NeurIPS Notifications Land September 24. December Is Already Full.

NeurIPS 2026 author notifications go out on September 24, anywhere on earth. The conference opens in Sydney on December 6. That is 73 days between finding out and standing in the room, and if you need a visa or travel authorisation for Australia, those 73 days are not all yours.

This is the week to work out what you would do if the answer is yes. Here is what December actually looks like.

NeurIPS 2026 is three cities, not one

The thing most people have not registered yet is that NeurIPS is no longer a single destination. For 2026 it runs as a multi-site conference:

Site	Dates	Status
Sydney	December 6 to 12	Main conference
Atlanta	December 9 to 13	Satellite
Paris	December 9 to 13	Satellite, branded EurIPS

The satellites overlap the back half of the Sydney programme rather than following it, so this is a choice between sites, not a tour. If you are in Europe and the flight to Sydney is the obstacle, Paris is the point of EurIPS: our EurIPS guide covers it, and the Sydney guide covers the main event.

One caveat on our own data: we track the Sydney and Paris sites as separate entries, because EurIPS carries its own name and site. The Atlanta satellite is listed on neurips.cc but does not yet have its own page here.

December 10 is the most globally spread day in computer science

Across the conferences we track, ten are running simultaneously on December 10, 2026, and they are on five continents at once:

Conference	Where
NeurIPS	Sydney, Australia
EurIPS	Paris, France
Asiacrypt	Hong Kong
GLOBECOM	Macau
PACLIC	Taipei, Taiwan
CoNEXT	Utrecht, Netherlands
OPODIS	Madrid, Spain
Black Hat Europe	London, United Kingdom
ACSAC	Los Angeles, United States
PyData Global	Online

It is not the busiest day of the year, and it is worth saying so plainly. November 11 has thirteen conferences running and October 13 has twelve. What makes December 10 different is the spread. On November 11, seven of the thirteen are in North America. On October 13, six of the twelve are in Europe. On December 10 no region holds more than four of the ten, and the set covers North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and an online event.

There is a second way December stands out. It is a quiet month by volume, with 21 conferences against October’s 38 and November’s 32, but ten of those 21 run on the same day. Just under half the month is concentrated into a single date, a higher share than either of the busier months manages.

The 73 days are shorter than they look

A notification-to-conference gap of 73 days is tight, and more so than it sounds. Across the 187 editions where we hold both a notification date and a start date, the median gap is 100 days and only 12 percent are as short as 73. Nearly a third sit under 90 days, which is the pattern we measured in how little time acceptance actually buys you.

The gap matters more than usual here because the destination is Australia, which requires advance authorisation from almost every visitor, and because the chain is sequential. You cannot request an invitation letter before you register, and you usually cannot register before you are accepted. Each step gates the next.

The compressible link is registration. If you are reasonably confident and the trip is affordable either way, looking at flights before September 24 rather than after is the single most useful thing you can do this week. December to Sydney is also southern-hemisphere summer and the start of the Australian holiday season, which is not a combination that rewards late booking.

December is unforgiving elsewhere too. OPODIS notifies on October 28 for a December 9 start in Madrid, a gap of 42 days, the tightest in the month.

The one pair you can actually combine

Most of December’s conferences collide. One pairing does not.

ACML runs in Melbourne from December 1 to 4, and NeurIPS opens in Sydney on December 6. Melbourne to Sydney is about an hour and a half in the air, and the two-day gap is enough to move without rushing. ACML notified authors on September 15, so if you are holding an acceptance there already, the Sydney decision on September 24 turns into one trip rather than two.

For anyone travelling from Europe or North America, that matters more than it sounds. The flight to Australia is the expensive, tiring part of this trip, and doing it once for two conferences changes the arithmetic considerably.

The rest of the month is a set of alternatives rather than a route. SIGGRAPH Asia is in Kuala Lumpur December 1 to 4, the same days as ACML. ACCV is in Osaka December 14 to 18 and Middleware in Tarragona the same week. SIGIR-AP is in Singapore December 13 to 15.

What to do this week

If you are waiting on NeurIPS, the useful work is the part that does not depend on the answer. Check whether you need authorisation for Australia and how long it currently takes. Price the flights now so you know what the decision costs. Decide in advance whether Sydney or Paris is your site if both are open to you, because that choice is easier made calmly than in the 24 hours after a notification email.

And if the answer on September 24 is no, the December calendar above is not a consolation prize. A good deal of it is still open.