The Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire runs Saturdays and Sundays from August 15 through October 25, 2026 at Mount Hope Estate & Winery in Manheim, Lancaster County. That is eleven Saturdays, eleven Sundays, and 22 separate gate days.
Most pages about the Faire stop at those dates. The more useful question, if you live anywhere in Lancaster County, is which of the eleven weekends is quiet and which one puts you in traffic behind a county fair. We publish all 122 Pennsylvania events on this site, so that is a calendar question we can actually answer. Five of the eleven weekends are clear of every other fair we track. Six are not.
The eleven weekends
The Faire opens Saturday August 15 and closes Sunday October 25. The Saturdays are August 15, August 22, August 29, September 5, September 12, September 19, September 26, October 3, October 10, October 17 and October 24, each paired with the Sunday after it.
Gates open at 11 a.m. and the site closes at 8 p.m. on each Faire day, per the organizer. Because it repeats every weekend for eleven weeks, it is the one major event in the Pennsylvania season that never forces an either-or choice. Every other fair on this page runs once. If the Faire clashes with something, you move your Faire visit, not the other thing.
The five clear weekends
August 15 to 16, August 22 to 23, September 5 to 6, October 17 to 18 and October 24 to 25 carry no other fair or festival in our Pennsylvania data.
The two opening weekends and the two closing weekends being the quiet ones is not a coincidence. The Lancaster County community fair circuit is compressed into late September and early October, so the Faire has mid August and the back half of October largely to itself. If your priority is a shorter queue at the gate and easier parking in Manheim, those are the four bookend weekends to aim at, with September 5 to 6 as the one clear date inside the busy stretch.
The six weekends that share the calendar
August 29 to 30 overlaps the closing Saturday of the Elizabethtown Fair, which runs August 24 to 29 about twelve miles west of Manheim.
September 12 to 13 is the busiest weekend of the entire run, and it carries two events. The Whoopie Pie Festival is a single Saturday in Ronks, and The Mushroom Festival runs both days in Kennett Square, Chester County. The Mushroom Festival is the only one of the ten that covers a full Faire weekend rather than clipping one day of it.
September 19 to 20 catches the last day of the Denver Fair, which runs September 15 to 19. September 26 to 27 catches the last day of the Ephrata Fair, September 22 to 26.
October 3 to 4 is the second-heaviest weekend. The New Holland Farmers Fair closes on Saturday October 3, and the National Apple Harvest Festival in Arendtsville, Adams County opens the same day and runs through October 11. That Apple Harvest run is why October 10 to 11 is also on this list: the festival spans two consecutive Faire weekends.
Manheim's own fair never clashes with the Faire
This is the detail worth knowing if you live in the borough. The Manheim Community Farm Show is held in the same town as the Faire, October 5 to 9, and it does not collide with a single Faire gate day. It runs Monday through Friday.
Two other Lancaster County fairs behave the same way. The Southern Lancaster County Fair in Quarryville runs September 16 to 18, a Wednesday to Friday. The West Lampeter Community Fair runs September 23 to 25, also Wednesday to Friday. Neither touches a Saturday or a Sunday.
Three of the ten events near the Faire are weekday-only, which is a real feature of the Lancaster County community fair tradition rather than an accident of scheduling. It also means the printed overlap between the Faire and the county circuit is smaller than a plain date-range comparison suggests. Comparing start and end dates alone would flag all three as conflicts. Comparing actual gate days shows none of them are.
Admission, hours, and what we do not publish
The Faire does not publish a single admission price in the data behind this site, so we do not quote one. Ticket pricing varies by date and by package, and the organizer sells through parenfaire.com. Treat any fixed price you see quoted elsewhere with suspicion unless it names the specific weekend.
The gate hours we do carry are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Faire days. The venue is Mount Hope Estate & Winery at 2775 Lebanon Road, Manheim. Beyond that, confirm details with the organizer directly rather than with any directory, this one included. Renaissance faires change their weekend themes, their ticketing and occasionally their hours across a run this long, and a static page cannot track that.
Where it sits in the Pennsylvania season
The Faire is the longest single event in our Pennsylvania data. Nothing else runs for eleven weekends. Most of the state's 122 events are three to six day runs that happen once, which is why the overlap analysis above is worth doing: for every other event, a clash is a decision, and for this one it is just a preference.
If you are building a Lancaster County autumn around more than one event, the pattern is straightforward. The county fairs concentrate in the last two weeks of September and the first week of October, they frequently run midweek, and the Faire covers every weekend on either side of that block. Pairing a weekday county fair with a weekend at Mount Hope is the version of this that involves no compromise at all.
