Budgeting up: how to set your festival up for success in years to come

We recently sat down with John Rostron, CEO of the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), and one line stuck with us: festival organisers eat and drink risk. It’s a great line, because it captures something true about the job. You commit to a field, a date, a bill and a supplier chain months before you know whether anybody is coming.

AIF represents 170 UK festivals, and John has run and set up his own festivals in the past, so we thought: who better to ask about running a successful one? When we asked what advice he’d give someone starting out, he didn’t hesitate.

"The best advice that I’ve heard and I would give, and particularly starting up, is budget up. Don’t start with the dream, start with something small that you can deliver and then hopefully as you sell well, you can then start to add and add. That’s so much easier to create a festival that way. If you start the opposite way round, if you’re not in those details, you’re really, really going to get undone."

Budget up, not down. It sounds obvious written down. In practice, festival organisers, who by nature are creative, rarely come at it from that angle, because it means deliberately not building the festival you see in your head.

Budgeting a festival recently got harder

We’ve said it before, but there’s no avoiding the impact the Covid pandemic had on festivals, and the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine made things worse still.

AIF’s 2023 Festival Forecast described supply chain costs across its membership as "untenable, with increases over 30% since 2019, and in some areas as high as 80%", naming energy, production, staging and security as the drivers.

Ticket prices haven’t kept pace. The same report put overall ticket price rises across AIF’s membership at "around 12% since 2019". Rostron’s summary of the resulting squeeze, speaking to Pollstar, is worth reading twice:

"Supply chain costs have gone up, and continue to go up, by over 30%-50% on average. They don’t want to pass that all on to customers, so they’ve raised ticket prices by 20% or so since COVID, and then looked at what can be cut to cover the rest."

That gap between cost inflation and price inflation has to be absorbed somewhere, and the somewhere is your margin. AIF’s 2023 forecast had its member festivals on course for a combined revenue of £195 million against combined costs of £177 million, which works out to a margin in the high single digits. AIF don’t call it a margin themselves, and the figures are forecasts rather than results, but the shape is clear enough. There isn’t much room for a mistake.

This is the world a first or second-year festival is now setting its budget in. Which is exactly why the order you build it in matters.

What does budgeting up your festival actually mean?

Budgeting down means designing your dream festival, then working out how to pay for it. Four stages. The headline act you’ve always wanted. The site you’ve imagined. Then you build a revenue model that gets you there, and it may need you to sell something like 85% of capacity just to break even.

Budgeting up means starting from what you can deliver on pessimistic ticket sales, and adding as demand proves itself.

Budgeting up doesn’t mean being less ambitious about your event. It just means being smarter about the risks you can afford to take, and being sensible where you need to be, so you don’t end up cancelling or closing.

If you budget up and sell better than expected, you have a good problem. You add a stage next year, or a second bar, or extend the site. Your audience gets to watch the festival grow, which is exactly the story you want them telling.

If you budget down and sell worse than expected, you’re cutting into an event you’ve already promised. Rostron is blunt about what gets cut first:

"Often the first thing to go is a stage, and all the artists with it. Festivals always have way more on offer than people can see, and they often over-deliver, so the customer doesn’t notice any difference."

That last sentence probably brings a lot of comfort to organisers. Most festivals offer their audience more than any one person could ever get through, so there’s usually more slack than organisers fear. But it only works once or twice. Keep cutting, and eventually you’re cutting the thing people came for.

You can add to a small event that sold well. You can’t subtract your way out of a big event that didn’t.

Budgeting up doesn’t mean being cheap

In our chat, John was quick to point out that budgeting to what you can afford doesn’t mean going cheap.

"It doesn’t mean you always have to go for best price. So being on detail doesn’t mean cheapest is best, but it’s about understanding where all those different expenditures are, why you’re spending them and what they mean."

This is the difference between a disciplined budget and a hollowed-out one. Discipline is knowing what every line is for. Hollowing out is going through the same budget picking the lowest number in each row.

Some places where paying more is usually the right call:

• Anything safety-related. Not negotiable, and not a place to discover the difference between a good supplier and a cheap one.
• The things people queue for. Toilets, bars, water, food. Rostron’s point elsewhere is that the whole experience is the product, and the unglamorous parts of it decide whether people come back.
• Suppliers who’ve looked after you before. Relationships in this sector are worth real money in a difficult year, and the industry is small.
• Anything you’d have to fix at 6am on the Saturday. Cheap now, expensive later, is a recurring pattern in event production.

And some costs are worth looking at harder than most organisers do, because they tend to get set once and never revisited.

