (CET)

Ticket prices

We want to continue setting our ticket prices so that they do not pose a significant barrier to participation, while fairly distributing the costs of the event among all participants. However, we, too, are not spared from rising costs – an event like this is a logistically complex undertaking! – and we have to reflect last year’s cost increases in the ticket prices.

The most important changes:

• Standard ticket: € 190 € 200
• Supporter-Tickets:
  • € 220 € 230
  • € 255 € 265
  • € 300 € 310
• Up-and-coming-Ticket: € 50 € 60

Next steps

All Chaos community groups will receive an email today to their last known contact address. If you did not receive this email, please contact us at 40c3-tickets@cccv.de by 2026-10-22 20:00 (CEST). In case we have missed an entire group that, in your opinion, should be represented at Congress and is not connected with any other local groups, please also reach out to us at 40c3-tickets@cccv.de.

Please note that groups that are close to each other, either by location or organisation, are expected to share their vouchers – if we started handling more than one group per city/area, we’d have a full-time job on our hands. For the same reason, our focus is on local groups, rather than e.g. distributed groups, or open source projects, or groups that only meet at Congress.

Chaos community groups will receive their vouchers on October 23 before 10:00 (CEST).

All angels who according to Engelsystem have worked more than 15 hours and have given us permission to contact them via email will receive their voucher today. You’re sure you passed the 15-hour threshold, but did not receive a voucher? Please contact us at 40c3-tickets@cccv.de and make sure to include the login name and email address you used at 39C3.

See you soon!
Your 40C3 presale team