IAJGS: Next conference will be virtual in April 2027

The IAJGS Board has rescheduled the 2026 conference to April 4-6, 2027, and that will be virtual. The next in-person conference will be in 2028.

In her email announcing the moves, IAJGS President Susan Weinberg explained: "Moving the timeline gives us the runway we need to fundraise properly, plan thoughtfully, and build something we can all be proud of."

She added that "we are not going dark in 2026. We have programming planned, including a free AI-focused virtual summit on April 26th open to all society members. More details on that are coming very soon."

In her full announcement here, Weinberg explained that since the COVID-19 pandemic, conference costs have increased by 25 to 38 percent. "The three biggest cost drivers (venue rental, catering, and AV) have surged 18 to 25% since 2022 alone. AV alone typically runs us between $65,000 and $85,000. And that's before we talk about speaker honorariums, which we began paying in 2021 and which now run approximately $40,000 for a domestic in-person conference.

"Location matters enormously too. “Tier one” cities, those major metropolitan areas where we've traditionally held our conferences, carry a 40 to 60% cost premium over “tier two” cities. We simply can no longer afford to hold conferences in those markets."

The last pre-COVID conference in Cleveland cost about $440,000, she said. Today, that same conference would cost $167,000 more, which would require either an increase in early bird registration fee from $325 to $563 or an increase in fundraising from $177,000 to $344,000.

"At our all-day board meeting in Salt Lake City in February, Todd Knowles and Suzanne Hoffman (volunteer co-chairs of the virtual conference) presented their honest assessment of what it would take to make the 2026 virtual conference a success.

"Their conclusion was clear: pushing through with a virtual conference in October 2026, followed by an in-person conference in 2027, would risk the quality of both events. The timeline was too compressed. Many of the volunteers needed for the virtual conference were also being tapped to plan the in-person conference. And holding a virtual event in October 2026 and an in-person event in mid-2027 puts the two so close together that one would inevitably cannibalize the other.

"As Suzanne put it: we could do a conference in October. It just wouldn't be the conference you want.

"We want the conference you want. And so do they."

You can read more about what organizers are planning to do differently in their detailed announcement.