# Price, the pricing calendar and offers, in full

Source: https://edfringeguide.com/analysis/pricing
Part of: What actually sells out at the Edinburgh Fringe — https://edfringeguide.com/analysis

Ticket price against Edinburgh Fringe sellout rates, the festival’s three-tier pricing calendar, and why offer codes are not a demand signal. Snapshot pinned at 21 August 2026.

35,035 ticketed performances across 3,292 shows, 3–21 August 2026. Snapshot pinned at 21 August 2026 (2026-08-21T19:40:00.000Z).

**Every rate below is a floor**: a date counts as sold out only where the outcome was observable, and unobservable dates count as not sold out.

## 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._

**Sellout rate by ticket price**

| | Sold out | Dates |
|---|---:|---:|
| £1–6 | 7.3% | 4,462 |
| £6–10 | 9.8% | 6,569 |
| £10–14 | 18.0% | 11,135 |
| £14–18 | 21.3% | 8,270 |
| £18+ | 35.2% | 1,785 |

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.

**Sellout rate by ticket price, split by genre**

| 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.

> **The adjustment that kills it**
>
> Fit everything at once — price, operator, room size, genre, date, time, region, on the ridge model’s mid-August snapshot, refreshed with the model rather than with this page — and the £20+ effect shrinks from +23.9 points to +6.0, with a confidence interval crossing zero. Shows that expect demand both charge more and get booked into bigger rooms by better-selling operators; the model credits the room and the operator. Room size, Saturday, and where the act is from all survive that adjustment. Price largely does not.

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.

**What a variable-price show charges, by day of the week**

| 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.

**Share of an operator’s dates that belong to a variable-price show**

| | Share | Dates |
|---|---:|---:|
| Gilded Balloon | 98.0% | 2,449 |
| Underbelly | 98.0% | 2,430 |
| Pleasance | 97.0% | 3,279 |
| Assembly | 97.0% | 3,182 |
| Summerhall | 86.0% | 1,226 |
| ZOO | 86.0% | 581 |
| C venues | 85.0% | 813 |
| Monkey Barrel | 76.0% | 1,239 |
| Greenside | 48.0% | 1,537 |
| Just The Tonic | 34.0% | 1,930 |
| Hoots | 19.0% | 2,478 |
| theSpace | 14.0% | 2,958 |
| Laughing Horse / Free Fringe | 3.0% | 2,909 |
| Braw Venues | 2.0% | 653 |

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:

**The same measurement, per operator: what a variable-price show adds to its own floor price**

| 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.

> **The same comparison without the date control is three times too big**
>
> Stratified by show and weekday and nothing else, top-price dates sell out at an odds ratio of 3.82 against the same show’s discounted dates. Almost all of that is WHICH dates get discounted — late-festival midweek — rather than the price. Adjust each date to its own date’s festival-wide rate and 3.82 collapses to +4.34 points. An odds ratio that large, on a within-show comparison, looks like the cleanest number on the page and is the most inflated one on it.

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.

**Price relative to the room’s own median, held inside the room**

| 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._

> **2-for-1 is a date, not a decision**
>
> Dates carrying the festival’s 2-for-1 code sell out at 26.2% against 21.9% for dates with no offer, which reads as a discount that works. It is not a show-level choice at all: the code appears on 70% of dates on 10 and 11 August and on essentially none outside those two days. Those happen to be two of the strongest weekdays in the window, and one of them is the catch-up reading after the monitoring outage. The comparison is measuring a calendar, and one of its two days is not usable as demand data in the first place.

**Group discount, before and after holding price or venue fixed**

| 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.

> **And the causation runs backwards anyway**
>
> Even a clean association here would not be a lever. Producers discount because a show is not selling, not the other way round, so a discount is downstream of the demand it is supposed to predict. The explorer exposes an Offers dimension because the data is there and hiding it would be worse — but a cut of it is not a finding, and this section is what that cut should be read against.



## Method, in full

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.