Blowing your budget on swanky cocktails or headlining entertainment might seem like a good idea, but if you don’t have any budget left to promote your event, you won’t be able to attract attendees to sip those drinks or enjoy the entertainment.
But you don’t have to be a math whiz to keep your event planning budget on track — and we’re here to help.
Eventbrite supports organizers worldwide to plan, budget, and organize five million events every year. Now, it’s your turn.
Read on to find out why budgeting is so important, read examples of event cost breakdowns, and get tips on how to make a budget plan for an event in four phases.
How to make a budget plan for an event
Phase 1: Clarify your event budget strategy
Phase 2: Analyze your event expenses
Phase 3: Master event budget best practices
Phase 4: Craft your event budget template
Why is event budgeting important?
Let’s get real: Organizing an incredible event costs a lot, and overheads are only increasing.
According to researchers at American Express, 53% of event planners say that increasing costs are their greatest challenge in 2024 — and customers are the ones paying this price (literally).
In Eventbrite’s TRNDS 2024 report, 60% of event organizers planned to increase ticket prices in 2024. That being said, only 28% of event attendees plan to spend more money on tickets this year.
Translation: Most event attendees feel the pinch, and you can’t expect them to fork out for your increasing costs.
That’s why event budgeting is important.
By creating a realistic events budget, you’ll have a clear projection of all the costs of running your event — whether it’s catering costs, event insurance, equipment to support hybrid events, event management software, employee salaries, or anything in between, so you don’t have to increase your ticket prices.
As you move forward through the event planning process, that budget will be your bible. When done effectively, event budgeting:
- Prevents overspending
- Helps with prioritizing expenses
- Reduces your chances of unexpected spending
- Gives you clear financial goals
Most importantly, creating (and sticking to) an event budget enables you to deliver an amazing event without compromising on quality or breaking the bank.
How to make a budget plan for an event
Now you know the importance of event budgeting, what are your next steps? That’s where a budget plan comes in.
An accurate event budget plan is a resource for organizing your projected spending, monitoring your remaining budget, and seeing where your money is going. Without a place to track your budget, you won’t know where exactly your money went.
To help you get started, we’ve split the planning process into four key phases:
1. Clarify your event budget strategy: This is where you establish the “why” behind your spending decisions.
2. Analyze your event expenses: The stage where you assess your event expenses and decide where you can afford to reduce your spending.
3. Master event budget best practices: Always expect the unexpected.
4. Craft your event budget template: This is the part where you take your best practices, use analysis, and deploy your strategy to start populating your event budget.
Once you’ve read through each phase, download our free event budget template.
Ready to start budgeting?
Phase 1: Clarify your event budget strategy
Before you begin planning your budget for event management, it’s important to take a step back and consider critically what you’ll spend your money on.
We’ve rounded up some of the best ways to use data that will help guide your budgeting process.
1. Reference historical data
Unless your event is in its first year, you already know what you spent your budget on in previous years. Begin by identifying line items you overspent or under-spent on and see if they’re the same or different yearly.
Once you’ve pinpointed specific things that you tend to overspend on, you’ll have a better picture of what areas need more budget. This will make it easier to be accurate earlier in your process instead of repeating past mistakes.
In addition, you can run your preliminary budget past your clients and your boss for approval if necessary. That way, you’ll already have a working doc to update as you move forward.
Need a hand sifting through past expenses?
If you’re using accounting software like Datarails, QuickBooks, or Zoho Expense, you can search through various line items and generate different reports highlighting your key spending areas.
It’s particularly important to track your spending when promoting your event, which is what brought Ittai Geiger, executive producer of Drunk Theatre, to Eventbrite.
Geiger wanted to simplify the process of advertising events while generating better results. And being able to control campaigns in real time enabled Geiger and his team to start generating profits that could be reinvested in creating bigger and better events.
”Now what we’re spending on marketing, on rent, on whiskey is more than not offset by what we bring in with ticket sales. That’s letting us play a little bit more,” he says.
“It’s not about us making money. It’s about letting it invest in itself and continue to grow.”
This is critical when you’re drawing up future budgets, too. The more you learn about your financial performance now, the more you can do to achieve event success moving forward.
Want to start generating better results for your upcoming events? Event organizers that use Eventbrite’s marketing tools sell an average of 63% more tickets than those who manage their ads elsewhere.
Increase your ticket sales
2. Consider trends
If you and your team are facing budget constraints, you’re not alone.
Only one in five event organizers planned to increase their budgets moving forward in 2023 — while everybody else said they were either sticking to their existing budget or trying to find places to cut costs.
So where does the money go?
When event organizers are drawing up their list of expenses, the biggest costs are:
- Marketing and promotion
- Speakers and talent
- Printed materials
- Venues
If this breakdown sounds familiar, then check out the section below on event marketing for some event ideas on how you can trim your marketing spend, no matter the size of your team or event.
