Sedona Events Calendar: The Recurring Festivals, Month by Month

The Sedona International Film Festival is the town's largest single event and the only one in this guide that runs longer than a weekend.

Outside the film festival, this guide could not confirm an official date for a flagship winter event beyond Breakfast with Santa. If a mid-winter trip is timed around "something happening," the film festival in late February is the one date worth building a visit around; the rest of January and early February carry no confirmed recurring event on an official page this research reached.

This is a genuine gap, not a research shortcut. The rest of the trip, and what each month does to the trailhead lots, sits in the guide these dates hang off. The City of Sedona's own event listing names a St. Patrick's Parade, a Celebration of Spring and a Sedona Summer Splash among its recurring calendar, and a Red Dirt Concert Series and Family Fun Fridays alongside them, but sedonaaz.gov returned an access error to every fetch attempt during this research, so none of those events' 2026 or 2027 dates could be confirmed from the city's own page. This guide will not print a month or a date for any of them without that confirmation; readers planning a spring or summer trip around one of these should check sedonaaz.gov's own events page directly or call the city.

The Verde Canyon Railroad, covered in full on its own page, runs special-event departures through the year, including an Uncorked Wine Festival and a Chocolate Lovers' Festival at $175 and a Grape Train Escape also at $175, per the railroad's own fare page. The railroad's own schedule publishes these as recurring but does not state fixed calendar dates in machine-readable text for the coming season, so treat them as the railroad's own seasonal programming to check directly rather than a date this guide can confirm here.

What is confirmed for this stretch of the year is climate, not an event: June through September is Sedona's monsoon window, running June 15 to September 30 on the National Weather Service's fixed calendar rule, with August typically the busiest month for storm activity. That is worth knowing when timing an outdoor visit even without a festival attached to the trip.

Book lodging early for any part of this window; several events overlap the same weekends.

The Sedona Arts Festival and the Sedona Plein Air Festival, the two longest-running and best-documented events on this list, both fall inside the same three-week window this year, which is the clearest reason October is the month to book a Sedona hotel room well ahead if a specific weekend matters to your trip. Every date above comes from the organizer's own page or Visit Sedona's event directory rather than a secondary listing; where a location was not stated on the page this research reached, this guide says so rather than guessing.

Three confirmed dates carry the town from Halloween into the holiday season. Dia de los Muertos runs November 1 at Tlaquepaque, with installations honoring the Mexican tradition inside the arts village, per Visit Sedona's own event directory. The Marigold Mural Project, a community mural painting on Calle Independencia, runs October 29, tied to the same Day of the Dead observance. A Veterans Day Tribute runs November 11, hosted jointly by Sedona Heritage Museum and the City of Sedona. The Sedona Turkey Trot, a 5K running event among the red rock scenery, runs November 27, in its 17th annual year per the same directory.

None of these carries the scale of the October cluster; expect a normal weekend's lodging demand around each of them, with the possible exception of Thanksgiving week itself, which affects hours at fee sites across this guide's entity pages independent of any organized event.

The City of Sedona's own events page structure, visible in this research without a full fetch succeeding, names a Red Dirt Concert Series, a St. Patrick's Parade, a Celebration of Spring, a Red Rock Rally Pickleball Tournament, Family Fun Fridays and a Sedona Summer Splash among its recurring annual calendar, alongside WagFest, Pumpkin Splash, Fest of Fall, Uptown Trick or Treat, Turkey Trot and Breakfast with Santa, all of which are confirmed elsewhere above.

For the six events named only on the city's own page, this guide could not reach sedonaaz.gov directly this pass to confirm a 2026 or 2027 date, a time, or a location, and prints none of those details rather than estimating from a prior year's pattern. If one of these is the reason for your trip, the city's own events page or a call to Sedona's visitor information line, 928-282-7722, is the accurate source; this guide would rather send you there than guess.

Every date on this page comes from one of three places: an event's own organizer site (the film festival, the arts festival and the plein air festival each maintain one), Visit Sedona's own event directory, or the City of Sedona's own event-name listing where a fetch of the live page succeeded far enough to see the event's name and category but not always its date. Where none of those three sources confirmed a date for the coming season, this page says so explicitly rather than repeating a date from a travel blog or a prior year's listing, which is how a rumored date circulates in the first place.

This matters most for the events named only on the city's own page: a St. Patrick's Parade, a Celebration of Spring, a Red Rock Rally Pickleball Tournament, Family Fun Fridays, a Red Dirt Concert Series and a Sedona Summer Splash. All six are real, recurring City of Sedona programming based on the page structure this research could see, but sedonaaz.gov itself returned an access error to every direct fetch attempt during this pass, the same block noted throughout this guide's research on other city-run pages. The honest move is to name what exists and flag the date as unconfirmed, covered fully in what the city names but this page cannot date.

Most Sedona trips do not, and that is not a loss. None of the events on this page are the reason most visitors come; the trails, the state parks and the day trips covered across this guide run on their own schedule year-round, and a quiet week without a festival is, if anything, the easier week to find lodging and a trailhead parking space. Sedona in 1 day, Sedona in 2 days and Sedona in 3 days each build a route around the sights, not the calendar, and work the same in a quiet March week as in the middle of the October cluster.

The one date worth actively planning around, or actively avoiding if crowds are not your preference, is the three-week October window covered above: two of the year's best-attended events overlap inside it, and lodging pressure across the whole month follows. Outside that window, this guide's best time to visit page is a better guide to timing a trip than the event calendar is.

Set the confirmed events aside and Sedona's calendar still has a rhythm worth knowing. Spring, roughly March through May, brings the mildest daytime highs in this guide's climate data and the fewest confirmed large events, a genuinely quiet stretch for a visitor who wants the trails without a festival crowd on top of the usual weekend traffic. Summer, June through September, layers the monsoon window over the heat; storm activity typically picks up in early to mid-July and peaks in August, per the National Weather Service, which affects afternoon trail planning independent of anything on this page's calendar.

October, covered in full above, is the busiest confirmed stretch of the year by event count. November eases off to three dated events spread across the month. December carries one confirmed family morning, Breakfast with Santa, plus the holiday closures that affect fee sites across this guide rather than adding a festival of its own. January and early February run quiet again until the film festival opens the next cycle in late February.

A visitor building a trip around scenery and trails rather than a specific festival can read this rhythm as a crowd forecast: expect the thinnest crowds outside October and the pre-Christmas week, and expect the fullest trailhead lots and hotel rates to track the confirmed dates above rather than a generic "high season" guess.