Every exhibition organizer eventually faces the same question: what does a stall cost? The honest answer is that it depends on four things you already know — the cost of running the hall, the value of the position, how much time is left before the doors open, and what your exhibitors can realistically earn in two or three days.
Start from your costs, not from a competitor's rate card
Add up what the show costs you before a single stall is sold: hall rent, electricity and load, security, housekeeping, signage, printing, staffing, marketing, and the commission or fee your venue charges. Divide by the number of stalls you can actually sell once you have removed aisles, entrances, fire lanes and your own registration area.
That figure is your floor. Any stall sold below it is funded by the stalls sold above it, and if the average does not clear the floor, the show does not happen next year.
Build the rate card in layers
Most shows price better with three to four layers than with one flat rate:
- Base rate — a standard stall in a normal position. This should carry the show.
- Premium rate — corners, aisle ends, positions near the entrance, the food court or the stage. Charge for the traffic these positions actually receive.
- Size steps — price by square footage rather than by "small, medium, large" labels, so exhibitors can compare honestly and you never argue about what "large" means.
- Bare space — a rate for exhibitors who build their own stall. This removes the cost of your shell scheme from the price and is usually the easiest line to justify.
Show the per-square-foot figure next to every package. It makes the premium layers look like what they are — paid-for position — rather than an arbitrary jump.
Use time as a lever, not a discount reflex
Early-bird pricing works because it buys you cash flow and a committed floor plan early, when you still have time to sell the remaining space. Two rules keep it honest:
- Publish the deadline and the exact amount in the rate card, not verbally.
- Keep the discount modest enough that you would still be happy if every exhibitor took it.
Late pricing is the opposite lever. Space that is still unsold a week before the show has a real cost: an empty stall is visible to visitors and to next year's exhibitors. A published late rate — higher, not lower — protects the exhibitors who booked early.
Take a deposit, and write down what it is for
A booking deposit is not extra income; it is the mechanism that makes a floor plan real. Decide in advance:
- How much of the stall fee is due at booking.
- When the balance is due, and what happens on a missed date.
- Whether the deposit is refundable, transferable to another event, or forfeited — and from which date.
- What happens if you cancel, not just if they do.
Write all four into the terms on the booking form. The disputes you avoid are worth more than the clause costs you in length.
Never let the stall fee be the only line
Your exhibitors will ask what else they owe. Answer it on the same page as the price:
- Electricity and extra load, if billed separately.
- Furniture, carpeting and stand-fitting beyond the shell scheme.
- Additional exhibitor badges or staff passes.
- Parking, storage and material-handling charges.
- Taxes — state clearly whether the quoted rate includes GST or is exclusive of it, because an exhibitor budgeting for the inclusive figure and being invoiced the exclusive one will not book a second time.
Put the rate card somewhere exhibitors can find it
The most common complaint from exhibitors is not the price — it is discovering the price only after filling in a form and waiting for a call. Publishing the rate card, the inclusions and the cancellation terms on your event page removes that friction and shortens every sales conversation.
A worked example of the arithmetic
Suppose a hall costs ₹4,00,000 all-in for the show, you can sell 80 stalls, and you want a margin that funds next year's edition. Your floor is ₹5,000 per stall (₹4,00,000 ÷ 80). A rate card of ₹7,500 base, ₹9,000 premium and ₹6,000 bare space, with a 10% early-bird on base and premium, clears the floor at every mix except a hall sold almost entirely on early-bird base rate — which is exactly the scenario you want to see coming before you publish, not after.
Those rupee figures are an illustration of the method, not a recommendation; your hall, your costs and your market set the numbers.