Richmond Night Market: The Final Season (2026)

On 5 August 2026 the market's founder, Raymond Cheung, announced that the Richmond Night Market closes permanently at the end of the 2026 season. The final night is Sunday 20 September 2026, the same closing date the season calendar always carried. The reason given is the expiry of the lease on the Duck Island site at 8351 River Road, next to Bridgeport Station and the River Rock Casino Resort; the land is reported to be headed for redevelopment.

In Cheung's own words, quoted in the announcement coverage: "It has been one of the most rewarding and enjoyable journeys of my life. Watching a single local event grow into one of Canada's best-known summer attractions has been an incredible honour."

What was not announced matters just as much. No new location has been named, no 2027 season has been promised, and no replacement event has been described. Reporters who asked directly were told there was no confirmed new site and no reopening plan.

So the honest position for a visitor is this: if you want to see it, the window closed on 20 September 2026, and anything you read about a 2027 market is speculation until the operator publishes something.

Why the site is the reason

The market has moved four times in 26 years, and each move followed a lease rather than a plan. It opened in 2000 in a shopping-centre car park, spent 2001 and 2002 at Lansdowne Park, ran from 2003 on Vulcan Way behind a Home Depot, and settled at the Bridgeport site in 2012. The Bridgeport years are the ones that made it famous, because a night market you can reach on a train from downtown is a different proposition from one you drive to.

Losing that site is not the same as losing a car park.

If you are reading this before a trip in a future summer, treat the market as closed and plan the evening around something that is still running. The two nearest live options are the free Shipyards Night Market in North Vancouver, which ran Fridays 15:00 to 22:00 from 15 May to 11 September 2026, and dinner in Vancouver's Chinatown, which is a fifteen-minute walk from the SkyTrain rather than a half-hour ride.

The market opens Friday, Saturday and Sunday and never on a weekday. Fridays and Saturdays run 19:00 to midnight. Ordinary Sundays run 19:00 to 23:00, one hour shorter.

Sundays that fall before a statutory holiday, and statutory holidays themselves, keep the midnight closing time. The 2026 season ran from 24 April to 20 September.

Tourism Richmond, the region's own visitor authority, is unusually direct about the crowd pattern: "Fridays and Saturdays are generally busier than Sundays" and "holiday Mondays are often less crowded." It also suggests arriving earlier in the season or towards the end of the run in September. That last piece of advice does not survive the closure announcement, since the final September nights are now the most sought-after of the 26 years, but the weekday logic holds: a Sunday in May is a different market from a Saturday in August.

What time to actually arrive

Doors are 19:00 and the light is still up in midsummer, which means the strings of bulbs that everyone photographs do not read until about 21:00 in July and closer to 20:00 by early September. Arriving at 19:00 gets you through the gate before the queue forms and lets you eat first; arriving at 22:00 costs CA$5 instead of CA$7 but leaves an hour on an ordinary Sunday. If you want both the cheap entry and the full evening, a Friday or Saturday after 22:00 gives you two hours at the After Party rate.

Bridgeport Station is on the Canada Line, the same line that runs to the airport, and Tourism Richmond describes the market as "an easy one-block walk from Canada Line's Bridgeport Station, which is just a 15-minute ride from downtown Vancouver." From Waterfront, allow closer to 20 minutes with the walk at the far end. The station is where the airport branch splits from the Richmond branch, so it is served by both, and trains are frequent well past midnight.

Here is the part that saves money. Richmond is a two-zone trip from downtown Vancouver, but TransLink charges a one-zone fare after 18:30 on weekdays and all day at weekends and on statutory holidays. The market never opens before 19:00 and never opens on a weekday, so every single trip to it is a one-zone fare.

Buses are one-zone at all hours anyway.

The airport connection, and the thing that does not apply

Bridgeport is one stop from the airport branch, which makes the market a plausible last evening before a morning flight if your hotel is in Richmond. The YVR AddFare of CA$6.50 is charged only on trips that start at YVR-Airport, Sea Island Centre or Templeton, so travelling from downtown to Bridgeport never triggers it, and neither does travelling from Bridgeport towards the airport. The AddFare only bites on the way out of the airport. The airport transfer page sets out the whole rule.

