The Spread
Across the 32 NFL stadiums, a realistic single-person game day — one ticket, one parking spot, one food item, one drink — runs from $132 to $332. The league average sits at $244.
That is a 2.5x gap between the cheapest and the most expensive seat in the same league, watching the same sport, under the same salary cap.
The five cheapest:
- Jacksonville Jaguars, EverBank Stadium — $132
- Carolina Panthers, Bank of America Stadium — $132
- Cleveland Browns, Huntington Bank Field — $135
- Tennessee Titans, Nissan Stadium — $164
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Raymond James Stadium — $173
The five most expensive:
- San Francisco 49ers, Levi's Stadium — $332
- Los Angeles Rams, SoFi Stadium — $330
- New York Jets, MetLife Stadium — $329
- Miami Dolphins, Hard Rock Stadium — $321
- Chicago Bears, Soldier Field — $310
It's the Ticket, Not the Hot Dog
The instinct is to blame concessions. The numbers don't support it.
Food and drink accounts for a small and fairly consistent slice of the total — $9 to $24 across the whole league. The ticket is what moves the number. Jacksonville's average ticket is $115 against San Francisco's $306, and that one line accounts for most of the gap between the top and bottom of this list.
Parking is the second lever and it is more variable than people expect. It is also the one you have most control over, because the cheapest lot and the closest lot are rarely the same lot.
Two Notes on Reading This
These are estimates, and the ticket figure is an average. A Week 3 game against a bad opponent in December is not the same purchase as a divisional rivalry in prime time. Treat the ranking as a comparison between venues, not as a quote.
The two shared stadiums behave differently than you'd expect. MetLife serves the Giants at $285 and the Jets at $329, and SoFi serves the Chargers at $263 and the Rams at $330 — same building, same parking lots, different ticket markets.
If You Want the Cheapest Realistic Day
Jacksonville and Carolina are genuinely inexpensive, and Cleveland is close behind. All three combine a soft ticket market with parking that does not punish you.
If you are locked into an expensive market, the parking line is where the savings are. Our parking pages list the cheapest lot and the closest lot separately for every venue, because they are almost never the same one.
See the full cost rankings for all 32, or run your own numbers in the Game Day Cost Calculator — it lets you set your own group size, tailgating plans, and lodging.