You have three options for ticket fees: add them on top so the buyer pays, absorb them so the advertised price is the price, or fold them into a single all-in price, sometimes with the split shown. The right choice depends on what you want the advertised price to be, how much you mind surprises at checkout, and how much margin you can give up on each ticket.
This post is about ticketing platform fees on match and event tickets. It suggests no fee levels, because yours are in your contract.
Option one: the buyer pays on top
The advertised price stays low and the fee appears during checkout. Your margin on the face value is untouched, and the platform's cost is carried entirely by the fan.
The cost is trust. A fan who saw one price on the poster and a higher one on the payment page can feel misled, even when the difference is small, and a club sees the same people every fortnight. A per-ticket fee is also multiplied by every seat in a family basket. If you go this way, show the fee as early as the platform allows, ideally on the first page where a price appears.
Option two: the venue absorbs the fee
The price on the poster is the price on the payment page. Checkout is clean, and staff on the gate never have to explain a fee.
The fee comes out of your margin on every ticket, including the cheap ones. Absorbed fees hurt hardest on junior and concession tickets, where a fixed per-ticket fee is a larger share of a smaller price. They also disappear from view, so nobody reviews them at renewal.
Option three: all-in or split pricing
Here you raise the face value to cover some or all of the fee and advertise the full amount. The fan sees one honest number, and you keep your margin. You can show the breakdown underneath or leave it out.
The trade is a higher advertised price than the club down the road that adds fees later. You can also split by ticket type: absorb on juniors and concessions, go all-in on adult tickets, and keep hospitality separate. Make sure your platform can apply different fee treatment per ticket type before planning around it.
Check the rules on price display
Some places have rules about how fees must be shown in advertised prices, and those rules change. Check the current rules where you sell, and if the wording of your price display matters, ask a lawyer or your league's governing body.
Model it with your own ticket count
Pull last season's sales by ticket type and build a small sheet.
- Tickets sold in each type: adult, concession, junior, family, hospitality.
- The fee per ticket for each type, taken from your contract or a recent payout report, not from memory.
- Tickets multiplied by fee for each type, then totalled. That is the season's fee bill, whoever pays it.
- A column for each of the three options, showing how much of that total lands on the fan and how much on you.
- Season tickets and memberships on their own rows, since a fee on one large purchase behaves differently from a fee on a single match ticket.
To see the same total across several seasons, enter your per-ticket fee and ticket count in a free calculator that shows the yearly and three-year software bill.
Once the total is in front of you, the question changes from who pays the fee to whether the fee is the right size for what you use. Rented ticketing is often good value for a venue that relies on the platform's reach and features. For one that uses little beyond seat selection and scanning, our page on what sports teams and venues rent and what can be rebuilt and the guide to owning your software cover the other route. Card processing fees stay either way. Those belong to the processor, and we build around it.