It’s also worth looking at trends in event management that you can leverage to reduce your spending in key areas.
For example, maybe you spend 10% of your budget on printing paper tickets and venue maps. But by exploring new industry trends like transitioning to QR codes, your budget will differ, such as providing your event team with the right tech.
Don’t worry — we’ll populate your expenses list in the next budgeting phase. First, let’s take a step back and talk about goals.
3. Get buy-in from all departments and stakeholders
The sooner you can get the green light from your stakeholders to start planning, the better. A rough budget can help you get an estimated figure to revise as you go along.
💡Pro tip: Always get at least three price quotes for everything, even if you have a vendor you like working with. Chances are good that you’ll find someone else who will go lower, and your favorite vendor will match their price. Alternatively, throw in something else like free parking for event staff.
4. Set your goals
Once you’ve identified areas to tighten up your spending, you can set specific goals. Whether you want to increase the amount of money you receive from event sponsors or make your money go further without using up your contingency fund, setting goals will keep you focused.
Set targets early on, including how many tickets you want to sell and how much sponsorship revenue you want to generate. Doing so will keep your income on track for your spending.
For lessons in best practice, check out the team at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.
When PR and Marketing Coordinator Jonah Holland chose Eventbrite, she had two major goals: to turn more interest into sales and to reach a new audience without going over budget.
That’s where Eventbrite’s marketing tools came to the rescue. By enabling Holland and her team to sell tickets directly through Facebook, Eventbrite enabled them to drastically expand their reach without exceeding their budget.
More importantly, the team could monitor progress toward that goal in real time and adjust ad spending accordingly to reach all the targets.
Phase 2: Analyze your event expenses
Now that you know your areas of focus, it’s time to list all the line items to track in your budgeting template. These will include particulars like rental costs, lighting equipment, and more.
Don’t have an event budget sample? See Phase 3 below for inspiration.
5. Create an event expenses list
Defining the focus areas of your event can help you prioritize your spending and invest in what really matters. Once you have your overarching categories defined, you can start to drill down and fill in the costs.
Be as specific as you can with line items to create a comprehensive event budget.
Don’t be tempted to lump things like ‘food and alcohol’ together, as you may be sourcing them from different vendors. If you’re comfortable with them, use formulas (like the ones in this bar inventory spreadsheet) to see profit or loss in real time.
Not sure where to start on your expenses list? Using an event budgeting template can streamline the process by prompting you to ensure you don’t forget a single line item in your budget.
💡Pro tip: Typical budgets have two columns for cost: projected cost and actual cost. The better your research, the more closely these two columns will match.
6. Incorporate your experiential costs
Not sure what costs to list for your event experience?
The following are the most common categories to consider when putting together your budget:
- Venue rental: Hotel conference rooms tend to start at around $70 per hour, while you should expect to spend $40 per hour or more to rent a community or hall space. To hire a bar or club, your venue cost will start from at least $100 per hour.
- Staffing: Events team wages in the US average $12–29 per hour, so make sure you budget that when planning to hire a team.
- Equipment: The equipment you need for your event depends on the type of event you’re running and its location. After all, you’ll normally have to pay more for delivery if your event space is in a remote area. But as an example, a medium event sound system (which a lot of events need) comes in at around $245 per day.
- Décor: Have an intricate event theme in mind? You should budget for decorations — and if you’re hiring a decorator, budget $700–1,000.
- Programming (speakers or performers): The average keynote speaker costs $5,000–$50,000, but expenses vary depending on the speakers’ reputation, experience, and status.
- Signage and event branding: The cost of branding and signage will depend on the size of your venue and your vision, but expect to spend $2,000+ if you require external support.
- Attendee experiences: These are all the little extra costs that add to making the experience more memorable for your guests. For example, hiring an event photo booth would cost $400–1000. The price varies depending on how many hours you need the photobooth for, whether you need extra photo props, and where you need your booth delivered.
- Travel: If you need to arrange transport for your guests, staff, or entertainers, that needs to go into the budget. If you need to hire an executive bus to transport VIP guests or staff, budget around $175 per hour.
You’ll want to list all the different line items for each major cost, so you can keep track of the details.
For example, speaker rentals and other A/V equipment hire are line items in the equipment category. Meanwhile, linen hire might be a line item under your venue category.
Some of your line items may differ depending on whether you’re holding an in-person event or a virtual event. For fully virtual events, you will save on costs like the venue, décor, and signage, but you may need to budget more for live streaming equipment or mailing swag directly to attendees.
The Last Bookstore does an amazing job of accepting and incorporating experiential costs into its wider budget plan, particularly when it comes to deploying extra staff.
“It’s always nice when there’s someone on staff who is trained, empathetic, and has an eye out for any disabled attendees, too, although, of course, that’s rare and understandably more costly for the venue,” says owner Josh Spencer.
