Each January in Davos-Klosters, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting brings together heads of state, ministers, central bank governors, chief executives and civil society leaders for five days of public plenaries, closed working sessions and bilateral meetings; the 57th edition runs 18 to 22 January 2027 at the Kongresszentrum Davos, with no theme announced yet and the Forum itself still under interim leadership.
WEF Davos is the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting, the flagship yearly gathering of the Forum, held each January in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, since 1971. The 2027 edition is the 57th, running 18 to 22 January 2027 at the Kongresszentrum Davos. It is invitation-only: there is no public ticket sale, and attendance flows through World Economic Forum membership, partnership or direct invitation.
18 to 22 January 2027. Kongresszentrum Davos, Talstrasse 49A, 7270 Davos Platz, Switzerland, the same venue used for recent editions. These dates are confirmed by the Davos destination authority (davos.ch) and the Davos Congress Centre's own event calendar; as of 3 September 2026, weforum.org has not yet published a dedicated page for the 2027 Annual Meeting (the address world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2027 currently returns a 404), which is consistent with the Forum's pattern of building the dedicated meeting site closer to the event.
World Economic Forum, an independent international organisation headquartered in Cologny, Geneva, Switzerland, operating as a non-profit foundation under Swiss law. Founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab. The Forum's leadership has changed twice in under eighteen months. Schwab stepped down as Chair and left the Board of Trustees in April 2025; Vice-Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe served as interim Chair until his own resignation on 12 August 2025, when the Board elected Laurence D. Fink (Chairman and CEO, BlackRock) and André Hoffmann (Vice-Chairman, Roche Holding) as Co-Chairs. Børge Brende, President and CEO since 2017, stepped down effective 26 February 2026 after the Forum opened an internal review of his past contacts with Jeffrey Epstein; Alois Zwinggi, a Forum veteran since 2010, was named to succeed him. Most reporting through mid-2026, including a May 2026 diplomatic readout from the Chinese state broadcaster's website, still describes Zwinggi as Interim President and CEO; the Forum's own leadership page, read on 3 September 2026, states plainly that "Alois Zwinggi is President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Economic Forum," while the same page still labels Fink and Hoffmann "Interim Co-Chair." A permanent Chair search was under way as of the Board's April 2025 announcement, targeted for completion by January 2027, meaning the search could conclude around the time of the Annual Meeting itself.
No official attendance projection for the 2027 edition had been published as of 3 September 2026; ~3,000 is the benchmark set by the last several editions, not a stated 2027 figure. The 56th Annual Meeting, in January 2026, drew close to 3,000 leaders from 130 countries, including a record 400 top political leaders, nearly 65 heads of state and government, a majority of G7 leaders, close to 830 of the world's top CEOs and chairs, and almost 80 unicorn founders and technology pioneers, per the Forum's own 23 January 2026 press release. Attendance is invitation or accreditation only: sitting heads of state and government, ministers and central bank governors, chief executives of Forum member and partner organisations, heads of multilateral institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO, UN agencies), and selected civil society, academic and media figures.
No speaker had been confirmed for the 2027 edition as of 3 September 2026; the Forum curates the roster close to the meeting and has not published one for a page that does not yet exist on weforum.org. For reference, the confirmed speaker list from the most recent edition, the 56th Annual Meeting in January 2026, where more than 60 heads of state gathered in total, included:
The Forum stated some 200 sessions and workshops took place at the 2026 edition, most carrying multiple named participants beyond this list; the names above are the ones directly quoted, credited by role, or reported by name in the Forum's own 23 January 2026 press release, the Forum's "heads of state gathering" story, and contemporaneous reporting (CNBC, Euronews) on the Macron, Zelenskyy and Herzog appearances, all checked 3 September 2026.
The biggest change a returning participant needs to register is not a programme detail but who is running the institution: the Forum enters the 2027 cycle under interim leadership across every top post, following Klaus Schwab's April 2025 departure, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe's brief interim chairship, the August 2025 election of Fink and Hoffmann as Interim Co-Chairs, and Borge Brende's resignation as President and CEO in February 2026 over the Epstein-contacts review, with Alois Zwinggi named to succeed him. No 2027 theme, programme or speaker roster had been announced as of 3 September 2026. The dates, 18 to 22 January 2027, and the Kongresszentrum Davos venue are unchanged from the pattern of recent editions.
No 2027 programme had been published as of 3 September 2026. The most recent edition, the 56th Annual Meeting in January 2026, ran under the theme "A Spirit of Dialogue" and organised its roughly 200 sessions and workshops around five questions: how to cooperate in a more contested world, how to unlock new sources of growth, how to better invest in people, how to deploy innovation at scale and responsibly, and how to build prosperity within planetary boundaries. Recurring flagship outputs timed to the meeting include the Global Risks Report (21st edition in January 2026), the Chief Economists' Outlook, and the Global Cooperation Barometer, produced with McKinsey & Company. Beyond whatever theme a given year carries, the meeting's standing subject areas, as tracked in the Forum's own record for this event, are global economic outlook, geopolitics and security, climate and nature, technology governance, trade and investment, technology and AI governance, and public-private cooperation. Third-party sites (not weforum.org) circulate a working title, "Collaboration in a Contested World," for 2027; this could not be confirmed on any World Economic Forum page and is not reported here as a theme.
Five formats recur across editions, per the current Annual Meeting 2026 website structure: public plenary and panel sessions, most of them livestreamed (over 200 sessions livestreamed in 2026); closed or "off-programme" working sessions and bilateral meetings, not published in the public agenda; the Open Forum, a free public track distinct from the main meeting; a Digital Members Track for the Forum's paid online membership tiers; and Co-Branded Media Sessions run jointly with named press outlets. There is no exhibition floor and, per the Forum's own record, no formal buyer-seller matchmaking programme.
Three confirmed strands, all run by the Forum itself rather than external organisers. The Open Forum is a free, public session track held at the auditorium of the Swiss Alpine School, Guggerbachstrasse 3, 7270 Davos Platz, distinct from the invitation-only main meeting; it has also run at other Forum meetings globally (Cambodia, India, Jordan, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia in past years). The Digital Members Track serves the Forum's paid online membership tiers (Premium and Pro, see the cost entry below). Co-Branded Media Sessions pair the Forum with named outlets, CNBC, the Financial Times, The New York Times Company, Bloomberg and others among them, for on-site interview and panel formats during the meeting week. No exhibition floor, trade pavilions or vendor programme were found for the Annual Meeting, unlike commercial conferences in this sector.
No delegate pass is sold to the public and no fee schedule is published; the World Economic Forum's own membership and partnership contact page carries no pricing, only a contact form. Access flows through institutional World Economic Forum membership or partnership (multi-year commitments negotiated directly with the Forum) or through direct invitation. Historical press estimates, none current and none confirmed by the Forum, put base corporate membership around USD 40,000 a year and the top Strategic Partner tier in the range of USD 600,000 to 758,000 a year, with individual delegate badges reported at up to USD 20,000 to 35,000; these figures come from journalistic reporting spanning roughly 2011 to 2025 and should not be read as a current price list. Separately, and unrelated to physical attendance in Davos, the Forum sells an online Digital Membership direct to individuals: Premium at EUR 30 a month (EUR 25.50 a month billed annually) and Pro at EUR 90 a month (EUR 76.50 a month billed annually), giving access to the Strategic Intelligence platform, session recordings and the Digital Members Track; neither tier includes a badge for the physical Annual Meeting.
No open call for speakers or papers is recorded (cfp_open = 0 in the Forum's own participant record). The 2027 roster, like every prior edition, will be curated directly by the Forum from its membership, partner organisations, invited governments and multilateral institutions; no public submission route was found.
There is no per-event sponsorship or exhibitor package for the Annual Meeting. Commercial and institutional access to Davos runs through the Forum's standing membership and partnership structure, principally the Strategic Partnership tier (see the sponsors entry below), which is an institutional relationship with the Forum year-round, not an Annual-Meeting-specific purchase. The Forum's membership and partnership contact page routes enquiries to a contact form; no published criteria or application process were found.
No 2027 partner list had been published as of 3 September 2026. The official partners page for the most recent edition, the Annual Meeting 2026, listed 126 organisations, read directly from weforum.org on 3 September 2026:
Separately, the Forum's standing Strategic Partnership community page states it "comprises 100 leading companies," but the roster rendered on that page on 3 September 2026 listed 125 distinct organisations, an inconsistency on the Forum's own site that this fiche flags rather than resolves.
Read from the 126-name Annual Meeting 2026 partner roster and the 56th edition's stated attendee mix, four categories dominate. Global banks and financial-services firms: BlackRock, JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, Bank of America, Barclays, Wells Fargo, BNY. Management consultancies and professional-services networks: McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG, Accenture, Capgemini, Kearney. Large industrial, energy and technology multinationals: Aramco, SABIC, Siemens, ABB, Honeywell Technologies, Schneider Electric, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir Technologies, Alibaba Group. Sovereign investment vehicles and state economic-development bodies: Qatar Investment Authority, Mubadala Investment Company, MGX, Bahrain Economic Development Board. Government and multilateral representation runs alongside these corporate categories rather than through the partner list: sitting heads of state and government, ministers and heads of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. No percentage breakdown by category is published by the Forum; this reads the observed roster, not a stated statistic.
