General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

÷ Tour

The ÷ Tour (also called the Divide Tour) was the third world concert tour by the English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, staged from 2017 to 2019 in support of his album ÷ (Divide), released on March 3, 2017. By its conclusion the tour had become the highest-grossing and most-attended tour ever recorded at the time, according to the concert trade publication Pollstar¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Artist and album	Ed Sheeran, touring his 2017 album ÷ (Divide)³
Run	Began March 16, 2017 at Pala Alpitour, Turin, Italy; concluded August 26, 2019⁴
Final totals	$775.6 million gross, 8.9 million tickets, 255 performances¹
Records broken	Passed U2's 360° Tour gross of $735.3 million on August 2, 2019, and its attendance record of 7.3 million on May 24, 2019⁴^•⁵
Scale of shows	43 countries visited, versus 28 on U2's 360° Tour⁴
Pricing	Average ticket price 14.2% lower than U2's $101.15; no VIP ticketing²
Performance format	One performer alone with acoustic guitar and loop pedal, staged end-on⁶^•¹¹

Background and announcement

Sheeran announced the tour in January 2017 after a year away from the music spotlight, with the dates following the release of Divide on March 3, 2017. The itinerary he laid out ran from Turin in March across Europe, Ireland and the UK, then Central and South America, finishing in Mexico in June; UK and Ireland stops included Dublin's 3Arena, Glasgow's SSE Hydro, Newcastle, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham, and two nights at London's O2 Arena³. The 2017 leg was an arena tour that moved 1.525 million tickets and grossed $124 million, ranking eighth on Pollstar's 2017 Worldwide Tours chart⁷.

Performance format

The tour's stagecraft was deliberately minimal for its venue size. Sheeran performed solo, without a backing band or dancers, building songs live with an acoustic guitar and a loop pedal⁶. Production designer Mark Cunniffe, who had encouraged Sheeran to perform in the round since 2015, delivered an end-on stage design with extensive video content⁶.

Box office and records

2018: a single-year record. The tour's central engine was its 2018 schedule. Sheeran grossed $432.4 million and sold 4,860,482 tickets across 53 cities and 94 shows that calendar year, the highest single-year gross and the most tickets tallied in any single year in Pollstar's 30-year history⁷. The average ticket price that year was $88.96, $37.79 below the 2018 Top 10 average of $126.75, a gap Pollstar estimated at roughly $184 million in forgone revenue had he priced like his peers⁷.

Passing U2. U2's 360° Tour had held the all-time gross record of $735.3 million (110 shows, 2009 to 2011) and the attendance record since 2011⁵. On May 24, 2019, at Groupama Stadium in Décines-Charpieu, France, the Divide Tour passed U2's attendance total with a cumulative 7,315,970 spectators; on August 2, 2019, at Messegelände in Hannover, Germany, it passed U2's gross with a cumulative $736.8 million⁴.

The tour closed on August 26, 2019 with a four-night homecoming stand at Chantry Park in Ipswich, England, near Sheeran's hometown, which grossed $12.9 million on 139,984 tickets¹. Final Pollstar totals stood at $775.6 million, 8.9 million tickets, and 255 performances¹.

Regional records accumulated along the way. In Oceania the tour set the official record for tickets sold on a single tour, at over 1 million (previously held by Dire Straits' 1985 tour with around 950,000), and for most stadium shows by a single artist on one tour, at 18 (previously AC/DC at 14)⁸. Sheeran's shows at Reykjavik's Laugardalsvöllur drew the biggest audiences in Icelandic history, with one in seven of the national population attending, and the tour produced the largest concerts in the histories of Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Latvia, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Helsinki⁴.

How it compared with the 360° Tour

The two record-holders reached their totals by opposite routes. U2 averaged 66,091 attendees per show across 110 stadium dates; Sheeran averaged 34,541, about half as many, by mixing more intimate arenas into the routing². Sheeran played 43 countries to U2's 28, and the tour's aggressive campaign against scalpers and the secondary market, along with its rejection of VIP ticketing, held average prices 14.2% below U2's $101.15²^•⁴. Volume did the work: a much longer run of cheaper, smaller-capacity shows outweighed a per-show average far below U2's roughly $6.7 million⁵.

Place in touring history

The ÷ Tour's record stood until the 2020s, when tours grossing over a billion dollars became a new benchmark. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour became the first tour to cross the billion-dollar mark in 2023 and was later reported by Pollstar at $2.2 billion⁹. Sheeran's next stadium tour, the Mathematics Tour (+−=÷× Tour) of 2022 to 2025, grossed $875.7 million on 8.8 million tickets across 188 shows, a figure the Spanish outlet Los40 lists as the fourth-highest-grossing tour of all time, behind Swift, Coldplay's Music of the Spheres, and Elton John's Farewell Yellow Brick Road¹⁰.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Music › Music institutions and events › Concert tours and residencies › Concert tours by pop artists › Pop concert tours

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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