Pennsylvania event data lists 38 fairs and festivals running between September and November 2026. That sounds like a three-month season. It is not. Thirty-four of the 38 run in September alone, four run in October, and none in this dataset run in November. The fall festival season, at least the part covered here, is really a September season with an October tail.
These 38 events are also 38 of the 122 events tracked statewide for 2026, close to a third of the entire year's calendar packed into a five-week stretch, most of it sitting inside September alone.
The density creates a second problem: overlap. Among these 38 events, 169 pairs share at least one date with each other in 2026. That is not a handful of unlucky coincidences, it is the normal result of stacking dozens of county and community fairs into a five-week window. Below is how the season breaks down by month, where the opening-week pileup happens, which counties carry the most events, and what the pricing picture looks like.
September carries the season, October is the tail
Of the 38 events between September and November, 34 run in September and 4 run in October. None run in November, despite that being part of the window this list covers. If you are planning a trip around fall festivals in Pennsylvania, September is not one part of the season, it is nearly the entire season.
The four October events are Unionville Community Fair in Kennett Square, October 2 through 4, the National Apple Harvest Festival in Arendtsville, which runs two separate weekends, October 3 through 4 and October 10 through 11, Manheim Community Farm Show, October 5 through 9, and Dillsburg Farmers Fair, which closes out the list October 12 through 17. Two events in this September-to-November window also carry a craft or artisan tag in the underlying data: the Mushroom Festival in September and the National Apple Harvest Festival here in October, so both show up on the craft fair list for 2026 as well.
The opening two weeks of September force real choices
The clashes documented in the data cluster hardest in the season's first two weeks. Big Knob Grange Fair in Rochester, Beaver County, opens the window on September 1 and the data lists it overlapping six other fairs on this list: Sullivan County Fair, The Great Allentown Fair, The Great Stoneboro Fair, Wyoming County Fair, La Festa Italiana, and Juniata County Fair.
Sullivan County Fair itself appears in eight of the documented overlaps, and The Great Allentown Fair in eleven, more than any other single fair in the listed data. The Great Stoneboro Fair adds six more documented overlaps of its own, several of them with fairs already named above. None of this is a coincidence of a few unlucky dates. It is what happens when a large share of the state's county and community fairs all open within the same ten-day window at the start of September. Out of 38 fall events, 169 pairs of them share a date somewhere in the data.
Lancaster County alone hosts seven of the 38
The 38 events are not spread evenly across the state. Lancaster County hosts seven of them: Whoopie Pie Festival in Ronks, September 12, Denver Fair, September 15 through 19, Southern Lancaster County Fair in Quarryville, September 16 through 18, Ephrata Fair, September 22 through 26, West Lampeter Community Fair in Lampeter, September 23 through 25, New Holland Farmers Fair, September 30 through October 3, and Manheim Community Farm Show, October 5 through 9. That is close to one in five of the entire fall list sitting in a single county.
Three more run in Blair County: Claysburg Area Farm Show in Claysburg, September 8 through 12, Sinking Valley Farm Show in Skelp, September 15 through 19, and Hollidaysburg Community Farm Show, September 21 through 24. Four more counties host exactly two events each: Mercer County has The Great Stoneboro Fair in Stoneboro and Jamestown Community Fair in Jamestown, Erie County has Waterford Community Fair and Albion Area Fair, Snyder County has McClure Bean Soup Festival & Fair and Beaver Community Fair in Beaver Springs, and Chester County has The Mushroom Festival and Unionville Community Fair, both of which list Kennett Square as their town. The other 20 events are each the only fall listing in their county.
No admission price published for any of the 38
None of the 38 fall events are marked free to enter in the data, and none publish an admission price either. Every listing in this window shows admission as not published. That is different from the craft and artisan events elsewhere in the data, where one event, Bark Peelers' Festival in July, does list a price. For the September-to-November window, there is no pricing data to work from at all, so budget for standard fair or festival admission and confirm the actual cost with each organizer directly.
Planning around the crowding
Given that 34 of the 38 events land in September and 169 pairs overlap somewhere in the data, a single trip covering every fair on this list is not realistic. Two approaches work better than trying to see all 38. One is to pick a county and follow its cluster: the seven-event run through Lancaster County or the three-event run through Blair County both give you a compact, close-together set of stops. The other is to wait for October, when the list narrows to four events, Unionville Community Fair, the National Apple Harvest Festival, Manheim Community Farm Show, and Dillsburg Farmers Fair, after the September pileup has already passed.
Whichever approach you take, check the documented overlaps above before locking in a date, and confirm hours and admission directly with each event, since that detail is not part of the published data behind this page.
