What should entertainment cost for a corporate event?
Most corporate briefs land between €2,000 and €8,000 for the performer, or roughly $2,200 to $8,700. 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, excluding travel and any agency fee. Euro figures are for Western Europe; the dollar column is a conversion at roughly 1.09, not a separate US market rate. They are ranges rather than prices, and the spread inside each one is mostly reputation and reliability rather than more performance.
| Booking | Performer fee (EUR) | Approx. USD |
|---|---|---|
| Close-up, two hours, drinks reception | €2,000 – 6,000 | $2,200 – 6,500 |
| Cocktail hour, ninety minutes to two hours | €1,800 – 5,000 | $2,000 – 5,400 |
| Walkaround, three to four hours | €2,500 – 7,000 | $2,700 – 7,600 |
| Stage set, twenty to thirty minutes | €4,000 – 15,000 | $4,400 – 16,300 |
| Brand activation with adapted material | €4,000 – 20,000 | $4,400 – 21,800 |
| Gala or awards, stage set | €5,000 – 20,000 | $5,400 – 21,800 |
Why every published guide gives you the same numbers
Search the question and you will find broad agreement. GigSalad puts corporate magicians at $400 to $900 an hour and illusionists and mentalists at $400 to $800, with top performers above $1,000. Rob Anderson, writing about the corporate market specifically, sets out four tiers ending at $5,000 to $15,000 and above for multi-day conference work or a television credit. Bark lands in the same territory.
The agreement is real, and it is useful up to a point. What it describes is a market of individual performers booked hourly, close to home, for a single evening. That is most of the market, and if that is your event the published figures will serve you well.
They stop, though, exactly where corporate briefs get complicated. None of them explains what changes when the performer has to be flown in, held for three days, contractually prevented from working for your competitor that quarter, or insured to a venue's requirement. Those are the things that move a fee from four figures to five, and they are almost entirely unwritten.
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 — it is a working day they cannot sell.
- 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.
Above the line: what changes past about €8,000
Past roughly €8,000, or $8,700, you are usually no longer buying a performance. You are buying availability, logistics and someone else's risk. None of what follows is about talent.
Travel is priced as time, not distance. A performer flying from Milan to Dubai for a Thursday evening loses Wednesday and Friday. The fee reflects three days of unsellable calendar, not a plane ticket. A two-hour set abroad can therefore cost more than a full evening at home, and a quote that itemises "travel" as a flight cost is usually incomplete.
A residency is a different contract entirely. A hotel booking a performer for a season is not buying twelve evenings at the single-night rate. Per-night figures fall, sometimes by half, but accommodation, a per-diem, a rehearsal allowance and often an exclusivity radius enter the agreement. The total is larger and the unit cost is smaller. Residency pricing cannot be derived from an hourly rate at all.
Then there is exclusivity. A brand that does not want the same performer appearing at a competitor's event that quarter is asking someone to decline work, and the clause is priced accordingly. It is one of the more common sources of an unexplained gap between two quotes for what looks like the same booking.
At the upper end a performer arrives with public liability cover, usually to a specified limit, plus technical requirements and sometimes hospitality terms. Venues increasingly require evidence of cover before load-in. A performer who cannot produce a certificate is cheaper for a reason, and the reason surfaces at the worst possible moment.
Production is the last of it. Stage illusion carries freight, build time and crew. Close-up and mentalism largely do not, which is why a mentalist commanding a high fee can still be the cheaper line on a budget once the get-in is costed.
The cheapest booking in this category is almost never the cheapest outcome.
How to read a quote
Whatever the number, a few questions separate a quote you can plan around from one you cannot.
- What is the performer's fee, and what is everything else? If the answer is a single figure, you cannot tell what you are comparing.
- Who pays for travel and accommodation, and is it estimated or capped? An uncapped travel line is an open invoice.
- What does the performer bring, and what does the venue supply? Tables, sound, lighting and a changing room are the usual gaps.
- Is there public liability cover, and to what limit? Ask before contracting, not before load-in.
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.
This is the part of the market that the published pricing guides leave out entirely, and it is the part that most affects what you actually receive. A commission taken from the performer means the agency earns more by placing a more expensive performer, whether or not that performer suits your room.
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.
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.
How do I choose a performer when I cannot judge the craft?
Stop trying to judge the performance and start judging the evidence: verifiable history with buyers like you, contactable references, and how they behave before you have paid them anything.
Which questions should I ask an entertainment agency?
Four: what are your selection criteria, who applies them, has anyone ever been removed, and what do you keep from the fee. Most agencies cannot answer the fourth.
How far in advance should I book entertainment?
Eight to twelve weeks for most events, six months for a fixed-date gala or wedding — and if you are inside two weeks, call rather than write, because the shortlist changes shape at that point.
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.