How to Get a Ticket to King's College Chapel's Christmas Eve Carols

If you want to be inside King's College Chapel for A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve, there is exactly one way in for the public: the College's online ballot. For 2026 it is open now and closes at 5pm on Friday 13 November. Miss that and the only way to hear the service is on the radio, which, to be fair, is how most of the world has always heard it.

The short version

• Service: 3pm, Thursday 24 December 2026, King's College Chapel.
• Ballot closes: 5pm, Friday 13 November 2026 (UK time).
• Results: successful applicants are emailed on Friday 20 November 2026, with instructions on how to get their tickets.
• Cost: nothing. Tickets are complimentary.
• Queue: there is no longer a public queue for this service. Turning up on the day will not get you in.

How the ballot works

There is a single public ballot each autumn, entered through the link on King's own Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols page. King's says the ballot makes roughly half the tickets for the service available to members of the public. There is one ballot for everyone, with no separate overseas round, and King's alumni are told to apply through it too, since this service sits outside their usual alumni entry benefits.

Apply only through the King's College website. The tickets are free, so any site asking you to pay for a place in the ballot, or selling Christmas Eve tickets, is not the College. Read the terms on the ballot form itself before you submit, because that is where the College sets out its rules for each application.

After you apply

The College's notice only promises an email to successful applicants on 20 November, so if nothing has arrived by then it is safest to assume you were not drawn. The success email carries the instructions for getting your tickets; follow those rather than anything you read elsewhere, as the collection arrangements have changed over the years.

If Christmas Eve in the chapel is the whole reason for the trip, hold off on non-refundable trains or rooms until you have heard on 20 November. Cambridge is perfectly good at Christmas without the service, but it is a long way to come only to listen on the radio.

The service itself

The Festival has been sung in the chapel every Christmas Eve since 1918 and broadcast by the BBC since 1928. It is a service of worship rather than a concert: nine readings from the Bible, interspersed with carols and hymns sung by the Choir of King's College, in the late-Gothic chapel you can also visit on an ordinary ticket the rest of the year (see our King's College Chapel listing for visiting hours and prices).

If you are not drawn

The service goes out live on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service at 3pm on Christmas Eve, and in the United States it is distributed by American Public Media to hundreds of stations. Do not confuse it with Carols from King's, a separate service recorded in advance for BBC television and also shown on Christmas Eve; the ballot is for the live Festival, not the TV recording.

Our Cambridge events listing carries the service too, and we update it if King's changes any of these dates.

Where these details come from

Ballot dates, the results date, the service time, the end of the public queue and the share of tickets offered to the public are taken from King's College's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols page, checked 18 October 2026. The alumni rule is from King's alumni benefits page, and the broadcast details are from King's and the Choir of King's College. If anything on those pages differs from what is here, the College's page is right.