Driving is the other option and the market publishes free parking on site, which Tourism Richmond confirms. The catch is the same one every night market has: three thousand people leave within twenty minutes of closing, and the lot empties onto River Road. The train does not queue.

Tourism Richmond's own guide puts it plainly: "don't forget that many vendors only accept cash, there are ATMs onsite." Neither the market nor Tourism Richmond publishes a proportion, so this page will not invent one. What both publish is the practical consequence: there are cash machines inside, they charge a fee, and the queue for them is longest at exactly the moment everyone else has also discovered the problem.

A workable plan for two people is CA$14 for admission plus CA$60 to CA$80 for food, which is four or five sharing dishes and a drink each. Stall prices are not published anywhere, by the market or by Tourism Richmond, so treat that as a budget rather than a quotation. British Columbia's tax rules help slightly: restaurant and prepared food carries GST at 5% only, because BC's 7% provincial sales tax does not apply to it.

Alcohol is taxed separately at a 10% provincial rate.

What nobody publishes

Three figures circulate widely and none of them survived a check. The number of stalls: the market advertises over 500 food options and more than 100 retail booths, which are marketing claims rather than counts, and no independent tally exists. The nightly attendance: the peak figure of over 30,000 visitors a night appears in the market's own history rather than in any audited source.

And the price of anything you eat: not one dish price is published in advance by the market, the vendors or the tourism board. Anyone quoting you a per-person food budget as a fact is estimating.

The confusion has a documented history. Raymond Cheung's original market lost its Vulcan Way lease in October 2007. A different promoter, also surnamed Cheung and unrelated, launched a competing Summer Night Market on that same Vulcan Way site in 2008 under Lions Communication Inc.

Cheung's market moved to Bridgeport in 2012. The two ran in parallel, a few kilometres apart, for a decade. In 2010 the Federal Court of Canada found copyright infringement and passing off against the rival and awarded Cheung's company CA$15,000 plus costs and interest.

The rival market rebranded itself the Illumination Summer Night Market in its final years and closed permanently in 2018. Its Vulcan Way listing has carried a closed marker ever since. So from 2019 to 2026 there was exactly one Richmond night market, and from 21 September 2026 there is none.

If a guide offers you a choice between two Richmond night markets, it was written before 2018 and has not been revisited.

What else runs in the evening

The nearest surviving equivalent is the Shipyards Night Market at Lonsdale in North Vancouver, which is free to enter and ran Fridays 15:00 to 22:00 from 15 May to 11 September 2026, twelve minutes from Waterfront on the SeaBus. It is smaller, it is on a plaza rather than a lot, and it does not attempt the same scale. Vancouver's own evening food is on where to eat in Vancouver, and the summer festival calendar is on Vancouver events.

Where this sits in a full itinerary is set out on the Vancouver guide homepage.

• The whole trip is a one-zone fare, whatever the zone map says, because the market never opens before 19:00 and TransLink charges one zone after 18:30 on weekdays and all weekend. [TransLink fares effective 1 July 2026, via this site's transport research pack]
• You cannot buy admission before you arrive, and that is the market's own rule rather than an oversight: "neither the Zoom Pass nor General Admission can be bought in advance." [richmondnightmarket.com, read in Q3 2026]
• Admission drops to CA$5 after 22:00, which Tourism Richmond calls the After Party Discount and which is not advertised on the market's front page. [visitrichmondbc.com Richmond Night Market insider guide, read in Q3 2026]
• The Zoom Pass is not a single skip-the-line ticket. At CA$40 it carries six admissions across the season plus an express gate, which makes it a resident's product rather than a visitor's. [visitrichmondbc.com, read in Q3 2026]
• The market has been in court over its own name. In 2010 the Federal Court of Canada found copyright infringement and passing off against the rival Vulcan Way market and awarded CA$15,000 plus costs and interest. [Federal Court judgment as cited in the Richmond Night Market article on Wikipedia]
• Anyone 60 or over gets in free, with no ID requirement published, which is a lower threshold than the 65 most Vancouver attractions use. [richmondnightmarket.com, read in Q3 2026]