How the Met Gala Benefit funds the Costume Institute and its spring show

The Met Gala is a red-carpet event that 6abc calls fashion’s biggest night, and it is also the main fundraiser for the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum describes the Benefit as the primary source of funding for the department’s annual exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and operations.

This explainer sets out how the Met describes the gala money, what the 2026 calendar and prices were, and which sponsor and fundraising figures are published. The sources are two Met pages, two television news reports, a Time Out article and a Wikimedia Commons photo description. Where they cover different periods, the article says so.

What the Benefit is recorded as funding

The Costume Institute’s department page uses the same description. It says the Benefit is the primary source of funding for annual exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and operations. It also states that the Benefit takes place annually on the first Monday in May. The page gives no dollar amounts and no split between those uses.

The only cumulative total in the sources comes from a Met press release about the 2024 gala. The release says the Benefit has raised more than $223.5 million for The Costume Institute to date. Anna Wintour, one of the co-chairs, has been a Trustee of The Met since January 1999. The 2024 gala was scheduled for May 6, 2024, and the co-chairs were Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Wintour and Zendaya.

Because the $223.5 million figure is a running total, it cannot be read as a single year’s income. The release does not say how much of that total came from tickets, tables or sponsorships.

The department page says Eleanor Lambert introduced the benefit in 1948 as a midnight supper. It says Anna Wintour has co-chaired the event since 1995, excluding 1996 and 1998. It also says the department relies on the generosity of collectors, designers and the public to expand its collection.

Published funding figure
The Benefit had raised more than $223.5 million for the Costume Institute to date, according to a 2024 Metropolitan Museum of Art press release. The figure is a running total, not an annual amount.

The 2026 calendar: gala on May 4, show from May 10

The 2026 gala was scheduled for Monday, May 4. CBS News reports that the spring exhibition, Costume Art, opens on May 10, 2026, and runs through January 10, 2027. The Costume Institute’s department page also lists the exhibition as running through January 10, 2027.

The gala and the opening of the show are therefore six days apart. The department page does not give an opening date, so the May 10 date rests on the CBS and Time Out reports.

CBS also describes the show as drawing on a collection that spans more than 5,000 years of art, with mannequins set atop six-foot pedestals. The article gives no count of garments or artworks in the exhibition.

Time Out reports that the exhibition was announced on November 17, 2025. The show is in the Condé M. Nast Galleries, which span nearly 12,000 square feet just off the Great Hall. The article says the Costume Institute’s main events move from a basement space to the museum’s front-of-house, and names Andrew Bolton as curator-in-charge.

Time Out says about 200 objects from the Met’s collection are shown alongside historical and contemporary garments. It describes the show as arranged by body type, including the naked, classical, pregnant, aging, anatomical and mortal body. The department page says the Costume Institute’s collection holds over 33,000 objects.

Ticket and table prices for the 2026 gala

According to 6abc, individual tickets for the 2026 gala cost $100,000, and a table of 10 starts at $350,000. The report says there will be about 400 guests. It lists Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour as co-chairs, and names Anthony Vaccarello and Zoë Kravitz as chairs of the host committee.

The report does not say how many tables were sold, what the gala raised in total, or how the proceeds are divided among the department’s uses. The prices show what a seat and a table cost. They do not show the gala’s income.

The department page describes Anna Wintour as a Trustee, the artistic director of Condé Nast and the editor-in-chief of Vogue. The 6abc report lists her with Vogue.

Sponsors named and amounts not disclosed

The exhibition and benefit are described as made possible by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. 6abc identifies the couple as lead sponsors and honorary chairs, and quotes the Met release that makes this credit.

The museum has not disclosed how much the couple contributes. Neither the 2024 release nor the department page gives a sponsor amount, so the sponsorship is documented by name only in the sources reviewed.

The 2024 Met release credits TikTok with making that year’s exhibition and benefit possible. It lists LOEWE as providing support and Condé Nast as providing additional support. It names Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, and Jonathan Anderson, Creative Director of LOEWE, as honorary chairs. The 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, was to have approximately 250 objects spanning four centuries on view.

The department page does not name specific corporate sponsors. Time Out names the designers Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Thom Browne as donor backers of the Costume Institute, but does not describe their roles in the exhibition.

The museum has not disclosed how much the couple contributes.

Last year’s record and how the figures compare

6abc reports that the 2025 gala raised a record of more than $31 million. The same report calls the Costume Institute the Met’s only self-funding department. The department page read for this article does not make that statement, so the description is attributed to 6abc alone.

The $31 million figure covers one gala year, while the $223.5 million figure is a running total as of the February 2024 release. The two numbers measure different periods, and the sources reviewed do not provide a year-by-year series that would connect them.

The 2024 release’s figure of more than $223.5 million is the only cumulative total in the sources. The department page does not mention the 2025 total, and no 2025 Met release was among the sources reviewed.

What the sources do not establish

None of the sources gives a total for the 2026 gala, a breakdown of costs, or the amount the Bezos couple contributed. The department page does not list the 2026 opening date, and the 2024 release is the most recent source with a cumulative total.

The museum’s annual reports were not among the sources reviewed, so no annual total for the Benefit is confirmed here.

The Met’s own page for Costume Art was not among the sources reviewed. The department page gives the closing date, and CBS gives the opening date. CBS spells the sponsor’s surname without an accent, while 6abc uses Sánchez.

Photo: Hugo Schneider · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons