FOCS 2026 and TCC 2026 in New York: Travel Guide

FOCS 2026 runs from 8 to 11 November at the NYU Kimmel Center on Washington Square. TCC 2026 runs from 10 to 13 November, in the same building.

Which means that for two days, the 10th and the 11th, both are happening at once. If you work in theory and also in foundations of cryptography, that overlap is the whole planning problem, and it is worth deciding early which talks you are giving up rather than discovering the clash on the day.

The venue is not where you think it is

This is the practical thing to get right, and the standard advice will steer you wrong.

Search for where to stay for a New York conference and you will be sent to Midtown, because that is where the Javits Center and the big convention hotel blocks are. Academic conferences in this city frequently are not there. NYU is on Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, about 3 km south of Times Square.

Our own data made the problem visible. Before writing this guide, all seven New York hotels we listed were in Midtown and Times Square, between 2.3 and 8.2 km from the Kimmel Center. Not one was near the venue. That is a fine way to attend a conference at Javits and a poor way to attend one on Washington Square, where a Midtown base turns a ten minute walk into a twenty five minute subway ride with a transfer, twice a day, for five days.

So the hotel list below is now split by that, and the Village options are new.

Where to stay

Distances are from the Kimmel Center at 60 Washington Square South.

Walking distance, in the Village. Washington Square Hotel (details) is the closest at 280 metres, an independent hotel on the north west corner of the park itself, about four minutes on foot. The Marlton Hotel (details) is essentially the same distance, a restored 1900 building on West 8th Street with a good lobby cafe, and the better room if you want somewhere to sit and work that is not your desk.

A short walk north. Walker Hotel Greenwich Village (details) is about ten minutes away on a quiet block. W New York - Union Square (details) sits in a landmark 1911 building on Union Square, fifteen minutes on foot, and is the pick if you want subway lines running in every direction because you are combining the trip with meetings.

Cheap, and genuinely cheap for Manhattan. The Jane Hotel (details) is in a 1908 sailors’ lodging house in the West Village, and its cabin rooms are modelled on ship berths. They are very small and most use shared bathrooms. Go in knowing that and it is one of the few affordable beds below 14th Street.

Midtown, if the rate is capped. The Times Square cluster is still worth considering when your funding sets a nightly limit, because the sheer volume of rooms there keeps prices down: Pod Times Square (details), citizenM New York Times Square (details) and Arlo Midtown (details) are the reasonable ones. Budget the commute honestly.

The full list is on the New York city page, and the block-versus-independent question is covered here.

Getting in and getting around

Three airports. JFK has the most international routes and connects by AirTrain to the subway or the LIRR. Newark (EWR) is often the cheapest from Europe and is well placed for the west side of Manhattan. LaGuardia (LGA) is the closest but is mostly domestic. From any of them, allow an hour to ninety minutes to the Village and rather more in weekday rush hour.

Once you are in, the subway is the answer and it runs all night. Pay with a contactless card or phone at the turnstile using OMNY, which caps your weekly spend automatically. The nearest station to the venue is West 4th Street-Washington Square, about five minutes away, served by the A, B, C, D, E, F and M lines, which is an unusually good set of connections for one stop.

Walking is genuinely competitive downtown. The Village street grid is the old irregular one rather than the numbered grid above 14th Street, so a map is worth having, but distances are short.

Between sessions

Washington Square Park is directly outside the venue, and in November it is at its best: the arch, the fountain, the chess tables in the south west corner, and the street musicians who are a permanent fixture. The NYU buildings ring it, so you are in the middle of a campus that has no real edges.

The Village is the point. This is the part of Manhattan that rewards wandering rather than ticking things off. Bleecker and MacDougal for the old folk and jazz history, the West Village for the quiet crooked streets, and the Strand a few blocks east on Broadway, an eighteen mile bookshop that swallows an hour without effort.

Jazz is the specialty here and the venues are the historic ones. The Village Vanguard, Blue Note and Smalls are all within walking distance of the conference, and sets run late enough to catch after a full day of talks. Book ahead for the Vanguard.

Museums are a subway ride uptown rather than a walk: the Met, MoMA, the Whitney at the south end of the High Line. The Whitney is the natural one from the Village, and the High Line walk to it is a good way to spend a free afternoon.

On the season, November in New York is cold but not yet brutal, roughly 5 to 12C, and it is a good month to be here. It is also busy and getting busier as the holidays approach, so hotel prices climb through the month.

If you are submitting rather than attending

Both venues run on schedules worth planning around.

FOCS took submissions on 1 April 2026 and notified authors on 3 July, which is a long review cycle even by theory standards. It alternates with STOC as the pair of flagship theory conferences, and if you are reading this early enough to be planning next year instead, STOC 2027 is part of FCRC in Atlanta from 5 to 11 June, co-located with PLDI, ISCA and SIGMETRICS. FCRC runs only about every four years, so that is an unusually good one to aim at.

TCC is an IACR conference covering the theoretical foundations of cryptography, and its co-location with FOCS this year is not accidental: the communities overlap substantially, and the joint week is the best chance in the calendar to sit in both rooms.

We mapped where both sit against the wider field in the acceptance-rate analysis, where the theory cluster runs tighter than machine learning and looser than systems. Full details are on the FOCS and TCC conference pages.