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By Andrew Krueger, Minnesota Public Radio News

Attendance at the Minnesota State Fair continues to trend ahead of last year’s pace.

Fair officials said 134,146 people passed through the gates on Monday. That compares to 120,288 people on the same day last year.

The record attendance for the first Monday of the fair is 144,504 — set back in 2017.

Attendance through the first five days of this year’s fair stands at 791,788 people. That‘s up about 11 percent compared to 2022.

There’s been one daily attendance record set this year — on Friday, when nearly 165,000 people passed through the gates.

If you want to visit the fair this year — but the larger crowds, and reports of traffic jams and full parking lots, are causing some hesitation — the next few days might be the best time to visit, ahead of Labor Day weekend.

The record attendance for Tuesday at the fair stands at 136,987, set back in 2019.

The record attendance for the second Saturday at the fair — the Saturday of the holiday weekend — is nearly double that. The fair saw 270,426 people pass through the gates on the second Saturday of its 2018 run — the greatest single-day attendance number in the fair’s history.