What should entertainment cost for a corporate event?
Most corporate briefs land between €2,000 and €8,000 for the performer. What moves the number is rarely talent — it is duration, format, travel, and how much risk the booking carries.
Matteo Cammisa
Founder, MAGIQ. Twenty years performing close-up and stage magic.
The honest answer is that the number moves on things that have almost nothing to do with how good the performer is. Duration, format, travel, how much risk the booking carries, and how far ahead you are asking.
Typical ranges
These are performer fees in Western Europe, excluding travel and any agency fee. They are ranges rather than prices, and the spread inside each one is mostly reputation and reliability rather than more performance.
| Booking | Typical performer fee |
|---|---|
| Close-up, two hours, drinks reception | €2,000 – 6,000 |
| Cocktail hour, ninety minutes to two hours | €1,800 – 5,000 |
| Stage set, twenty to thirty minutes | €4,000 – 15,000 |
| Gala or awards, stage set | €5,000 – 20,000 |
| Brand activation with adapted material | €4,000 – 20,000 |
| Walkaround, three to four hours | €2,500 – 7,000 |
What actually moves the number
- Notice. Under seven days you are paying for someone to rearrange their week. Expect a meaningful premium and do not be offended by it.
- Travel and the night before. Any booking that requires a performer to arrive the previous day costs more than the same booking in their own city, and the difference is not the train fare.
- Exclusivity of the date. A Saturday in December is not a Tuesday in February.
- Adaptation. Material rewritten around a product or a company costs more because it is rehearsal, not performance.
- Room size, but less than you would think. A performer's fee is largely time and reputation — four hundred guests rather than two hundred often changes the format more than the price.
The cheapest booking in this category is almost never the cheapest outcome.
Where the money is actually lost
Not on the fee. On a performer who arrived without their requirements and needed a table, a microphone and forty minutes of your production manager's attention. On a stage act that could not cut its set when the auction overran. On a second booking made in a hurry because the first one fell through.
A booking that goes wrong rarely costs you the fee — it costs you the evening you were responsible for, and the fee was the smallest number in the room.
What agency fees look like
Most agencies take a commission out of the performer's fee, usually twenty to thirty per cent, often undisclosed. You see one number and cannot tell which part is the performer and which is the introduction — or whether the recommendation was shaped by which performer pays the most.
Ask directly: what do you keep, and does it change depending on who I choose? It is a fair question and the answer is informative either way.
Would you rather we did it?
Describe the event and we will apply this framework for you, with the reasoning written down and our fee quoted before any shortlist exists.