Was That Craft Fair Worth It? The Math Most Makers Skip

A $600 day at an $85 booth, driven 96 miles, worked to the penny — plus the rule that tells you which fairs to drop. Real profit, not the cash box.

You loaded the truck at 6 a.m., stood on concrete for six hours, drove home in the dark, and counted $600 in the cash box. Good day, right? Maybe. The cash box tells you what came in. It says nothing about what the day cost you to show up — and that gap is where a lot of makers quietly lose money for a whole season without noticing.

Here's the math most of us skip, worked all the way to the penny, plus the rule of thumb the market veterans use and the honest part nobody likes to say out loud: some fairs lose you money, and the right move is to stop doing them.

What a fair actually costs

Revenue is the easy number. The cost of the day hides in five places, and four of them never touch the cash box.

• The booth fee. You already paid it, so it feels free by fair day. It isn't. It's the first thing that comes off the top.
• Getting there and back. Gas plus wear on the vehicle. The clean way to count this is the IRS standard mileage rate — 70 cents a mile for 2025 — which folds fuel, tires, and depreciation into one number you can also write off at tax time.
• The goods you sold. Every candle, bar, or bowl that left the table cost you something in materials. That's your cost of goods, and it scales with how well you did — a great sales day burns more inventory.
• Card fees. Square, PayPal, whatever's on your phone. Small per swipe, real by the end of the day.
• Your hours. Not a cash cost, but the one that decides whether the day was worth trading your Saturday for.

Miss any of these and the day looks better on paper than it was in the truck.

A real $600 day, to the penny

Let's run one. Call her a candle maker at a Saturday street market. Booth was $85. She lives 48 miles from the venue, so 96 miles round trip. She was on the clock 10.5 hours — an hour to load and drive out, half an hour to set up, six hours selling, half an hour to tear down, and 90 minutes home. She rang up $600: $380 in cash, $220 across 14 card swipes on Square.

Here's the day laid out.

So the $600 day was really a $300.28 day. Almost exactly half of what the cash box showed went to the cost of being there.

Now the number that actually matters. Profit per hour:

$300.28 ÷ 10.5 hours = $28.60 an hour.

That's the honest wage for the day — before you count the evenings you spent pouring and packing the inventory in the first place. Fold those in and it drops further. But $28.60 an hour on a fair day is a solid result. She'd take that.

The hours you don't count

The 10.5 hours above is just the show. It leaves out the work that made the show possible: the evenings pouring inventory, the afternoon printing labels and pricing tags, the hour packing the bins. For a booth that grosses $600, that back-of-house time is easily another four to six hours across the week.

You don't have to run those hours through the P&L every time — but you should know they're there, because they change what "worth it" means. If the show pays $28.60 an hour but you spent six unpaid hours making the stock, your real rate across the whole effort is closer to $18 an hour. That's still fine for a maker who loves the work. It's a bad trade if you're doing it only for the money and there's a better-paying show two towns over. The point isn't to guilt yourself about your own hours. It's to stop comparing a fair's take against zero and start comparing it against your next-best use of the same Saturday.

Fixed cost, variable cost, and why the booth fee stings

Two of the day's costs behave differently, and it's worth seeing why. The booth fee and the mileage are fixed — you pay them whether you sell $200 or $2,000. The cost of goods and the card fees are variable — they only exist because you made sales. That split is the whole reason a slow day at an expensive booth hurts so much: the fixed costs don't shrink to match a bad crowd. Sell nothing at that $250 juried booth and you're still out $250 plus $126 in mileage — $376 gone for showing up. It's also why a cheap booth close to home is so forgiving. Low fixed cost means the day is nearly break-even from the first sale, and everything after that is real money.

The 5-to-10x booth rule, and why it's only a first pass

Market sellers pass a quick gut-check around: your gross should land somewhere between five and ten times your booth fee for the show to be worth it. Below 5x, the fee eats too much of the day. Our candle maker grossed $600 on an $85 booth — a 7.06x multiple, right in the sweet spot. Good sign.

But the multiple is a screen, not a verdict. It ignores mileage, and mileage is where a "good multiple" show can still lose money. A close-to-home $50 booth where you gross $400 is an 8x — looks great — but if it's 200 miles round trip, that's $140 in mileage alone, and the picture changes fast. Use the multiple to decide which shows to apply to. Use the full P&L to decide which ones to do again.

The fair that quietly loses you money

This is the part makers avoid, so let's do it plainly with a second show.

Juried weekend fair, farther out. Booth was $250. It's 90 miles each way — 180 round trip. You worked 12 hours across setup and two selling days' worth of standing. The tent looked full, people said kind things, and you came home with $420 in sales.

You lost $54.70 to be there, and that's before your 12 hours. Run the booth rule and it fails too: $420 gross on a $250 booth is a 1.68x multiple, nowhere near five. The tent felt busy because people stopped and chatted. They just didn't buy enough to cover the cost of the tent.

One bad show isn't proof of anything — weather, a slow crowd, a bad neighbor booth, it happens. But if a fair prints red two or three years running, it's not a fluke. It's a fair that doesn't work for what you sell, and the kindest thing you can do for your business is drop it and put that Saturday somewhere better. Loyalty to a show that loses you money isn't loyalty. It's a leak.

What to write down at every show

You can't compare shows you didn't measure. The minimum you need per event:

1. Booth and application fees. Both. Some juried shows charge $35 just to apply whether you get in or not — a real cost of the circuit.
2. Round-trip miles. Log them at the show while you remember. Multiply by the year's IRS rate later.
3. Hours, door to door. Loading, driving, standing, tearing down. Be honest; this is the number that tells you your real wage.
4. What you brought and what came home. Count-back beats counting every sale. Brought 40, came home with 12, so you sold 28 — reconcile that against the cash and card totals and you'll catch the freebies, the theft, and the math errors.
5. Cash versus card, so you can subtract the processing fees.

Do that for a season and a pattern shows up on its own. Here's what one maker's spring looked like once the four shows sat side by side:

The little $40 bazaar quietly paid the best hourly rate of the spring — low fixed cost, close to home, done by early afternoon. The juried weekend, the one that looked the most prestigious on the application, lost money. Without the table, you'd never see it; the holiday fair's big number would paper over the loss and you'd sign up for the juried show again next year out of habit.

Two or three shows carry your year, a couple are fine, and one or two have been costing you money the whole time while feeling like part of the routine.

MadeKeeper builds this into a per-event record — you enter the booth fee, the miles, your hours, and what sold, and it hands back the true profit, the profit per hour, and a plain verdict on whether the show earned its place. If you want to run the numbers on a single show first, the free fair-profit calculator does exactly this math with nothing to sign up for. Bring your last show's receipts and see what the day really paid you.

If you're a booth-heavy maker — say a potter hauling a juried tent across the state — the mileage line alone can flip a "good multiple" show into a loss, so it's worth running every one.

Know before you load the truck. And once you know, be willing to act on it — the fair you drop is the Saturday you get back.