Jay-Z Will Headline the Super Bowl LXI Halftime Show at SoFi Stadium

MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2026

The announcement

The reveal came with the whole country already watching football: during ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcast of Cowboys–Eagles, Roc Nation announced Jay-Z as the Super Bowl LXI headliner, and the NFL and Apple Music confirmed the news the same night. Apple’s own announcement bills it as the 2027 Apple Music Super Bowl LXI Halftime Show.

“From Reasonable Doubt to standing on the Super Bowl halftime stage, this has been a journey,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “Thirty years of music, work, and culture on the world’s biggest stage. This run continues to be a dream come true.”

Super Bowl LXI is set for February 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood — the building where, two nights earlier, Jay-Z had stood on stage in front of a sold-out crowd and declined to say a word about any of this.

Seven years holding the pen

Roc Nation partnered with the NFL in 2019 to select and produce the halftime show, and the deal now runs through 2029. The headliners on Jay-Z’s watch have defined the show’s modern era: Rihanna in 2023, Usher in 2024, Kendrick Lamar and SZA in 2025, and Bad Bunny at Super Bowl LX this past February. Through all of it, the one name never on the list was the man holding the pen. Jay-Z, a 25-time Grammy winner, has never performed at a Super Bowl — the stage has been filled for seven years while the curator stayed in the booth.

That changes in February. In the weeks before Monday’s announcement, Puck reported that Jay-Z was weighing selecting himself, and Deadline confirmed the plan through a music industry insider, with other major names reported to have been under consideration. Previously carried the story as unconfirmed on Oct. 20. Monday night, the rumor became the official word.

Two nights after his own finale in the same building

The timing is not subtle. Jay-Z spent the past three months on the JAY-Z30 stadium run — Yankee Stadium in July, London and Paris in the fall — celebrating 30 years since Reasonable Doubt, and he closed the whole tour at SoFi on Friday and Saturday night (Oct. 23–24). Night one put his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, on piano; the finale handed the stage to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, who led the last Super Bowl halftime show played at SoFi, back in 2022. All week, speculation followed the tour that the finale would double as a halftime announcement. Jay-Z said nothing. Two nights later, the announcement arrived anyway — during a Cowboys–Eagles game, on the stage-setter’s own terms.

There is a family symmetry to complete, too: Beyoncé headlined the halftime show in 2013 and returned as a guest performer in 2016. Come February, both halves of the couple will have headlined the biggest stage in American music.

Jay-Z’s last solo album, 4:44, arrived in 2017, and no new record accompanies the announcement — the set will be built on three decades of catalog. What it looks like is now the only open question, and it stays open until February 14.

The Music Desk’s read: the most protected secret in the building turned out to be the obvious one. A man spends seven years proving he knows exactly what a halftime show should be, then test-runs the host stadium with a sold-out anniversary tour and the building’s last halftime headliners as his guests. The announcement wasn’t a surprise so much as a coronation with a date on it.