💡Pro tip: Use different colors to shade your spreadsheet so you can see at a glance which line items belong in which categories.
7. Include your technology costs
Investing in the right technology can make a huge difference in your ability to maximize your event budget. You need to choose a ticketing partner that can help you provide a delightful registration process and a mobile event app that people actually use, as well as improving your event ROI.
These are the three most common technology costs to consider including in your event budget, depending on whether they apply to your event or not:
- Event app
- Ticketing partner
- Live streaming
For a virtual, live streamed event, the technology you use is particularly important.
You’ll want to ensure you have a strong internet connection, proper video equipment, and potentially even a sound engineer.
If you’re looking for a way to minimize your event technology costs, it makes life a lot simpler (and cheaper) to choose all-in-one event management software that bundles every feature you’ll need into just one dashboard.
For example, Eventbrite not only allows you to create and sell tickets, but you can also promote your event using a range of in-built marketing tools, check your guests in at the door using the Eventbrite Organizer App, and monitor your event goals using our advanced reporting dashboard.
Want to see it in action?
8. Estimate your event marketing budget
There are many ways to save money on your promotion costs. But you have to start by understanding how effective your current promotional strategy is. Data plays a huge part in that.
Look closely at your marketing spend and how many ticket sales come from each effort.
Then, invest your budget in the channels that yield the highest return on investment and stop doing anything that doesn’t produce a return. If your team is small, maximize your marketing budget by investing in the right marketing tools and technology for your event.
Here are common areas where you can trim down on your spending:
- Social media: Use free tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to automate your posts without spending more.
- SEO: Use a ticketing partner with industry-leading domain authority so your events have a better shot at ranking in Google, without any more investment from your team.
- Streamline your checkout process: Small tweaks to your purchase process (like selling tickets directly through Facebook) can drastically increase your sales without any other changes.
It’s also crucial you invest in a marketing tool that can help you control your budget and use it on the best platforms to reach your target audience.
Aykut Events does an amazing job at this.
According to founder Aykut Akcaoglu, utilizing Eventbrite’s marketing dashboard enables the team to set specific marketing budgets and track spending in real time — giving them the chance to redirect spend wherever required.
“Overall, we want to organize a great event, but we also want to make sure that the money we invest in these ads is worth it,” Akcaoglu says.
“The analytics tool is very easy to read, and you can tell the outcome and see if you’re getting a good return on your investment.”
💡Pro tip: It costs six to seven times more to acquire a new attendee than it does to retain an existing one. Are you doing enough to nurture past attendees in your event marketing?
Organize an email campaign to reach out to customers on your contacts list from previous events and tell them about your future events.
Phase 3: Master event budget best practices
Even if you enjoy tracking every receipt, the following strategies can help you keep everything in check and get more mileage from your budget.
9. Consider event ROI
Ultimately, your budget is a fundamental part of calculating your return on investment. Your budget can determine your event’s total cost. Then, use it as a starting point for the years to come so you can meet your event objectives and grow your profit margin.
Not sure how to calculate your event’s ROI? Use this simple equation:
[(Total Sales Revenue – Total Cost of the Event) ÷ Total Cost of the Event ] X 100 = ROI
If your ROI is 1X, it means you broke even. Most events aim for an ROI of at least 2-3X.
Is building your ROI a key priority?
Look for tools that can support you in the right places. For example, The Duck Club uses Eventbrite’s AI tool to generate ad campaigns and place them on social media channels 30% faster.
“My favorite part about Eventbrite marketing tools is definitely the ad buys; it eliminates like half of my job,” says chief marketing officer Megan Stoll.
10. Leave an emergency fund
You never know what could happen in the days leading up to an event — which is why it’s important to create a rainy day fund to support you with unexpected expenses.
Working some leeway into your budget gives you enough breathing room to absorb hidden costs, in case you might need to add to your audio-visual equipment order or a speaker’s fees turn out to be higher than expected.
This helps minimize stress when unexpected costs arise and ensures everything goes smoother for your upcoming event.
💡Pro tip: Depending on your event type, plan on having a contingency figure between 5% and 25% of your total event budget. Remember that your buffer will change throughout the lifecycle of your event.
11. Avoid common mistakes
A common event budget mistake is ignoring the budget as you plan.
Spending a little bit of time on your budget every day (at least 10 minutes) will help you stay on top of new developments in real time rather than letting things pile up in a heap.
Another mistake to avoid is not exploring all the different avenues of revenue that can increase your budget. One-third of event professionals generate the majority of their revenue from sources other than ticket sales.
The most common sources include:
- Sponsors
- Swag
- Merchandise
💡Pro tip: Don’t just offer your sponsors the generic bronze/silver/gold package. Really work together to find out what your sponsor wants to achieve and collaborate with them to provide a valuable partnership. You can use a workbook to value your sponsorship packages compared to market rates.
