The booth-fee math: is that $85 fair worth it?

The 5-to-10x rule circuit vendors use, plus one $600 day worked to the penny — booth, miles, materials, and what the hours actually paid.

The organizer's email says $85 for a ten-by-ten, due Friday. And somewhere between reading it and finding your card, you run the only math most of us ever run on a booth fee: "I'll probably make that back."

Probably. That's the whole business plan.

Here's the two-minute version that actually answers the question — before you pay, not on the drive home.

The yardstick: gross 5 to 10 times the fee

The rule of thumb that circuit vendors live by is simple: a fair is working when your gross sales come in at five to ten times the booth fee. For that $85 booth, that means $425 to $850 across the table by teardown.

Why a multiple of the fee, and not just "more than the fee"? Because the fee is never the whole cost of the day. Materials walked out with every sale. The truck burned gas both ways. You stood there from load-in to load-out. A day that grosses $110 against an $85 booth technically "made the fee back" — and paid you almost nothing for any of it.

So read the multiple like this:

• Under 5x — the day took more than it gave. Once, that's weather or a slow gate. Twice, it's the venue.
• 5x to 10x — a working fair. The fee earned its keep.
• Over 10x — book it again before the organizer raises the price.

One honest caveat: the yardstick assumes fair-typical margins. If you sell $6 soap bars you'll need more transactions to get there than the woodworker moving $300 cutting boards — but the multiple holds up surprisingly well across crafts, because booth fees tend to scale with the kind of show you're at.

The worked example: $85 booth, $600 day

Say the fair costs $85, it's 96 miles round trip, and you gross $600. Here's the whole day, written down:

That's a 7x fair. A good day — genuinely.

Now the part almost nobody finishes: hours. An hour and a half of setup, six hours at the table, an hour of teardown, two hours of driving. Ten and a half hours, $262.04 — about $24.96 an hour. If that number beats what your time is worth to you, the fair earned a return trip. If it doesn't, no amount of "but I made the fee back" changes the answer.

Notice what the materials line did there. At 30% of gross it was the biggest cost of the day — bigger than the booth, bigger than the miles. If you don't know your real cost per piece, that line is a guess, and the whole verdict wobbles with it. (That's the number MadeKeeper exists to pin down, but a fair estimate beats a blank line while you get there.)

Before you pay the next fee

Turn the rule around and it becomes a booking filter. At $85, ask: can I plausibly sell $425 at this show? Look at the venue's foot traffic, last year's vendor list, what your table averages per buyer. If an honest guess says $300, the fair fails the test before you've loaded a single bin — and passing on it costs you nothing but the fear of missing out.

A few things the yardstick quietly assumes, so check them too:

1. Count everything with the fee. Some shows stack on electricity, insurance riders, or a jury fee. That $85 booth with a $25 jury charge is a $110 booth. Run the multiple on the real number.
2. Count the miles honestly. Round trip, plus the supply run the night before. At 76¢ a mile, distance quietly eats small shows — a far-away $60 fair can cost more than a close-to-home $120 one.
3. Your hours are a cost even when nobody cuts a check for them. Ten and a half hours is ten and a half hours. The verdict only means something if they're in the math.

Run your own numbers in the free fair profit calculator — booth fee, miles, hours, materials, and a straight verdict, no signup. Then keep the answer somewhere better than the truck ride home.