For four days at the end of September, Port Hercule stops being a harbour and becomes a trading floor. The Monaco Yacht Show reaches its 35th edition this year, running from Wednesday 23 to Saturday 26 September, and the arithmetic is worth stating plainly: roughly 120 superyachts, 43 of them delivered during 2026 and showing for the first time, more than 560 exhibitors, and upwards of 30.000 people moving through a basin you can walk around in fifteen minutes.
What makes the week matter to anyone who owns property in the Principality, rather than only to the yachting trade, is that the two markets have never really been separable here. The same families are looking at both, frequently in the same week, and often with the same adviser standing behind them.
The Fleet Coming In
The largest vessel in the harbour this year will be Leviathan, Oceanco’s 111-metre hybrid-electric build delivered in November 2025 and now owned by Gabe Newell, the Valve co-founder. It has not been shown in Monaco before. That a boat of this scale belongs to software money rather than to shipping or oil is a reasonable summary of where the top of this market has moved over the past decade.
Oceanco’s 111-metre hybrid-electric superyacht Leviathan at anchor post-delivery ahead of its Monaco premiere.
Among the genuinely new hulls, Lürssen’s 102,4-metre Nixie leads on size, followed by the 79,8-metre Pangea from Amels and Sanlorenzo’s 73,4-metre Silver Fox. CRN brings Amor à Vida, Rossinavi brings Akula, Sanlorenzo also shows Alchemist, and ARES Yachts brings Simena, a deliberately classic-looking thing in a fleet that mostly is not.
Lürssen’s 102.4-metre Nixie, the largest newly delivered hull debuting at the 2026 show.
The show is more useful than its reputation suggests at the other end of the range. Under thirty metres you will find the Wallywhy200, the Princess X90 and Y95, the Arcadia A96 and A80, and the Arksen 85, aimed at a buyer more interested in range and expedition capability than in a beach club. Thirty-eight of the exhibitors represent yachts already in operation rather than shipyards selling new build, with an average length around forty-nine metres, and the 50-metre Reverie by Feadship among the better things afloat in that group.
How the Week Is Actually Structured
Wednesday is the day that matters, and it is not a public day: access is limited to invited guests and Prestige VIP Guest passholders, with the Dockside Area reserved for private clients alone. By the time general ticket holders arrive on Thursday, a meaningful share of the week’s serious conversations has already happened on a pontoon somebody else was standing on.
The show runs 10:00 to 18:30 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and 10:00 to 18:00 on Saturday. Tickets are sold online only, with nothing available at the gate: a Wednesday pass runs 400€ and excludes the Dockside Area, while passes for the remaining three days are 700€ for one, 1.300€ for two and 2.070€ for three. The opening conference sits on the Wednesday, BOAT Radio broadcasts daily from the site, and structured networking sessions close each day.
Worth knowing about, and easy to miss: on Thursday 24 September the organisers run a strictly invitation-only session called Introduction to Superyacht Ownership, aimed at people approaching the market with serious intent rather than curiosity and structured around the practical questions of ownership that rarely surface in a sales conversation. For a family weighing a first boat alongside a first Monaco apartment, it is a more productive afternoon than any number of dockside walk-throughs.
What Owners and First-Time Buyers Do With It
Existing owners use the week to walk the competition. Layout, tender garages, crew quarters and the amount of genuinely usable outdoor space are the things that never come through properly in a brochure, and September is the one week a year when forty of the relevant boats sit within a few hundred metres of each other. First-time buyers time a search around the show for a simpler reason: brokers, naval architects, management companies and finance are all in the same place at once, and the introductions cost nothing.
The Cannes Yachting Festival runs earlier in the month, from 8 to 13 September, and a good many people treat the two as a single extended trip along the coast. Property viewings get folded into the same window more often than the property side of the industry likes to admit, because the adviser is already travelling and the questions overlap.
The Harbour Underneath the Show
Port Hercule holds roughly 700 berths and every one of them belongs to the Monegasque state. A berth can be rented and never bought outright, with priority running first to Monaco nationals and then to residents. Show week is when that constraint becomes visible to everyone at once, since well over a hundred significant yachts compete for space in a harbour whose capacity is essentially fixed.
Mareterra’s marina is the rare exception, adding around fifteen berths as part of the new district. That is a small number in absolute terms and a remarkable one in a country that had otherwise stopped making water. Beyond the Principality’s own borders, the recently awarded thirty-year concession at Cap d’Ail provides the nearest deepwater alternative, barely ten minutes along the coast. Buyers who understand this treat a Monaco residence and a Monaco berth as a single decision rather than two, since holding one without a credible route to the other leaves the arrangement half-finished.
Planning the Week
Accommodation across the Principality and the surrounding coast tightens long before the show opens, and it is worse this year than the dates alone suggest: the Régates Royales are in Cannes from 22 to 27 September and Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez begins on the 26th, so three events draw on the same rooms, the same berths and the same restaurant tables across a single fortnight. Anyone leaving a booking until August will be commuting from further away than they would like.
The week also carries an unofficial social programme of dinners and gatherings hosted by yards, brokers and clubs, and access to the better ones follows the same logic as the Wednesday preview. Residents based along the Larvotto waterfront or in the Carré d’Or can walk to all of it, which during these four days is worth more than any parking arrangement. Buyers weighing which residences suit a life partly organised around the harbour, or still deciding whether to buy or rent first, should treat that proximity as a line item rather than a pleasant extra.
The 35th Monaco Yacht Show runs 23 to 26 September 2026 at Port Hercule, with around 120 superyachts, 43 of them new for the year, and Oceanco’s 111-metre Leviathan as the largest in the harbour. Wednesday is reserved for invited and VIP guests, the Dockside Area for private clients, and the fortnight it falls in is the most heavily booked stretch of the year on this coast.
Owners and buyers considering a Monaco residence within reach of Port Hercule, whether ahead of this year’s show or the next, are welcome to contact Baldo Realty Group for a confidential conversation about the districts closest to the harbour.