Free tool

What will the AV for your event actually cost?

Set your attendee count and what you need on stage, and get a realistic budget range broken down by audio, video, lighting, staging and crew. Built from 2026 market day-rates, not guesswork.

Screens and video
Lighting
Stage
Estimated AV budget$2,840 – $5,980
Where it goes
Audio$1,730 – $3,800
Sound system · for 100–300$800 – $2,000
Wireless microphones · for 4 × 1$320 – $720
Sound engineer · 1 × day rate$608 – $1,080
Video$500 – $1,100
Projector · 1 × day rate$300 – $600
Projection screen · 1 × day rate$200 – $500
Crew$608 – $1,080
Show technician · for 1 × 1$608 – $1,080

Converted from our base rates at indicative exchange rates, refreshed daily.

Not included: venue charges, rigging and power drops, content and graphics production, catering, and transport. Venue technical charges alone commonly add 10–25%.

Indicative figures for the selected market, not a quote. Base rates come from our 2026 event AV price guide

Turn the estimate into a proposal

Your configuration carries across — CueQuote opens a proposal already filled in with this event, then prices it from your own catalogue and your own rates.

Continue with this estimate
This is a budgeting tool, not a quote. Use it to set a realistic number before you brief suppliers. Actual pricing depends on your venue, rig, dates and each company's own rates — so confirm with AV companies before you commit a budget.

Common questions

How accurate is this estimate?

It is an orientation range, not a quote. The rates are typical 2026 market day-rates, and real pricing moves with your city, the season, how far ahead you book, and the specifics of your venue. Treat the range as a sanity check on quotes you receive rather than a number to budget to the dollar.

Why is crew such a large share of the total?

Because every piece of equipment needs someone to rig it, run it and strike it. Labour is often the single biggest line on an AV invoice. The calculator adds load-in and load-out crew as separate days, which is the cost planners most often leave out of their own estimates.

Why does the range get wider as the event grows?

At small scale the kit list is fairly fixed. Above roughly 300 attendees the specification starts to matter enormously — pixel pitch on an LED wall, how many moving lights, whether there is a camera package. Two quotes for the same brief can legitimately differ by a factor of two.

Does this replace a real quote?

No. It tells you whether the quote in front of you is in a sensible range and what should be on it. When you need a real priced proposal from your own equipment catalogue, that is what CueQuote does.