12. Get creative
Still not getting your budget to budge? It’s time to think creatively about how you can market your event and deliver a great experience for attendees using the event budget you do have. You can’t eliminate marketing costs entirely, but you can make savvy decisions on where to offset it.
For example, get scrappy by:
- Promoting with the help of influencers
- Outsourcing what you can to interns or volunteers
- Partnering with brands and local businesses
Phase 4: Craft your event budget template
If you’re new to creating a budget for your event, you might not know where to start with an empty spreadsheet, which can seem quite daunting.
More often than not, trying to fit your event’s finances into an outdated budget template you pulled from the internet makes your life more complicated — not less.
Luckily, with just a little work upfront, it’s easy to create an event budget template that’ll serve you now and in the future.
All you have to do is ask yourself five questions:
1. What are you budgeting for? Specify the needs of your event and break out your major spending categories.
2. What are your exact costs? Walk yourself through the lifecycle of your event and list the line items you’ll need under each category.
3. What’s your projected event revenue? Estimate how much you will make, including revenue from tickets, sponsors, vendors, and anything else coming in.
4. Are there unknown variables to work into your event budget template? This is your contingency plan. If you don’t need it in the end, even better — that’s a buffer in your bank that can go towards your next event.
5. Can you make your budgeting easier with technology? Apps and other technology tools help automate budgeting tasks, make the job easier, and give you a more accurate financial picture.
💡Pro tip: Spreadsheets not your jam? There are plenty of simple tools to get you started, like Google Sheets, which doesn’t require you to download software onto your desktop.
4 event budget expense examples
Now that we’ve explored the four phases of creating your own event budgeting plan, let’s look at some examples of common expenses. After all, sometimes, it helps get the creative juices flowing to see some numbers on the page.
Event venue expense examples
Unless you own your own venue, renting an event space is often one of your biggest expenses.
When you’re shortlisting different event venue options, ask lots of questions, such as whether the venue includes an A/V system, whether it’s furnished, whether plates and cutlery are included — and everything in between.
Here’s a basic sketch of venue expenses and to give you an idea of what to expect in terms of fixed costs and variable costs:
| Expense | Cost |
| Room/hall rental | $500 |
| Furniture rental | $150 |
| Equipment rentals | $200 |
| Decorations | $150 |
| Event signage | $250 |
| TOTAL | $1,150 |
Event catering expenses
Event catering prices can vary — and again, your event space will play a key factor in this.
For example, many conference centers will have internal catering teams that you’ll have to use. Meanwhile, an outdoor event space might be a blank canvas that you could cater to simply by renting some food trucks.
There might be other expenses you’ve got to consider, too. For example, if you’re hosting an event in Kansas and want to apply for a temporary alcohol license to serve beer at the event, it’ll cost you an extra $25 per day.
Here’s what a catering expenses list might look like:
| Expense | Cost |
| Vendor hire | $2,000 |
| Table linen | $200 |
| Plate hire | $200 |
| Alcohol license | $150 |
| Alcohol | $500 |
| Soft drinks | $200 |
| Catering equipment | $500 |
| TOTAL | $3,750 |
Event marketing budget
Event marketing is absolutely critical to your success. After all, nobody will buy tickets for your event if they don’t know about it.
As we’ve already mentioned, event marketing doesn’t have to bleed you dry. Using tools like Eventbrite, you can optimize your spending to meet your event goals without breaking the bank.
But to give you an idea of the various line items, let’s look at the line items you might see in your average marketing budget:
| Expense | Cost |
| Graphic design | $500 |
| Meta campaign | $500 |
| TikTok campaign | $200 |
| Reddit campaign | $150 |
| Spotify campaign | $250 |
| Influencer collaborations | $250 |
| Google Ads | $200 |
| Print collateral | $500 |
| Email marketing | $50 |
| TOTAL | $2,750 |
Event staffing expense example
If you’re running a large-scale event, you won’t be able to do it alone.
You need to surround yourself with a capable team of event staff to help you get over the finish line — and there are a few different employee-related expenses based on the position you’re hiring or the expertise you’re looking for.
Here’s a rough sketch to get you started:
| Expense | Cost |
| Vacancy promotion | $500 |
| Training | $650 |
| Certifications | $150 |
| Event staff wages (Pre-event) | $750 |
| Event staff wages (During the event) | $1,500 |
| Event staff wages (Post-event) | $250 |
| TOTAL | $3,800 |
Ready to start planning?
Event budgeting might not be the most exciting part of event planning — but it forms the foundation that every memorable experience is built upon. That’s why you’ve got to craft your budget carefully and leave nothing to chance.
Just remember to follow our pro tips and choose a partner like Eventbrite that can help you plan, promote, and optimize your spending to execute incredible event plans without breaking your budget.
