The Waukesha Card Show returns to the Waukesha County Expo Center on Saturday, October 17, 2026, and October's date is one of the busiest of the year for a specific reason: the Pewaukee Card Show runs the same morning about ten minutes up the road. Rather than splitting the crowd, the overlap has turned into an unofficial Waukesha County card show day, with collectors and dealers running both floors and treating the pair as a single circuit. If you plan it well you can genuinely do both.
The Expo Center floor is the larger of the two, carrying more than two hundred tables from over a hundred distinct dealers. The inventory range is broad and legitimately deep. Baseball spans 1950s Topps and Bowman vintage, 1970s and 1980s complete sets, box-lot commons that make short work of a want list, and modern Prizm, Optic, Select, Mosaic and Topps Chrome. Football in mid-October is the room's center of gravity — Green Bay Packers material across every era fills multiple tables, from Lombardi-era Starr, Nitschke and Hornung through Favre, Rodgers, Love and current rookies, with the rest of the NFL well covered. Basketball rides the season opener with Bucks and league-wide inventory, hockey is in full swing, and UFC, boxing, soccer, golf and racing all have dedicated dealers. Trading card game vendors carry Pokemon spanning WOTC-era through current Scarlet and Violet plus Japanese product, along with Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Disney Lorcana and Dragon Ball. Locked cases feature PSA, BGS, SGC and CGC slabs at every price tier, and the room also holds autographed memorabilia, signed jerseys and helmets, comics, Funko Pops and supply vendors.
Hours are 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM Central. That five-hour window makes this the ideal second stop if you start your day at the 9:00 AM Pewaukee show, or the ideal first stop if you would rather hit the bigger floor fresh and finish in Pewaukee. Admission is two dollars for adults, free for children twelve and under, and free for everyone after 1:00 PM. No VIP tier, no advance tickets — pay at the door. A portion of every show's admission goes to HAWS, the Humane Animal Welfare Society of Waukesha.
The Waukesha County Expo Center is at 1000 Northview Road in Waukesha, roughly twenty-five minutes west of downtown Milwaukee off Interstate 94. Parking is free and plentiful, and the organizers direct attendees to park and enter on the east side of the building — worth following, since the perimeter walk is long otherwise. The hall is level, climate-controlled and ADA-accessible with wide aisles.
Families, casual collectors, Packers and Bucks fans, set builders, TCG players and working dealers all fit here. Given the compressed hours and the double-show day, be tactical: decide your route before you arrive, hit the tables that carry your primary category first, and leave general browsing for the back half. Bring cash first — with a hundred-plus independent dealers, card readers are inconsistent. Carry a want list sorted by sport, player and TCG title, pack penny sleeves, top loaders and a hard case, and if you are chasing a deal, the final hour after free admission kicks in is when sellers get most flexible. Reach the organizers at [email protected].
