What ticketing fees cost a small venue is the per-ticket fee multiplied by the tickets you sell, plus any percentage the platform takes of the ticket price, plus payment processing. Nobody outside your business can tell you the figure, but you can work out your own from a season of settlement reports.
We are not going to quote fee levels here. They differ by platform, by contract and by how the deal was negotiated, and any number we printed would be a guess. What follows is the method for finding yours.
The three parts of a ticketing fee
- A fixed amount per ticket. It scales with how many tickets you sell, not with what they cost, so it weighs heaviest on cheap tickets and junior or concession prices.
- A percentage of the ticket's face value. It scales with price, so premium seats, hospitality and season packages carry more of it.
- Payment processing. This is what the card networks charge through a processor. Some platforms bundle it into their own fee and some show it as a separate line.
Your contract may add others: a flat monthly or annual platform fee, a setup charge per event, charges on refunds and chargebacks, rental for scanners or box office hardware, or a different rate for season tickets and memberships than for single tickets. List every one that applies to you before you start adding up.
Who is actually paying it
Fees can be added on top for the buyer, taken out of the face value before you are paid, or split between the two. When the buyer pays, the fee never shows up as a cost in your accounts, which makes it easy to ignore.
It is still money your supporters hand over to attend your event, and it affects what they are willing to pay for the ticket itself. So count it twice: once as the cost that lands on you, and once as the total collected in fees on your tickets, whoever paid.
What to pull from your settlement reports
- Tickets sold per event across a full season or year, including complimentary tickets if a fee applies to those.
- Gross face value of those tickets.
- Fees charged to buyers on top of face value.
- Fees deducted from your payout.
- Payment processing, where it is shown separately.
- Refunds, and whether the fees on refunded tickets were returned or kept.
- Anything invoiced outside the settlement, such as a monthly platform charge or hardware rental.
A worked example with invented numbers
Suppose a venue sells 9,000 tickets a year at an average of 20 dollars, and the platform charges 1 dollar per ticket plus 3 percent of face value. The per-ticket part is 9,000 dollars. The percentage part is 3 percent of 180,000 dollars, which is 5,400 dollars. Together that is 14,400 dollars a year before processing. These figures are made up to show the arithmetic and are not what any platform charges. Put your own in. Our software bill calculator is a free calculator that takes a per-ticket figure and an optional monthly fee and shows the yearly and three-year totals.
The part that stays whatever you do
Payment processing does not go away. Any system that takes cards pays the card networks, so leave that line out when you compare options and look only at the platform's own fee.
Be honest about what that fee buys. If a real share of your buyers find you through the platform's own listings, that reach is worth paying for, and your reports should show how many sales came from your own website and links versus theirs. If nearly all of your tickets are sold to your own supporters through your own site, you are paying a per-ticket fee for a checkout and a scanner app.
That second case is the kind of thing we rebuild at Hiro for one flat monthly price, with card processing left exactly where it is. Our page on software for sports teams and venues covers what can be rebuilt, and our guide to renting versus owning your software covers when it is not worth doing.