Someone searching for furry events near them gets back eight different kinds of thing under one word, and the differences are not cosmetic. One of them is a free Saturday afternoon anyone can attend. Another is a ticketed 21+ club night. A third is a four-day hotel booking that costs several hundred and sells out months ahead.
We publish 197 conventions and 79 other events across eight formats. Here is what each one actually is.
| Format | What it is | Typical cost | Ages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Convention | 2 to 5 days, hotel or conference centre, hundreds to thousands of people | Badge plus hotel | Usually all-ages, some 18+ |
| Furdance | One evening, a rented club or hall, DJs | 16 to 63 EUR, median 36.50 | 18+ in almost every case |
| Club night | One evening at an existing nightclub | Around 20 USD | 21+ in most cases |
| Furmeet | An organised local gathering, format varies | Often free | Mixed |
| Fursuit walk | A group walk through a city centre, about two hours | Free | All-ages |
| Furry bowling | A booked bowling alley for a few hours | 12 to 25 per person | All-ages |
| Picnic | A park, food, a few hours | Free | All-ages |
| Game night | A back room, board games, an evening | Free | All-ages |
Every figure there is counted from the event pages on this site rather than estimated. Where a range is given it is the actual spread across the events we publish.
A convention is the big one. It runs two to five days, it happens in a hotel or a conference centre the organisers have booked, and it has a programme: panels, a dealers den, an art show, a fursuit parade, a charity auction, usually a dance. Anthrocon drew 20,618 people in 2026 and Eurofurence drew 9,139, though most conventions are far smaller than that.
The commitment is what separates it from everything else. You are booking a hotel room, taking time off, and buying a badge months in advance. Registration for popular cons closes early, and hotel blocks close earlier still. This is the format worth planning around, and our guide to picking a first convention covers how to choose one.
These two get used interchangeably, and the difference is in who owns the venue.
A furdance is a furry event that rents a venue for one night and runs its own dance. A club night is a furry night hosted at a nightclub that exists anyway. The practical difference shows up in the ticket: furdances we publish run from 16 to 63 EUR with a median of 36.50, because the organisers are paying for the hall. Club nights sit around 20 USD, closer to an ordinary club cover charge.
Both are evening events for adults. Of the 35 furdances and club nights on this site, 30 carry an explicit age restriction and not one is all-ages. Furdances are mostly 18+, club nights mostly 21+, which mainly reflects where they happen.
Sizes run from about 100 to 600 people. If this is the format that appeals, what is a furdance goes into the night itself and your first furdance covers turning up alone.
A furmeet is the loosest term here, and it is loose because it describes an organiser rather than a format. A local furry group arranges something and calls it a meet. It might be a restaurant table for twelve, a park afternoon, or a day-long event with 240 people.
Of the nine we publish, three are free and three are 18+, so a furmeet is the one format where the cost and the age policy cannot be guessed from the label. Read the individual page before you go.
These are the daytime, low-commitment formats, and as a group they are the clearest answer to "I want to meet furries without booking a hotel".
All 17 fursuit walks we publish are free and all-ages, as are all four picnics and both game nights. Bowling charges a ticket per person, 12 GBP at the cheapest and 25 USD at the dearest, and is all-ages everywhere we track it. Nothing here needs booking months out, and most of it you can decide on the day before.
A fursuit walk in particular does not require a fursuit, which is the most common reason people rule it out.
Browse our complete calendar with dates, locations, and details for every upcoming furry convention.
View Full CalendarSorting our 79 events by country changes which word you should be searching for.
Furdances are a German institution. Eight of the 18 are in Germany, and the format barely exists in the United States. Club nights are the reverse: 13 of 17 are American. Both are "furries dancing in a rented room on a Friday night", and the two scenes named it differently and settled on different venues and different age limits.
Fursuit walks lean the same way as furdances, with 10 of 17 in Germany, plus two very large annual ones in Poland. Picnics and game nights are entirely American in our corpus.
So the format you should search for depends on where you live, and a search for the wrong word returns nothing in a city that has an active scene. If "furdance" gets you nowhere in Ohio, try "club night". If "club night" gets you nowhere in Bavaria, try "furdance" and "suitwalk".
Work up in commitment.
Start with a free daytime event if one runs near you, because it costs nothing but an afternoon and you can leave whenever you want. A fursuit walk, a picnic or a bowling night puts you in a room with local furries with no ticket to regret.
Go to a furdance or club night next if you want the evening version and you are old enough. It is one night, it is a fixed price, and it is the same crowd.
Book a convention when you already know you like the people. A con is the most rewarding of these and the most expensive to get wrong, and going to a local meet first means you arrive already knowing somebody. Our budgeting guide covers what a con actually costs once hotel and travel are counted.
No, and for most of them the majority of attendees do not have one. Fursuit walks are the only format named after suiting, and even there the group includes handlers, photographers and people in ears and a tail.
A fursuit walk has a fixed format: meet, group photo, walk a city route, break, walk back. A furmeet is whatever the local group organised, which might be a meal, a park afternoon or a full day event. The walk is predictable and the meet needs checking.
It depends entirely on the format, which is the main reason this guide exists. Every fursuit walk, picnic, bowling night and game night we publish is all-ages. Almost every furdance and club night is 18+ or 21+.
Free for walks, picnics and game nights. Roughly 12 to 25 a head for bowling. Around 20 USD for a club night and a median of 36.50 EUR for a furdance. A convention is a different order of magnitude once the hotel is counted.
Sometimes, though usually not. Both are commonly run by volunteers from the same regional scene, and several furdances happen in cities that also host a convention. They are separate events with separate tickets.
Our events listing filters by format and country, and the convention calendar covers the multi-day ones. Most smaller events are organised through Telegram and Discord rather than websites, so the organiser's channel linked on each page is where the dates get announced.
Counts, ticket prices, age restrictions and country distribution in this guide are derived from the 79 published event pages and 197 convention pages on this site, each of which cites the organiser's own listing. Prices are the spread across those pages and are quoted in the currency each event charges.
A clear A-to-Z furry terminology glossary: fursona, fursuit, partial, headless lounge, dealers den, YCH, ref sheet, con crud, GoH, and more, defined plainly.
Germany runs 7 conventions and 21 recurring events. The US runs 70 and 32. The two scenes solved the same problem in opposite directions, and here is how.
Wondering if there is a furry convention near you? How to search 195 cons across 42 countries by region, month and travel radius, plus cheaper local options.