Eurovision 2027 Season Opens: The September Deadlines

Eurovision 2027’s selection season opened on 1 September 2026. Under the EBU’s eligibility rule, a song can only represent a country in Burgas next May if it was not released or publicly performed, in part or in full, before that date — so 1 September is the line that separates last season’s material from next year’s contest. Twenty-two broadcasters have now confirmed they will compete, and eight of them are running submission windows that close between this week and late October.

Why 1 September is the real start of Eurovision 2027

The EBU rulebook states that songs submitted to represent a participating broadcaster “must be original and must not have been released and/or publicly performed in part or in full before the Release Date”. For the 71st contest that release date is 1 September 2026. As Eurovoix noted in its season round-up, the rule has been applied less strictly over the past decade, but it still governs what broadcasters will accept: Norway’s Melodi Grand Prix rules, for instance, explicitly require entries to be unreleased before 1 September.

For anyone following Eurovision 2027 as a market rather than as a fan event, the date matters for a second reason. Until now the story has been about who is in and who is out — the field, the boycotts, the Dutch withdrawal. From today it becomes a story about songs, and songs are what actually move prices.

The Eurovision 2027 submission deadlines closing this autumn

Eight confirmed countries have published a closing date for entries. Switzerland’s is the first to shut, six days from the season opening.

Two windows have already shut. NRK closed Melodi Grand Prix submissions on 31 August, and Finland’s UMK closed in the last week of August — Yle’s own page gave 23 August while Eurovoix reported the 24th, and we have kept both on the record rather than quietly picking one.

Five Eurovision 2027 national finals already have a date

The selection calendar is unusually well defined this early. Five countries have fixed both a date and, in most cases, a venue.

Latvia’s final is the one worth reading closely. Supernova 2027 runs in two parts: every finalist faces a combined public and international jury vote, and only the top three go through to a superfinal decided by the public alone. Latvia also allows foreign songwriters, provided non-Latvian rights holdings in a song do not exceed 49% — a rule that quietly opens the country to the Scandinavian writing camps that dominate the rest of the field.

San Marino runs the longest process of anyone. A casting round pushes 240 or more acts into a Stage & Live Academy of eight shows, semi-finals on 3 and 4 March cut 40 acts to ten, and the final on 6 March fields up to 20 — the ten qualifiers plus up to ten SMRTV wildcards — with a five-member jury picking the winner.

What broadcasters confirmed in the past week

Canada will sing in both official languages. CBC/Radio-Canada confirmed on 31 August that the country’s debut entry will include both French and English: “the song will include both of Canada’s official languages and may also include other languages”, with the chosen artist consulted on their comfort in each. It is a genuinely unusual constraint — no country has been required to write bilingually as a matter of broadcaster policy in the modern contest — and it lands before the artist is even chosen, because Canada is picking the performer first and commissioning the song afterwards. Applications close on 9 September, a shortlist is named in the autumn, and the winner is decided by a digital public vote on the Eurovision Song Contest Canada website alongside a jury of music experts. The full criteria, published by CBC/Radio-Canada via Eurovoix, ask for an unprocessed live vocal and note that an existing European footprint is “an asset”.

Germany named its selection panel. SWR, which took German participation over from NDR in 2026, will run submissions until 21 September and then sift them in two rounds: an internal “music team” of Jules Kalmbacher, Pele Loriano, Florian Müller, Celina Spanier and Lilly Behling picks a longlist, an international jury gives feedback, and SWR chooses the finalists from that. Loriano produced both “The Code” and “Wasted Love” — the 2024 and 2025 winners — which is the clearest signal yet that SWR is buying contest expertise rather than domestic chart names. The broadcaster also ran its first 2027 songwriting camp on 31 August.

Austria is going internal. ORF, straight off hosting the 2026 contest in Vienna, has ruled out a national final. Peter Schreiber and Cesár Sampson — who finished third for Austria in 2018 — are heading the search, with the artist due in late 2026 or early 2027 and the song later still.

Italy has changed how Sanremo feeds Eurovision. The Italian representative will no longer simply be whoever wins the Festival di Sanremo. Instead a dedicated Eurovision competition will be held on the festival’s fourth night. Artistic director Stefano De Martino said the artists “will have the opportunity to stage their performances according to their creative vision”. For anyone who has ever backed a Sanremo winner expecting an automatic Eurovision entry, that is a structural change to a pipeline that has run one way for years.

Eurovision 2027 betting: still only one market open

There is no outright Eurovision 2027 winner market to trade yet, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Checked on 1 September 2026, the only open Eurovision event on Polymarket is the 2027 participants board — 14 country contracts on whether a nation competes at all, carrying about $10,000 of lifetime volume between them. That is a participation market, not a winner market, and no song exists yet for a winner market to price.

Two contracts moved in the last 24 hours. Belgium fell from 28% to 17%, consistent with VRT repeating that it is unlikely to compete without a direct EBU vote on Israel’s participation. Canada eased from 97% to 93%, which is harder to read as news — Canada’s application portal opened on schedule and nothing has suggested a wobble. At the safe end the board has Germany at 98%, Italy at 97%, Moldova at 91% and Israel at 89%; at the contested end, Slovenia 53%, North Macedonia 51%, Iceland 50%, Kazakhstan 48%, Spain 28%, the Netherlands 21% and Ireland 19%.

Read the volumes before reading anything into the prices. North Macedonia sits at 51% on nine dollars of lifetime volume even though MRT confirmed its return on 21 May — that is a placeholder, not an opinion, and it is a good example of why thin markets on this board should be treated as unpriced rather than as a disagreement with the news. Our bookmaker guide and winner odds page will carry 2027 outright prices when they actually open; until entries exist, they will not be meaningful.

Who is confirmed for Burgas — and who still is not

The confirmed field stands at 22, up from the 21 we counted in the participation board on 24 August. Two of those 22 have confirmed participation without publishing any selection format at all: the United Kingdom, where the BBC confirmed in June but has said nothing about how it will pick an artist, and — more surprisingly — host broadcaster BNT, which as of 1 September had still not said how Bulgaria will choose its own entry for the contest it is staging.

Andorra and Bosnia & Herzegovina have confirmed they will not return; Slovakia ruled itself out on cost on 2 August; the Netherlands is out after AVROTROS withdrew on 24 August, unless another NPO member takes the mandate on. Belarus and Russia remain suspended from the EBU. Iceland, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain — four of the five 2026 boycotters — have all still to decide.

Two entries on our undecided list are weaker than they look, and we have relabelled both. Armenia rests entirely on Patrick Fiori saying in October 2025 that he would like to represent the country; AMPTV itself has said nothing, and Eurovoix’s season round-up lists Armenia among the broadcasters that have not announced plans at all. Hungary’s obstacle is structural rather than political: MTVA and Duna Média Service are being replaced by two new organisations, and it is not clear whether the successor inherits EBU membership or has to apply for it again. Both belong in the undecided column, but neither is close to a confirmation.

The next fixed points are Switzerland’s deadline on 7 September, Canada’s on the 9th and Sweden’s on the 11th. The first act of the 2027 season will not be chosen until Luxembourg’s final on 30 January, but the songs that will be there are being written now.