GX Index July 2026: What UK Gigs Paid (£328–£1,433)Issue 04 of the GigXchange Index: 4,290 data points, 225 rows removed in public, two sources withdrawn, and the city league’s first movement since launch
TL;DR: GX Index Issue 04, July 2026
The GIGXCHANGE Index Issue 04 is the one where we took rows out of our own dataset. 225 observations are quarantined: an over-eager club model that was never meant to publish, plus rows traced back to our own test accounts. Two of our eight sources emptied entirely, and published cells now read 280 against June’s 310. What is left is smaller and truer. The UK wedding median for a 3–4 piece rose £37 to £1,042, the pub band figure fell to £375 because the quarantine left that cell, and the city league moved for the first time in four issues: London overtook Leeds for fourth place.
A second confession in here too: one of our five quality gates spent roughly 10 weeks switched off without anyone noticing. It is back, and this issue tells you what it caught on its first day. Live percentiles at /rates.
The issue where we took rows out
Every issue so far has been able to lead with growth. This one leads with subtraction, and I think it is the most useful thing we have published.
In July we audited our own machinery and found three faults, all ours. 123 ticket-derived club estimates had been approved into the live pool when that model was explicitly designed to run in shadow mode and count for nothing. 62 artist-panel rows and 40 venue budgets traced back to our own seed and test accounts: invented fees that no musician was ever paid, sitting in a dataset that other people cite.
All 225 are quarantined. Every adapter now checks whether a profile belongs to a test account before it ingests anything, and fails closed when it cannot tell. Venue budgets turned out to be seed data to the last row, so that source is empty and starts again from zero. Published cells dropped by 36 overnight, and regrowth since leaves us at 280 against June’s 310.
June’s published numbers stay exactly as they were. We correct forward, never backward. But the £425 pub figure June printed was propped up by rows that should never have counted, and you deserve to know that when you compare the two issues.
Here is where each gig type landed for a 3–4 piece once the noise was gone:
| Gig type | p25 | p50 (median) | p75 | p90 | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wedding | £754 | £1,042 | £1,345 | £1,907 | 15,359 |
| Private party | £666 | £1,000 | £1,420 | £2,167 | 8,705 |
| Corporate | £669 | £839 | £892 | £1,025 | 14 |
| Festival | £649 | £669 | £872 | £892 | 12 |
| Club (ticketed) | £450 | £600 | £1,463 | £1,463 | 33 |
| Pubs & bars | £225 | £375 | £625 | £950 | 509 |
| Theatre / pit | £631 | £640 | £640 | £640 | 3 |
UK national medians by gig type · 3–4 piece band · All figures artist take-home (net of commission). Source: GX Index, 30 July 2026 refresh.
Weddings set the ceiling at £1,042, up £37 on June and the largest move this segment has shown. Private parties sit £42 behind at £1,000, which at this lineup size means the two jobs are functionally the same market: if you are a function band quoting a 40th birthday, quoting well under your wedding rate is now leaving money on the table. Corporate has held at £839 for three issues running, because fixed budgets do not negotiate.
The city league finally moved
For three issues the city table was the same table. Same order, same figures, because no city drew enough new evidence to challenge it. That changed in July: London’s median climbed from £903 to £917 and took fourth place from Leeds, on 288 observations. One swap is not a trend. But it is the first time fresh evidence has re-ordered the league rather than confirmed it, and that matters for an index whose whole promise is that each issue builds on the last.
| City | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edinburgh | £1,119 | £1,186 | £1,759 | £1,829 | 30 |
| Brighton | £833 | £1,050 | £1,219 | £1,259 | 123 |
| Cardiff | £887 | £987 | £1,230 | £1,455 | 66 |
| London | £576 | £917 | £1,200 | £1,685 | 288 |
| Leeds | £730 | £910 | £1,254 | £1,437 | 96 |
| Bristol | £793 | £893 | £1,112 | £1,143 | 192 |
| Glasgow | £643 | £868 | £1,419 | £1,960 | 54 |
| Sheffield | £663 | £854 | £1,289 | £1,553 | 126 |
| Manchester | £663 | £825 | £990 | £1,153 | 252 |
| Birmingham | £593 | £788 | £944 | £1,210 | 180 |
| Liverpool | £663 | £773 | £817 | £850 | 129 |
| Newcastle | £657 | £663 | £697 | £781 | 24 |
| Nottingham | £583 | £663 | £825 | £1,027 | 48 |
City league · Wedding fees, 3–4 piece band · Ranked by p50. Source: GX Index, 30 July 2026.