Accreditation is invitation-code gated, not an open application: journalists apply through weforummedia.org, but only those who already hold an invitation code from the Forum can submit a request; there is no on-site accreditation and applications after the published deadline are not accepted. The Forum's own record for the 2026 edition states more than 400 journalists and media representatives were accredited.
The Forum runs its own "Co-Branded Media Sessions," on-site interview and panel formats produced jointly with named outlets during the meeting week; for the 2026 edition these included, across the four days of the meeting, CNBC, MIT Technology Review, The National, TV Tokyo, the Financial Times, Fast Company, Fortune, The Atlantic, Euronews, Politico, The New York Times Company, CNBC-TV18, Devex, Foreign Policy and Reuters (20 January); The New York Times Company, CNBC, China Global Television Network, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, CNN, Deutsche Welle, The India Today Group, The Economist, Axios, CNBC Africa, The Observer (21 January); Business Insider, Euronews and The Wall Street Journal (22 January); and The National again (23 January). These are Forum-produced formats, not independent assignments. Beyond them, major outlets also file their own Davos coverage during the week under their own editorial judgment; this fiche has not traced individual bylines to confirm which 2026 pieces were independent reporting versus Forum-arranged content.
Three tiers, not one undifferentiated body of "press." Forum-arranged, not independent by construction: the Co-Branded Media Sessions listed above are session formats the Forum itself produces with named outlets, valuable as a list of outlets present but not evidence of independent editorial judgment. Organiser-stated, unverified by this fiche: the "more than 400 journalists and media representatives" figure for 2026 is the Forum's own count, not independently audited. Genuinely independent: large outlets (Bloomberg, Reuters, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist among them) also send correspondents who file Davos coverage under ordinary editorial control, separate from the co-branded sessions; this fiche has not verified, article by article, which specific 2026 pieces fall in this category, so treat the distinction as directional rather than a scored breakdown.
Anyone without an existing institutional relationship with the World Economic Forum, since Davos sells no ticket and accepts no unsolicited registration regardless of ability to pay. Individual professionals and executives from organisations below Forum-partner level. Trade and procurement buyers looking for supplier discovery, product demonstrations or an exhibition floor: none exists here. Sector specialists seeking deep technical peer exchange in a single domain, since the programme is deliberately cross-sector rather than vertical. Journalists without a Forum-issued invitation code, since press accreditation is not an open application.
Davos is the senior fixture of the January diplomatic and business calendar, the one week combining sitting heads of state, ministers, central bank governors and chief executives in a single small town under one programme. It is not the World Economic Forum's only meeting: the Forum also runs the Annual Meeting of the New Champions ("Summer Davos"), held in Dalian, China, 23 to 25 June 2026 under the theme "Innovating at Scale," with more than 1,700 leaders from over 90 countries; the Global Collaboration and Growth Meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 22 to 23 April 2026; and a newly announced high-level event with the Government of South Africa planned for spring 2027. These are smaller, differently themed, and not branded as editions of the Davos Annual Meeting itself. Davos is also frequently compared with government-only forums such as the G7 and G20, which it is not part of but whose leaders are frequent Davos participants in the same season.
No parallel edition of the Annual Meeting runs elsewhere; unlike some events in this sector, the Forum keeps its flagship meeting exclusively in Davos-Klosters by design. There are two historical exceptions. In 2002, the meeting was held in New York City, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, from 31 January to 4 February, as a solidarity gesture after the September 11 attacks, drawing more than 2,700 participants from 102 countries under the theme "Leadership in Fragile Times." In 2021, the pandemic cancelled the in-person meeting entirely; a planned relocated Special Annual Meeting in Singapore (announced for May 2021, then postponed to August 2021) was ultimately cancelled outright, and the Forum instead ran a fully virtual programme, the Davos Agenda, 25 to 29 January 2021, with more than 2,000 leaders including 25 heads of state and government and 600 CEOs across 140 livestreamed sessions.
English is the working language of the plenary programme. The Forum has in the past provided simultaneous interpretation for select sessions, historically including French, at some editions, but a language policy specific to the 2027 edition has not been published.