The lines that get set once and forgotten

• VAT. At 20% on ticket sales, VAT is one of the largest single lines in most festival budgets, and it’s the one AIF is actively campaigning on. Their 5% For Festivals campaign asks the Government to cut it to 5% for a temporary three-year period. Rostron’s published case: "A reduction in VAT on festival tickets from 20% to 5% for three years is an evidence-based, simple, sensible remedy that would ease the financial burden on promoters enough for them to return to health." AIF is also pushing for a Music Festival Tax Relief aimed at festivals under 30,000 capacity, modelled on the existing Theatre and Orchestra reliefs. Neither is in your control this year, but both are worth supporting, and worth modelling for.
• Ticketing fees. Ticket fees matter and we’ve written about this at length. The short version for budgeting purposes: percentage-based fees scale with your ticket price, flat fees don’t, and at festival price points that gap can actually be pretty big. We have our own pricing page where you can calculate the fees you’ll pay on Ticket Tailor as well as compare that to other platforms. Go ahead and check it out and recalculate it every time you change your ticket price.
• Payment processing. Usually a separate line from platform fees, sometimes bundled, and easy to miss entirely when you’re comparing providers.
• The cost of your own time. Rarely in the spreadsheet, always in the budget somewhere.

Buy for the festival you intend to become

One of the more practical things Rostron said is about the difference between a one-off and a long-term project, and it’s the part of "budgeting up" that isn’t just about restraint.

"A big difference for a lot of organisers is, are you just doing this once or is it a long term journey here? Because some of the decisions you make, and a lot of production companies will talk about this in practical terms. If you’ve got a long term vision for a festival, you can buy and build certain things now that are going to cost you more, but then store them and reuse them. And then over time, that’s going to serve you so much better. It’s going to save you time, money, resources. But you need to be thinking about that right from the off."

So the discipline isn’t only about spending less. It’s about spending on things that survive the weekend. Signage, structures, bars, decor, infrastructure you can store in a barn and bring out next June. The hire cost you avoid in years two, three and four is often more than the premium you paid in year one.

This is the honest version of "budget up". Small enough to deliver, but built to be added to.

Get the money in before you spend it

The other half of a festival budget is timing, because most of your costs land before most of your revenue does.

This is where building a community pays for itself in the most literal sense. Green Man, a 25,000-capacity independent in the Bannau Brycheiniog national park, sold out its 2026 edition in just over an hour in September 2025, eleven months ahead of the festival and before announcing a single act. It was their fourth consecutive sell-out. Whatever else that does, it means the entire ticket revenue for August 2026 was banked in September 2025.

Most festivals aren’t Green Man, but the principle scales down. Three ways to build this in from year one:

• An early tier for the people who don’t need convincing. Rostron’s observation is that independents sell far more of their tickets on early bird than you’d expect, often before there’s even a lineup to announce. Setting up an early bird tier, or any tiered pricing, is just a case of adding a new ticket type. And that simple tweak means cash in the months when suppliers want deposits.
• Payment plans. He singled these out as one of the changes that has mattered most: "It’s like, why didn’t we have that before? It’s such an obvious thing. That’s been really brilliant." A payment plan isn’t a discount. It removes a barrier without touching your revenue. And makes your event more accessible. It’s a feature worth checking your ticketing platform actually offers - and yes, before you ask, it’s available on Ticket Tailor.
• A supporters scheme. Knockengorroch in Galloway raised £18,914 from its audience in 2025 to cover rising costs, then turned that response into a permanent year-round scheme where supporters get pre-sale early bird access, including people who can’t attend that year. That’s recurring off-season income from a community that wants the festival to exist.

Rostron also noted that the wider industry has become more willing to advance cash to festivals to get them through the pre-season squeeze, which is one of the reasons he thinks the sector has steadied. Worth a conversation with your suppliers and your ticketing provider about what’s possible.

Find the person who loves the spreadsheet

A closing note for anyone reading this with a sinking feeling at the thought of opening a spreadsheet:

"That’s a challenge for a lot of festival operators because they set them up because they’re creative and they want to have a party. And then the last thing they want to do is look at the spreadsheet. But hopefully you find someone who’s good at the spreadsheet and they take that bit on."

Being in the detail doesn’t mean you have to be the person in the detail. It means somebody does, and that they should be someone who actually enjoys it. He also points out that there’s plenty of guidance available on how to structure a festival budget properly, "so the right things appear in the right areas", and that most of it comes from other organisers who’ve already made the mistakes.

That’s largely what AIF exists for. Their Festival MOT is a newer service aimed at festivals that are struggling, where industry experts come in and, in Rostron’s words, "look under the bonnet" and give independent advice. He gave one example of a festival whose ticket sales had inexplicably stalled, until someone looked and found every ticket type was showing as sold out on the festival’s own website. Nobody internally had spotted it.

Which is a good reason to have someone from outside check your numbers occasionally, however good your spreadsheet is.