Analysis → Price, the pricing calendar and offers, in full
Price, the pricing calendar and offers, in full
Price looks like the strongest driver on the page and mostly is not. The full version of why, plus the three-tier calendar the venues run and the reason the offers data cannot be read as a signal.
Price looks like the strongest driver, and mostly is not
The raw relationship is clean, monotone and about five-fold. Almost all of it disappears once you account for which room and which operator the show is in.
Cheapest listed price per date; bands include their upper figure, so a £10 ticket is in “£6–10”. That is worth stating because £10 alone is 3,352 dates — put it in the band above instead and the £6–10 rate reads 8.1% rather than 9.8%. Free-but-ticketed dates are excluded: 53% of them are one show, and they behave nothing like the rest of the programme.
The clean monotone climb is comedy’s. Theatre’s version stalls and dips in the middle of the range before a modest final step — a different shape, not a shallower slope, and the pooled bars above are the average of the two.
| Price | Comedy | n | Theatre | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £1–6 | 6.0% | 1,146 | 3.2% | 95 |
| £6–10 | 9.1% | 3,079 | 5.7% | 1,677 |
| £10–14 | 23.0% | 3,963 | 17.0% | 4,322 |
| £14–18 | 36.9% | 2,016 | 15.7% | 3,148 |
| £18+ | 51.7% | 435 | 20.1% | 378 |
Excludes dates sold only through the Fringe’s central box office, for the same reason as the room-size split above — comedy is 26.3% system-1 against theatre’s 13.4%, and without the exclusion theatre’s £18+ cell reads 44.8%, almost all of it Traverse, whose rate is a floor with no ceiling. Comedy climbs nearly nine-fold end to end; theatre climbs six-fold with a dip at £14–18. Both are still associations — the adjustment below applies to each of them.
For an audience this still works as a signal, just not as a cause: an £18 ticket is a reliable tell that the operator expects to fill the room. For a producer it is not a lever — putting the price up does not buy the demand that usually accompanies it.
The Fringe runs a three-tier pricing calendar, and the venue sets it
Two in five priced shows charge different prices on different dates. That is not the artist’s decision — it is a house tariff, and which chain you are in decides whether you have one at all.
1,248 of 3,115 priced shows (40.1%) charge more than one price across their run, with a median spread of £4.50. 44.5% of all priced dates in the festival are charged above their own show’s floor price. Measured against each show’s own cheapest date, the shape of the tariff is the same three tiers everywhere it exists: a cheap preview, a midweek rate, and a weekend rate.
| Day | Dates | Above its own cheapest date | At its own top price | Sold out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wednesday | 2,685 | +£2.50 | 21.3% | 14.82% |
| Thursday | 3,204 | +£2.49 | 22.0% | 15.42% |
| Monday | 1,837 | +£3.94 | 63.9% | 27.49% |
| Tuesday | 2,034 | +£3.83 | 60.2% | 29.5% |
| Friday | 3,304 | +£4.02 | 82.8% | 19.1% |
| Sunday | 2,243 | +£4.36 | 89.2% | 17.03% |
| Saturday | 2,400 | +£4.41 | 94.0% | 31.13% |
Variable-price shows only, measured against each show’s own minimum price — so a show that never played a preview has its midweek price as its baseline, which pushes the Wednesday and Thursday rows mechanically towards zero. Separately, 858 shows played 5–6 August at a median £5.00 below their own later price. Do not read the sold-out column as an effect of the price: Saturday is dear AND full for reasons the weekend table already covers.
A share of dates, not a sellout rate — the bars here are not comparable in meaning to any other chart on this page, only to each other. Yield management is close to a perfect operator attribute: the Big Four run it on 97% or more of their dates and the free-fringe and theatre-block operators barely at all. Which means any date-level price analysis of this festival is quietly an analysis of four venue chains.
What the operators share is one convention, not one calendar. Everywhere previews exist they are priced at essentially the show’s floor — the uplift on 5–6 August is within a couple of pence of zero at every chain that runs them. After that the shapes diverge, and they diverge in ways a coordinated market would not:
| Operator | Preview, 5–6 Aug | Mon–Thu | Fri–Sun | Weekend minus midweek |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hoots | no previews | +£0.68 | +£2.27 | +£1.59 |
| Assembly | +£0.01 | +£3.71 | +£4.93 | +£1.22 |
| Monkey Barrel | +£0.21 | +£3.50 | +£4.69 | +£1.19 |
| C venues | +£0.00 | +£1.71 | +£2.89 | +£1.18 |
| Pleasance | +£0.03 | +£4.49 | +£5.62 | +£1.13 |
| Other / independent | no previews | +£3.89 | +£4.45 | +£0.56 |
| The Stand | no previews | +£4.03 | +£4.57 | +£0.54 |
| Underbelly | +£0.02 | +£3.78 | +£4.17 | +£0.39 |
| ZOO | no previews | +£1.92 | +£2.24 | +£0.32 |
| Gilded Balloon | +£0.00 | +£2.73 | +£3.03 | +£0.30 |
| Just The Tonic | no previews | +£3.27 | +£3.54 | +£0.27 |
| Summerhall | +£0.00 | +£6.01 | +£6.14 | +£0.13 |
| theSpace | no previews | +£2.52 | +£1.82 | −£0.70 |
| Greenside | no previews | +£5.10 | +£2.49 | −£2.61 |
Every operator the query returns, ranked on the last column: a row needs 60 variable-price dates in both its Mon–Thu and its Fri–Sun cell, and all fourteen clear it. The preview cell needs the same 60 dates, which is why some chains show no preview row — they do not price previews separately. On the differential the steepest weekend house is Hoots, which charges more than three times as much extra on a Friday as on a Tuesday off a low base; on the largest absolute premium it is Summerhall at +£6.14, and Summerhall’s £6 is flat between Mon–Thu and Fri–Sun rather than every day of the week — its previews carry none of it. Greenside and theSpace are inverted, charging more on weekdays than at the weekend. Gilded Balloon’s tariff is flat and small. One shared convention plus independent house tariffs is what a market looks like; identical calendars would have been the interesting finding, and they are not what is there. This table published eight of the fourteen rows until 2026-08-25, with no stated rule and with both ends of the ranking among the six it dropped, under a footnote calling Pleasance — fifth here — the clearest weekend house.