Over 200 sessions were livestreamed free of charge for the 2026 edition, per the Forum's own Annual Meeting media page, and the Open Forum's public sessions are livestreamed separately with no registration required. Closed sessions and bilateral meetings, the majority of what actually happens during the week, are never broadcast. The Forum's own participant record marks formal replay access as not offered (replay_access = 0), though session video from past editions is subsequently published on the Forum's own channels (weforum.org/videos, its YouTube channel) as editorial content rather than a structured on-demand product.
Not applicable in the way it would be for a ticketed conference: no delegate pass is sold to the public, so there is no published refund or cancellation policy for Annual Meeting attendance. The unrelated Digital Membership subscription (Premium and Pro, see the cost entry above) carries its own online subscription terms, including a 7-day free trial; this fiche has not reviewed those terms in detail since they govern a digital product, not physical attendance in Davos.
Not publicly disclosed. No accessibility statement was found on the Annual Meeting overview, programme or Open Forum pages checked on weforum.org. The Forum has hosted programme content on disability inclusion in past editions, including sessions developed with the Valuable 500 business coalition, but this is editorial programming, not an attendee accessibility policy, and should not be read as one.
Kongresszentrum Davos, Talstrasse 49A, 7270 Davos Platz, Switzerland. The standard route from Zurich is by train, roughly 2 hours 40 minutes with a change at Landquart; in past editions the Forum has negotiated a 50% discount on round-trip Zurich-Davos rail tickets for accredited participants, and selected trains have stopped directly at the Congress Centre roughly every 20 minutes during the meeting week. Davos Dorf and Davos Platz are the two local rail stations. Zurich Airport becomes one of the most tightly controlled general-aviation airports in Europe during the meeting week, with prior-permission and parking restrictions on private aircraft. None of this logistics detail has been reconfirmed specifically for the 2027 edition; it reflects the pattern of recent years.
Because the institution convening the world's most senior invitation-only gathering is, for the first time in its history, running that gathering without a permanent Chair or a permanent President and CEO. Klaus Schwab's departure in April 2025 was followed by a brief interim chairship, then Fink and Hoffmann's election as Interim Co-Chairs in August 2025, then Borge Brende's resignation as President and CEO in February 2026 over the Epstein-contacts review, with Alois Zwinggi named to succeed him. The Board's own timeline targets a permanent Chair by January 2027, which means the search could resolve in public view right around the Annual Meeting itself. A convening institution built on continuity and discretion is currently short of both at the top.
Because the number that would answer "how much does it cost" does not exist as a public figure: no delegate pass is sold, and the Forum's own membership and partnership page offers a contact form, not a price list. What circulates instead is a decade-plus of press estimates, from roughly USD 40,000 base membership to USD 600,000 to 758,000 for a Strategic Partner tier, none confirmed by the Forum and none dated later than press reporting can verify. The one price the Forum does publish openly, EUR 30 to 90 a month for a Digital Membership, buys a research platform and a virtual programme track, not a seat in Davos: the contrast between what is priced and what is not is itself the clearest signal of how access here actually works.
Because the constraint is the point, not a limitation to route around. Three thousand or so leaders confined to Kongresszentrum Davos and a handful of hotels, with a security perimeter around the whole town, is what forces a head of state and a bank chief executive into the same corridor on the same afternoon. The Forum has broken this pattern twice in fifty-six years, New York in 2002 for solidarity after 11 September, and a fully virtual week in 2021 when the pandemic cancelled even the relocated Singapore option, and returned to Davos both times. The Forum runs other, larger and more open meetings elsewhere in the year, in Dalian and Jeddah among them, without ever proposing they replace the January fixture.
No dedicated weforum.org page for the 2027 Annual Meeting existed as of 3 September 2026. General meetings hub: weforum.org/meetings/. Most recent published edition: weforum.org/meetings/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2026/. Leadership and governance: weforum.org/about/leadership-and-governance/. Press accreditation: weforummedia.org. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/world-economic-forum/. YouTube: youtube.com/user/worldeconomicforum. X: @wef. The Forum's own media page also lists Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Weibo, Threads, WhatsApp and WeChat as official channels for meeting coverage, without giving a single confirmed handle for each. Contacts on record: Alois Zwinggi, Interim President and CEO; Laurence D. Fink and Andre Hoffmann, Interim Co-Chairs; Bathsheba (Sheba) Crocker, Managing Director and Chief Communications Officer. Borge Brende, listed as a contact in prior research, resigned from the Forum in February 2026 and no longer holds a role there.