Edinburgh keeps the crown at £1,186 for a fourth issue, with Brighton (£1,050) and Cardiff (£987) unmoved behind it. London remains the widest market we publish: £576 at the budget end to £1,685 in the premium tier, which is the honest span between a registry-office trio and a Mayfair gala. Newcastle and Nottingham still share the foot of the table at £663.
The four city cells we have been promising since May (corporate for Nottingham and Sheffield, festival for Brighton and Edinburgh) are still short of the three-observation bar. Scraping cannot manufacture city-tagged event fees, and the artist panel reports asking rates rather than gigs. Those cells get built when working musicians report real fees at /rates. That route, or none.
The quality gate that quietly stopped running
The second confession is harder to write than the first.
Five automated gates stand between an incoming observation and a published cell: required fields, a vetted-source whitelist, an artist-fee-only rule enforced in the database itself, per-musician-per-hour plausibility bounds, and a duplicate fingerprint. The fourth one, the range check, was silently dropped during a rewrite in the spring and spent roughly 10 weeks not running. Nothing was bounds-checking incoming rows. Nobody noticed until the July audit.
It is back, unknown gig types now bounce outright instead of sailing through unchecked, and on its first day back it rejected a £25,000 “wedding band” and a £100 one from the same feed. Both are exactly the kind of row that quietly drags a median around for months.
An index that publishes its own failures is worth more than one that pretends it never had any. If you cite one thing from this issue, cite the £375 pub figure, and cite why it changed.
The weight table now prints what was actually applied
One change of basis to declare, because silent recalibration is the thing we most want never to do.
Every observation carries an effective trust weight: source weight multiplied by confidence. Until now the report printed the headline dial setting for each source. From this issue it prints the average weight actually applied to that source’s rows. Mostly the two agree. In one place they very much do not: post-event verified reports were published at 0.85 in Issues 01 to 03, and the rows themselves carry 0.12. They entered the pool that way during launch week and never had 0.85 applied to them, because the time series never retro-edits itself: a row keeps the weight it entered with.
So three earlier issues printed a number the data never used. That is corrected here, in print, rather than quietly swapped.
| Source | Observations | Share | Avg w×c | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agency rate cards | 3,463 | 80.7% | 0.48 | Weekly re-scan: 3 UK agencies |
| Artist profile rates | 335 | 7.8% | 0.38 | Monthly panel; 135 snapshots on 28 July |
| Post-event verified reports | 195 | 4.5% | 0.12 | Launch-era rows at their entry weight |
| MU / Equity recommended | 143 | 3.3% | 0.55 | Union floors, refreshed annually |
| Web-extracted rates | 128 | 3.0% | 0.35 | Pulled from public pages, human-reviewed |
| Anonymous submissions | 26 | 0.6% | 0.16 | Public form; rate-limited and reviewed |
| Venue gig budgets | 0 | — | — | Withdrawn this issue: every row was seed data |
| Ticket-derived club estimates | 0 | — | — | Withdrawn this issue: approved against its shadow-mode design |
Observation breakdown by source · July 2026 · Avg w×c = average weight × confidence: how much each observation counts toward the final percentile. Source: GX Index Issue 04.
Rate cards now dominate by raw count at 80.7% of rows, up from 77.4% in June, but that is arithmetic rather than expansion: the pool shrank around them. Each still carries only 0.48 of a full vote. The weighting exists precisely so that when confirmed bookings (weight 1.00) start flowing, a few hundred settled fees can outvote thousands of asking prices. How commission is stripped from gross rate-card fees is documented in commission models explained.