Do the producers get their own calendar right? Hold the show fixed, compare its own top-price dates against its own discounted ones on the same weekday, and score every date against that calendar date’s own festival-wide rate. The premium nights come out +4.34pp ahead across 831 shows (95% interval +1.71 to +6.97) — and it is a comedy effect. Comedy +6.08pp on 360 shows; theatre −2.21pp on 319, an interval straddling zero. This is the tightest control this dataset can apply to the price question: show identity, venue, room, genre, weekday and calendar date all held at once.
One related question the raw data answers backwards: is there a ceiling on over-pricing? Priced at 1.01–1.25× the room’s own median a date sells out 22.6%; above 1.25× only 17.4%, which looks like a limit. Stratify by the room instead and the ladder is monotone almost to the top.
| Priced at | Dates | Sold out | ×odds vs priced at the room median? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 0.8× | 4,017 | 9.5% | 0.48 |
| 0.8–0.99× | 6,012 | 14.3% | 0.75 |
| 1.01–1.10× | 3,614 | 24.1% | 1.15 |
| 1.11–1.25× | 3,537 | 21.1% | 1.54 |
| 1.26–1.5× | 1,330 | 18.1% | 2.91 |
| Over 1.5× | 763 | 16.3% | 1.94 |
278 rooms with at least 30 priced dates; the comparison group is the 11,945 dates priced exactly at their room’s median. The raw rate column falls above 1.25× and the odds column rises, because the shows priced far above their room’s norm sit in cheap rooms. The apparent ceiling is room composition. As everywhere else on this page, none of this is a lever: producers price to the demand they expect.
Why the offers data cannot be read as a signal
Discount codes look like an obvious driver and are the one dimension here that will mislead you in both directions. This section is a warning, not a finding.
| Comparison | Group discount | No group discount | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raw, clean window | 14.9% | 29.4% | −14.5 |
| Within £6–10 | 8.3% | 12.7% | −4.4 |
| Within £10–14 | 15.1% | 25.3% | −10.2 |
| Within £14–18 | 15.7% | 10.2% | +5.5 |
| Within Monkey Barrel | 38.2% | 33.8% | +4.4 |
| Within independent venues | 11.1% | 10.3% | +0.8 |
Clean window is 12–19 August, which excludes both the monitoring outage and the 2-for-1 days. The strata are severely unbalanced — inside £10–14 there are 4,753 discounted dates against 288 undiscounted ones — so the sub-rows are themselves fragile.
A fourteen-point raw gap that reverses sign inside two of the strata and inside both venue comparisons is composition, not effect. What the raw number is mostly measuring is which venues and price points offer a group discount at all. An earlier version of this analysis reported that group-discount dates underperform at every price band; on this larger sample they do not, and the finding is withdrawn.
Method, in full
What this chapter measures, what it excludes, and where it is weakest.
The price finding is the clearest case on the page of a raw table and a fitted model disagreeing, and the disagreement is the finding rather than a wrinkle in it. Dearer dates do sell out more. Fit price alongside the operator, the room and the room’s own price norm, and most of what looked like price turns out to be a restatement of which room the show is in — expensive rooms are big rooms in strong buildings. The raw slope is real as a description and close to useless as advice.
Free-but-ticketed dates are excluded from every price band. Over half of them belong to a single operator’s model, so leaving them in makes the cheapest band a measurement of that operator rather than of price. Dates at exactly the band boundary are assigned down, not up, and the section says what moving them the other way would do to the affected row — a boundary rule that changes a published number is a thing to state, not to pick quietly.
The pricing-calendar section carries a trap worth naming twice. Its sold-out column is NOT an effect of the price tier: Saturday is both the dearest day and the fullest day, for reasons the weekend table already explains. The calendar finding is about what venues CHARGE across the run, and the two must not be read as one claim about what a tier does to demand.
The population, the definition of “sold out” and the two bounds every rate sits between are the same across every page here, and are set out once in how this was measured and what these numbers cannot tell you.