Comic-Con is arguably the biggest annual event hosted in San Diego. With organizers expecting more than 135,000 attendees in downtown San Diego, the event remains a major economic driver.
UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management finance professor Allan Timmermann and postdoctoral scholar Fabrizio Ghezzi are forecasting $200 million in economic activity citywide.
A model they built uses granular economic modeling to forecast hourly economic activity by neighborhood.
For Comic-Con 2026, Timmermann and Ghezzi predict the Gaslamp will have the strongest economic activity of any neighborhood.
While noon appears to be the peak time for economic activity in many neighborhoods, the Gaslamp is expected to remain economically active throughout the day and night.
Timmermann and Ghezzi predict about $40 million in economic activity for the Gaslamp.
Other areas the model identified were Mission Valley and La Jolla — Mission Valley because of its many hotels, and La Jolla because of its hotels, restaurants and bars.
Ghezzi said the model represents active, frontier research but has not yet been peer-reviewed.
“One good analogy to understand our scope is with medicine,” Ghezzi wrote in an email. “Right now, economic analysis looks at aggregates, which is equivalent to asking, 'How is your overall health?' What we try to do is to go one level deeper and focus on questions such as, 'How is your stomach?' or 'How are your legs?' Being able to answer economic questions at these levels will allow us to better understand and direct economic decisions.”
Meanwhile, San Diego Convention Center officials said Comic-Con’s economic impact is expected to be about the same as last year.
“Comic-Con, as an event, generates more than $160 million in regional impact and more than $3 million in tax revenues to the city of San Diego,” said Maren Dougherty, executive director of marketing and communications for the San Diego Convention Center.
If the convention center is expanded, Dougherty said it could have a greater economic impact on the city.
“If we were to have additional space, we would be able to layer events more so that while one event is actively moving in or moving out, we can host another event during that time,” Dougherty said.
After a lengthy court battle, the city of San Diego can now collect the increased hotel tax revenue from Measure C, which voters passed in 2020.
The measure was originally intended to help infrastructure projects, including a convention center expansion. No expansion efforts have been completed before this year’s Comic-Con.
