NFL International Games 2026: Hotel Guide to All 9 Trips

The short answer

The NFL plays nine 2026 games abroad, from Melbourne on September 10 to Mexico City on November 22. For every one, the winning hotel move is the same: stay central, ride the train to the stadium, and book refundable now. Madrid, Mexico City, and Rio are the value trips. Paris and London cost the most.

The full slate, confirmed

This is the record year: nine games, seven countries, eight stadiums, all officially announced by the NFL in May. Re-verified August 29, 2026: this is still the complete confirmed list. No additions are expected.

All six European games kick off at 9:30 a.m. ET, which is 2:30 p.m. in London and 3:30 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, and Munich. Rio goes at 5:25 p.m. local. Mexico City is NBC’s Sunday Night Football, an evening kickoff in town. Note the Jaguars play back-to-back London weeks, Tottenham then Wembley, so Jags fans can do one trip and get two games.

Why the hotel math is different abroad

Domestic NFL weekends are a compression-night story: one stadium, a ring of hotels around it, and revenue managers who close out every discount the day the schedule drops. We’ve covered that machine in the Week 1 booking guide.

International games mostly break that pattern, in your favor. These are giant leisure cities where one football game, even a sold-out one, is a normal weekend. London has more hotel rooms than some NFL states. So the stadium-adjacent premium that eats your budget in Green Bay barely exists in most of these markets. The game is also rarely in a neighborhood you’d want anyway: Stade de France is in Saint-Denis, Tottenham is deep in North London, Estadio Banorte is at the far southern edge of Mexico City. Every one of these stadiums has a train to it.

So the rule for all nine trips: pick the neighborhood for the other 70 hours of your trip, and let rail handle game day. Book refundable, because you’re booking months out on an international trip with more moving parts than a domestic one. The refundable-rate playbook applies unchanged, just mind the cancellation cutoff against your flight dates.

City by city

London (Oct 4, 11, 18): three games, zero reason to sleep near either stadium

Two games at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, one at Wembley. Neither is a stay-there neighborhood.

For Tottenham, the club’s own travel guidance is blunt: no general-admission parking, take the train. White Hart Lane station on the Overground is about a five-minute walk to the stadium; Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale on the Victoria line are 25 to 30 minutes on foot or a short bus hop. That makes the Victoria line your hotel filter. Base near King’s Cross, Euston, or Victoria and you’re one simple ride from the ground and in the middle of everything else London does. For Wembley, the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines run to Wembley Park, so the same central base works for both stadiums. One booking covers whichever London game you’re doing.

London is the expensive one. PwC’s forecast puts London hotel ADR (average daily rate, the industry’s price benchmark) around £193 for 2026, and city-wide averages track near $247 a night. The saving grace is supply: with this many rooms, an NFL Sunday typically prices like a normal London weekend rather than a surge event. A 2:30 p.m. kickoff also means no late-night transit scramble. You’ll be back in Soho for dinner.

Paris (Oct 25): stay in Paris, not by the stadium

Stade de France sits in Saint-Denis, north of the city proper. It’s an easy trip: RER B to La Plaine–Stade de France, RER D to Stade de France–Saint-Denis, or Métro line 13 to Saint-Denis–Porte de Paris, per the RATP’s own guidance. It is not a neighborhood to build your trip around, and almost nobody does. Stay in central Paris near an RER B or D stop (the Gare du Nord and Châtelet corridors are the direct shots) and treat the stadium as a 20-minute errand.

Budget honestly here. Paris is running the hottest hotel market on this list; CoStar data showed the city posting a record March 2026 ADR over €350 during event weeks, and while a regular October Sunday won’t price like that, central Paris rarely dips cheap in fall conference season. This is the splurge trip of the nine.

Madrid (Nov 8): the value play in Europe

Madrid proved itself last November: 78,610 at the Bernabéu for Dolphins-Commanders, the first NFL game in Spain, a bigger crowd than the Clásico drew three weeks earlier. The 2026 edition, Bengals at Falcons, has been on general sale since July 9.

Here’s what makes Madrid the best European value. The Bernabéu isn’t in a remote stadium zone, it’s on the Paseo de la Castellana with its own Metro line 10 station, ten-ish minutes from the city center. And the market is cheap for a European capital: Spain’s national hotel ADR averaged a record €166 in 2025, with Madrid’s baseline months sitting lower still, roughly half of what central Paris charges. Stay in Sol, Chamberí, or Salamanca and everything, stadium included, is a short metro ride. Late-week flights, tapas at 11 p.m. after a 3:30 kickoff, and a hotel bill that won’t scare you.

Munich (Nov 15): book now, before tickets even go on sale

Patriots at Lions at FC Bayern Munich Arena, better known as Allianz Arena. Game-day transit is a Munich classic: U6 toward Garching, off at Fröttmaning, about 16 minutes from Marienplatz, then the walk to the arena with 60,000 other people. Stay in the Altstadt around Marienplatz or in Schwabing and you’re on the U-Bahn spine already.

Munich’s hotel market is spiky in a specific, predictable way: it compresses violently for trade fairs (April 2025’s Bauma fair pushed city ADR up 59% to €190, per STR data) and settles back to a moderate baseline between them. Mid-November, weeks after Oktoberfest ends, is baseline season. Here’s the timing gift, and it is still open: as of August 29, 2026, the NFL has not announced a single sales window for this game. Its own ticket page lists the seven price categories, €42.17 up to €413.75, and then tells you to check back. The hotel wave follows the ticket wave in every one of these cities, so with eleven weeks to go and not one ticket sold to the public, Munich is the cleanest booking on this entire list. Book the refundable room now and you’re in front of the whole fanbase.

