// about
about hackathons usa
An independent directory of hackathons happening across the United States — one place to find every build weekend, game jam and design challenge, without checking six platforms.
what this is
Hackathons USA is a listings directory. It tracks hackathons taking place in the United States and puts them on one page, sorted by date, with the dates, location, ticket price and prize information attached to each one. Right now there are 188 upcoming events listed across 10 city hubs.
We do not run hackathons. Every listing links out to the organiser's own page, which is where registration, rules, schedules and any questions about the event itself belong. Think of this as an index, not an intermediary.
where the listings come from
Listings are gathered automatically. A weekly pipeline checks the public event platforms that US hackathon organisers actually use — Eventbrite, Devpost,Luma and Meetup — and collects anything that looks like a hackathon happening in the United States. Organisers can also add an event directly through thesubmit form.
Automated collection is the only way to keep a directory of this kind current, but it is also the part most likely to be wrong, so candidates are filtered before they are published:
- US-only. The hard case is place names that exist in more than one country — there is a Cambridge and a Birmingham in England as well as in Massachusetts and Alabama, a London in Ontario and in Kentucky, a Paris in Texas and a Melbourne in Florida. An event is only accepted when something other than the city name confirms it is American: a
.eduor.govlink, a US timezone, US-only eligibility rules, a US university or organisation, or prize money in dollars. - Actually a hackathon. Build weekends, game jams, buildathons, datathons and hack days, code jams and similar hands-on competitions. Conferences, webinars, masterclasses and meetups that merely mention the word do not qualify, and neither do the “life hack”, “wellness hack” and “biohacking” events that share the keyword.
- Online events need a US signal. For Devpost and Luma an online listing is only kept if something ties it here — a
.eduor.govlink, a US timezone, US-only eligibility rules, or weaker hints together such as a US university and prize money in dollars. Online listings found through Eventbrite's own US search are kept without that extra check. - Still upcoming. Past events move to an archive section rather than the main listings.
- Not a duplicate. The same event cross-posted to two platforms is matched on its link or its title and merged into one listing.
how the listings are written
Once an event is accepted, its page is read and the details are pulled out — dates normalised to US format and the event's own timezone (the country spans six, so each listing keeps the one its organiser published), prices to dollars, the venue and address separated out, the banner image copied onto our own servers rather than hotlinked from the organiser.
The short summary on each listing is written by an AI model (DeepSeek V4 Flash), from the organiser's own page. The longer description below it is the organiser's own wording, reformatted into clean paragraphs — except where a source had no description at all, in which case that paragraph is also model-written from the event's other fields. The model is instructed to use only what is in the source and never to invent a venue, price, prize or attendance figure. It is not instructed to be flattering, and it does not rate or recommend anything.
Dates are the one thing the model does not have the final say on: where the organiser's page publishes exact start and end timestamps, those are written over whatever the model produced.
Automated aggregation means mistakes reach the site. If a listing has the wrong date, the wrong city, or should not be here at all, tell us and it gets fixed or removed.
how cities work
The 10 city pages — San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Washington DC, Denver, Atlanta — are hackathonecosystems rather than the 10 largest metros in the country. Austin and Boston are smaller than Dallas or Houston but run far denser hackathon calendars, so they get their own pages while the towns around them fold into the closest hub for browsing purposes.
So Palo Alto, Mountain View, Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose browse under San Francisco; Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City and Stamford under New York; Cambridge, Somerville, Providence and Worcester under Boston; Santa Monica, Pasadena and Irvine under Los Angeles; Bellevue, Redmond and Tacoma under Seattle; Round Rock and San Marcos under Austin; Evanston, Naperville and Milwaukee under Chicago; Arlington, Bethesda, Reston and Baltimore under Washington DC; Boulder and Fort Collins under Denver; and Decatur, Alpharetta and Marietta under Atlanta. An event's own page always shows its real venue and address — the grouping only affects which city page you find it on, because that reflects how people actually travel to these events.
In a country this size, grouping stops where travel stops. Dallas, Houston, Miami, San Diego, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Detroit, Salt Lake City, Nashville and Raleigh all keep their own names rather than being filed under a hub several hundred miles away — they appear in the main listings without a city page of their own. Names that belong to more than one place are never guessed either: a bare “Portland”, “Concord”, “Springfield”, “Aurora” or “Arlington” is only resolved once the value carries a state.
who it's for
Developers, designers, students and founders looking for something to build at this weekend — and organisers who want their event found by those people. Student-run university hackathons, corporate innovation weekends, charity build days and independent game jams are all in scope.
how this site makes money, and what that changes
Being listed is free and always will be — the directory would be worthless if it only contained events that paid to be in it. Organisers can optionally pay for a featured listing, which buys a banner across the site for seven days. What that includes is set out on the submit page rather than restated here, so there is only one description of it to keep accurate.
A featured listing buys placement and nothing else. It does not change whether an event is listed, and it does not change the order of the ordinary listings, which are sorted by date. We are not affiliated with Eventbrite, Devpost, Luma or Meetup, we are not paid by them, and outbound links to organiser pages are not affiliate links — we earn nothing when you register for an event.
editorial stance
- Completeness over curation. The aim is every US hackathon, not a shortlist of the ones we like. We do not rate, rank or review events.
- Organisers own their description. Descriptions are the organiser's own words; summaries are condensed from them, as described above. We do not add promotional claims of our own.
- Corrections are free and fast. There is no fee to fix or remove a listing, including a featured one.
- No dark patterns. No cookie wall, no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers. See the privacy policy for exactly what is and is not collected.
get in touch
Corrections, questions, removal requests and press enquiries all go to the same place — see thecontact page. Organisers with an event to add should use thesubmit form.