How much does going out in San Francisco cost in 2025?

First, what areas are the most lively?

Let's start with the most basic fun map and look at where events are happening

Already, we can see that most events are, unsurprisingly, happening downtown. The breakdown per neighborhood confirms this:
- 14% of events happen in SoMa
- 8% happen in the Mission
- 6% happen in the Financial district
- 5% happen Downtown / Union Square

If we plot the same events on a heatmap, the hotspots become ever clearer. We also see little pockets that extend to the Castro, the Panhandle and the Golden Gate Park.

So, how much?

There isn't much value in simply looking at the average price of everything, so let's order the events by price, regardless of whether they're a concert or an embroidery class, and see what comes out

Ok, not super convincing. Clearly a bunch of very expensive events are messing with the scale. Let's ignore them for now and plot the prices again without events that cost more than $130, which represent about 7% of the total:

Better! Let's figure out the exact boundaries of the different deciles so we can get a better idea of how prices are distributed. And in case you're not familiar, you get 10 "deciles" when you split a dataset into ten parts of equal size. In our case, we took the ~4000 events ordered by price and split them into 10 chunks. The result is that, for example, we can now figure out the boundaries of decile 4, which shows events that are in the "30% to 40%" price band: costlier than the bottom 30 % of events but cheaper than the top 60 % (ie. the 30th to 40th percentiles).

Looking at this graph, we can quickly see a few things. First, surprisingly, more than 40% of events are free! In fact, the exact number is 43%. And 70% cost $35 or less, meaning a lot of things happening in the city are quite affordable.

Not fully shown on the graph is the last decile. The reason being that the top 10% of events, like we saw before, range from $110 to $2000 and mess up the scale. And in case you're curious about the $2000 event: it was a gala in May at the California College of the Arts that ended up raising more than a million dollars.

What is cheap to do in the city?

The lower deciles are dominated by live music, DJ nights, all kinds of markets and street festivals, trivia nights, bar promotions and fitness classes.

Using the hundreds of tags that we associate with the events we track, we're able to determine that the lower deciles are dominated by:

- live music events, concerts and DJ sets, costing $15 on average but with a ton of free performances that come with block parties, at bars, etc.
- street markets, artisan fairs and cultural festivals that will run you $10 on average because some art exhibitions aren't free or come with small alcohol tastings, but all of those are great "free" options in most cases
- trivia nights, which are quite popular in San Francisco and cost only $3 on average because most of them are in bars, so attendance is free
- finally, at $16 on average, fitness classes! This is more unexpected since classes tend to be found primarily in higher deciles but there are so many organizations and brands that run free events for promotion that there are many great opportunities to get a sweat and be healthy as a couple. There are also a ton of "free yoga in the park" sessions all over the city in the warmer months which bring the average price down.

Going up in price, in the middle to high deciles we tend to find:
- classes, which at $36 on average represent a big chunk of outings San Franciscans are enjoying
- cooking classes, the most expensive classes overall, at $84
- tastings, whether wine, rum or whiskey that will set you back about $45
- comedy shows, an absolute staple and reasonably priced on average at $22. As an interesting side note, improv shows are, at $25, priced slightly above the comedy average

What neighborhoods are the best for your wallet?

This is an interesting one. Potrero Hill appears as a data anomaly where events, on average, cost about twice as much as what they do in the second most expensive neighborhood. The reason is that most events in Potrero Hill are cooking and art classes, which are among the most expensive.

As expected however, number 2, 3, 4 and 5 are what you'd expect: the Financial District comes in at #2, 6% more expensive than Civic Center, which is 5% more expensive than SoMa and Union Square.

After those, there is an almost 20% gap to the next one: the Mission.

At the other end of the spectrum, the cheapest neighborhoods are Duboce Triangle and the Golden Gate Park. Hanging out in those areas will cost you only 20% to 25% of what it costs to go out downtown.
Duboce Triangle has a ton of bars organizing events around food, beer and trivia nights, which are very cheap on average, but the place your wallet will love the most is the Golden Gate Park, which is the best place for festivals, concerts, exhibitions and free dance classes.

How can you find your perfect couple hangouts?

There are so many things to do in the city every week, more than 200 unique events actually. We can help you find the one or two that are perfect for you by learning your preferences and sticking to your budget. With no ads or sponsored anything. Ever.
If you want to make organizing your date nights effortless, sign up free here.