How To Price Tickets For an Event

3/6/2023

How much should you charge for your event tickets? That’s a question every event organizer asks themself! If your event ticket pricing is too high, you might deter ticket sales; too low, you won’t cover overhead.  Though it’s tempting to use last year’s event ticket prices, resist! 

Many event costs (including marketing, refreshments, talent, and staff fees) may change year to year, and using ticket prices from previous events may not adequately cover the cost of producing future events.

You could do some market research to get a feel for what the ticket price is for similar events to find the right price for yours, but that shouldn’t be the only way you determine your ticket price. There are too many variables! For instance, everyone’s costs—and thus the breakeven point—vary and the number of potential attendees you need to attend your event may differ. 

In an attempt to make the lives of event organizers everywhere a little bit easier, we’ve created the below event ticket price calculator. Plug in your event’s particulars and it’ll give you an idea of the right ticket price for your event..

Event Ticket Price Calculator
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What to Consider In Your Event Ticket Pricing Strategy

Our event ticket price calculator will help you determine the sweet spot for your event’s ticket price. To ensure you plug the right numbers into each box, we explain each line item below.

Target profit

This is the amount that you would like your event to have made when it’s over. By changing this value, you can find out how much more the tickets would have to cost to earn an additional $X at your event. In other words, play with this number! It’ll inform you of the right price for whatever financial goal you have in mind.

Cost for tickets

Even if you produce them yourself using your own printer, there is a cost associated with printed tickets. This box should contain the total that you will end up paying for your tickets to be printed and shipped to your location.

Having your event tickets professionally printed is a huge time saver, can be very affordable, and the end result will generally look better than what you could produce at home. An effective way to offset ticket printing costs is signing up a sponsor and printing their ad on the back of your tickets.

Number of events

Is your event a one-off? Or do you plan on multiple dates? This box is for the total number of individual events that you plan to hold.

Cost per event

From facility rental to paying ushers and performers, costs add up. This box should contain the total expenditure of an individual event. When this sum is multiplied by the total number of events, it will be the total event cost of the production.

Number of seats per event

It is always a good idea to know what full capacity is at your event venue. Do not worry about how many tickets of that total you will sell right now; just enter the total number of seats in the box.

Percentage of tickets to be sold

Some events are lucky enough to sell out every time. Since 1963, Notre Dame football, for example, has sold out of tickets for every game but one (1973 vs. Air Force over Thanksgiving weekend). Most venues are not so lucky and are best served by a guess as to what percentage of the tickets will be sold before the event. For example, 80% would mean selling four out of every five tickets.

Once you’ve input all of the above information, the ticket pricing calculator will then generate the right ticket price for your unique event. Whatever the price, we recommend you round up the ticket price to an even number. 


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