Rio de Janeiro (Sept 27): cheapest rooms on the slate

The NFL’s first game in Rio, Ravens at Cowboys at the Maracanã, 5:25 p.m. local kickoff. Tickets have been on general sale since June 9.

Do not book near the stadium. The Maracanã sits in the city’s Zona Norte, which has essentially no fan-grade hotel stock and isn’t where visitors stay. The whole city stays at the beach: Copacabana and Ipanema, where metro Line 1 connects to Line 2 at Estácio, then one stop to Maracanã station, five minutes’ walk from the gates, 25 to 30 minutes door to door. On matchdays the metro is the fast, safe option; use it both ways and keep phones pocketed on the walk.

The money part is great. Late September is Rio’s shoulder season, with rates typically 20 to 25% below the December-to-March peak; three-star Copacabana hotels commonly run about $70 to $110 a night. Your flight will cost more than your hotel. Budget the trip that way around.

Mexico City (Nov 22): the reopening, and the shortest flights

The NFL returns to Mexico City for the first time since 2022, and it’s the debut event era of Estadio Banorte, the renovated stadium formerly called Estadio Azteca, fresh off hosting the 2026 World Cup. Vikings at 49ers, Sunday night, on NBC.

The stadium is far south in the city. The transit play is Metro Line 2 to Tasqueña, then the Tren Ligero light rail to its Estadio Azteca station, five minutes from the entrance, all for pocket change on a rechargeable MI card. Tasqueña gets slammed on event days, so leave early. Stay where every first-timer should: Roma or Condesa for restaurants and walkability, Polanco for the upscale version, Coyoacán if you want to be closer to the stadium side of town. Hotel value is absurd by NFL-city standards; well-reviewed Roma and Condesa properties routinely book under $150, often well under. For a U.S. fan this is also the cheapest flight of the nine by a mile, and the evening kickoff means one caution: have your ride home planned, because the post-game Tren Ligero crush and rideshare scrum are both real.

Melbourne (Sept 11 local): the calendar trap

The season opener abroad, 49ers vs. Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In the U.S. it’s Thursday night, September 10. In Melbourne it’s a Friday morning game: 10:35 a.m. local kickoff, gates at 7 a.m. Book your room for the local dates or you’ll be a day off.

The MCG is the easiest stadium walk on this list. It sits in Yarra Park on the edge of the CBD: Jolimont station is a five-minute walk, Richmond station about 850 meters, and Flinders Street is a 20-minute stroll along the river. Any CBD or East Melbourne hotel is a walk-to-the-game hotel. Early September is late winter there, an off-peak shoulder, and Melbourne CBD averages have recently tracked around $128 a night. Fair warning on timing: this one is now twelve days out, so the calm booking window is gone and you are shopping what’s left. It closed months ago for cheap flights. If you’re going, the tickets are digital-only through the Ticketmaster app — standing room opened at A$95 and general admission at A$140 — and the Jonas Brothers have the halftime show, which tells you what kind of crowd the MCG is expecting.

What three nights actually costs

Hotel only, city-center double room, typical ranges as of August 2026. These are planning numbers anchored to the market data above, not quotes; event weeks can push the top end.

Split a double and the lodging line for a whole international NFL trip can undercut a domestic marquee weekend, where hotel-plus-ticket alone runs $1,400 or more per person. The flight is what you’re really buying.

Rentals: where they beat the hotel

Three of these cities are apartment-rental markets first and hotel markets second. Rio’s Copacabana and Ipanema beachfront is wall-to-wall apartment stock, and a two-bedroom split four ways in September shoulder season is genuinely cheap. Mexico City’s Roma and Condesa are the same story, deep rental supply in exactly the neighborhoods you want. In London, a flat starts winning for groups of four-plus or stays of four nights and up, once cleaning fees stop dominating the per-night math.

The usual caveats travel with you: add the cleaning fee before comparing, and read the cancellation terms, which are almost always stricter than a refundable hotel rate on an international trip with more ways for plans to break. Vrbo listings route through our partner rails; in Rio and Mexico City a lot of the best inventory is Airbnb-only, and if that’s the honest pick for your crew, book it there.

When the fan wave hits each city

Hotel demand for these games moves in a wave, and the wave starts at ticket on-sale. Here’s the 2026 pattern, verified August 11: Melbourne general sale opened April 8. Rio, June 9. London, July 7. Madrid, July 9. Munich, still pending. Every on-sale converts thousands of maybes into fans who now need beds, and they book in the days right after.

Which means the leverage board today looks like this. Munich is wide open, book before the on-sale. Madrid and the London games are mid-wave, still fine, book this month. Rio has had ticketed fans booking since June but the shoulder-season market is deep enough to absorb them. Melbourne is last call.

One more 2026 change worth knowing when you buy: the NFL moved its international games to all-in ticket pricing this year, so the price you see on Ticketmaster includes all fees. Budgeting got slightly less annoying.

The value verdicts

Best value overall: Mexico City. Cheapest flights from the U.S., sub-$150 hotels in great neighborhoods, and you’re at the reopening of one of the sport’s cathedral venues on Sunday Night Football.

Best value in Europe: Madrid. Half of Paris’s hotel prices, a metro-connected stadium in the middle of the city, and last year’s 78,610 says the atmosphere is proven.

Cheapest on the ground: Rio. Shoulder-season beach hotels near $100. Spend the savings on the flight, which is the whole cost of this trip.

The splurges: Paris for the hotel bill, Melbourne for the airfare and the vacation days. And London remains the sensible default, the deepest hotel market, three games to choose from, and if you bleed Jaguars teal, a two-week residency.

Whichever city, the play doesn’t change. Refundable room, central neighborhood, train to the game. Melbourne is twelve days out and past saving; Munich has not sold a public ticket yet and is the one clean shot left on this list. Everything in between is a re-shop.