Boring football doesn’t sell as well as the thrilling kind.
For that reason, the audience for Super Bowl LX dropped in 2026, to 124.9 million average viewers for the game.
Last year, Super Bowl LIX drew 127.7 million viewers. This year, the final number enjoyed the boost of the new Nielsen Big Data + Panel, which had been sending audience figures higher. Without that feature, the Super Bowl LX audience could have been much lower than the reported total.
The game set a record with a peak audience of 137.8 million in the second quarter, when the Seahawks held a 6-0 lead.
The Bad Bunny halftime show averaged 128.2 million viewers, down by more than five million from Kendrick Lamar’s record-setting 133.5 million in Super Bowl LIX.
The numbers remain unlike any other televised event. Still, the same question comes to mind every year at this time — with 350 million people living in the U.S., what the hell was the rest of the country doing when the Super Bowl was on?
