The Met Gala 2026, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual benefit for the Costume Institute, raised a record $42 million on May 4, 2026, museum officials said that day, per Town & Country's report. The evening ran under the dress code "Fashion is Art," with Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour serving as co-chairs.
The number was set by price as much as popularity. Individual tickets cost $100,000, an increase of $25,000 over the previous year, and tables started at $350,000, per Town & Country. The New York Times, in a May 1, 2026 examination of the benefit's finances, calculated that the gala had raised $166.5 million over the past decade.
The Costume Institute is the Met's only curatorial department that funds itself entirely — a condition rooted in the terms under which the Museum of Costume Art merged into the Met — and the benefit underwrites the department's exhibitions and operations. The 2026 total, confirmed before the evening began, stands as a record for an event founded in 1948.
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The exhibition the gala honors opens to the public six days later: Costume Art, nearly 400 objects set beside artworks from across the museum's collection, runs from May 10, 2026 through January 10, 2027 in the new Condé M. Nast Galleries designed by Peterson Rich Office.
For the city's art public, the gala's economics are not a spectator question alone: because the department is self-funding, the evening's total effectively sets the scale of the Costume Institute's next eighteen months, including the exhibition's announced extension to the Met Cloisters in the fall. The detail most coverage skipped is the ticket increase itself — a $25,000 jump in a single year, the clearest signal yet that demand for the room has outrun its capacity, with the museum raising the price of scarcity rather than adding seats.