Re-sighting did its quiet work too: the final July scan re-checked 670 agency listings already in the dataset. Each bumped a sighting counter rather than inserting a twin. Since this month a re-confirmed listing also ages from its most recent sighting rather than its first, so a price the market keeps confirming no longer decays as stale.
Scoring June’s promises
June made this a standing section, so here is the scorecard, unvarnished:
| What we said in June | What actually happened | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Close the ingest gap that admitted 25 mislabelled rows | Closed, and then some. The firewall was reinstated wholesale, unknown gig types now reject outright, and the audit that followed found the 225 rows described above. | Kept |
| The promise scorecard becomes a standing section | You are reading it, in both the report and this write-up. | Kept |
| Four promised city cells stay on the board (Nottingham and Sheffield corporate, Brighton and Edinburgh festival) | All four still short of three trusted observations. On the board for a third issue. | Still open |
| First confirmed-booking observations | Still zero rows. The bookings we hold are dominated by our own test accounts, and counting those would repeat the exact mistake this issue spent a section undoing. | Missed, deliberately |
June’s promises, scored in July · Source: GX Index Issue 04.
The band-size curve: where the money bends
The most practically useful output of the Index, for weddings, at UK national level:
The steepest step is still duo to 3–4 piece: a £429 jump, because that is where a client stops buying background music and starts buying a show with a rhythm section. Past four musicians the per-head economics flatten. A quartet works out near £261 a head, while the five-plus median split six ways comes to about £239, since the van, the PA and the admin are already paid for by the fourth chair. Model your own lineup on the free rate calculator.
What we honestly cannot tell you yet
Same policy every issue: the gaps, stated plainly, before anyone cites this data somewhere it does not belong.
- Confirmed bookings: zero rows. Every published cell is still built from asking prices, union floors and verified reports, not money that provably changed hands. This is the single biggest thing that will sharpen the Index, and it arrives with real transaction volume, not engineering.
- Venue budgets restart from nothing. The first genuine venue budget the Index ever ingests will be the first row in that source.
- The club picture is thinner without the ticket model. The five-plus club cell rests on 6 observations and is directional at best.
- Festival and theatre stay the sparsest gig types: 12 and 3 observations respectively at 3–4 piece.
- Corporate is thin too: 14 observations. Entertainment budgets rarely go public. Treat the £839 as an early signal.
- No genre-level cells yet. Every observation carries genre tags; publication waits on volume, not engineering.
What comes next
Issue 05 covers August, and the commitments stay deliberately modest:
- The four city cells stay on the board. They publish when three trusted observations exist, and not before.
- The quarantined 225 stay quarantined and are never quietly readmitted. If any subset is ever rehabilitated, it gets its own section explaining why.
- The cadence is now the 28th. From Issue 05 the data window closes on the 28th of the month, the report compiles that night, and publication follows within days.
The live index rebuilds nightly at 05:00 UTC and never waits for the monthly report: rate cards re-scan every Monday, the artist panel snapshots on the 28th, and approved submissions flow daily.
How to contribute
This issue is the clearest argument yet for why we need you. We removed 225 of our own estimates because estimates are not evidence. One real fee from one real gig outweighs a hundred scraped listings, and July proved it outweighs a hundred of our own guesses too.
Head to /rates and report a fee anonymously. No email, no signup, no account. Three approved reports take under 2 minutes and unlock every cell, trend line and city drilldown for 30 days. If you gig regularly, keep your GigXchange profile rate current: the monthly panel reads it on the 28th of every month.
If you are a venue booker, journalist or researcher: the Index is free to cite and free to build on under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: “GigXchange Index, gigxchange.app/rates”. The full July report and its raw CSVs are on the reports page, and past issues live at the reports hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
Annual refresh commitment
This guide was published on 31 July 2026 and is refreshed every July. UK live music rate data moves monthly, so annual verification matters. We re-verify every reference, recommendation, and data point once a year. Next scheduled refresh: July 2027. If any claim is outdated before then, email support@gigxchange.app and we will update it within 24 hours.
