GX Index June 2026: What UK Gigs Actually Paid This MonthIssue 03 of the GigXchange Index: 4,036 data points, a steady market, the artist panel’s first full cycle, and a 25-row correction made in the open
TL;DR: GX Index Issue 03, June 2026
The GIGXCHANGE Index Issue 03 is the quiet one: 4,036 data points (up 189 on May’s 3,847), 7 gig types, 13 UK cities, and for the first time since launch the market barely moved. The UK wedding median for a 3–4 piece holds at £1,005 (n=11,936), a £9 drift on May. Private parties closed to £977, within 3% of weddings. Edinburgh tops the city league at £1,186 for a third consecutive issue. The real story is the lens, not the levels: the artist panel completed its first full monthly cycle at its raised trust weight, and the quality firewall pulled 25 mislabelled rows out of publication, cutting the pub band figure from £487 to £425.
One admin note: this issue ships a fortnight past our usual third-week slot. The extra two weeks bought the 25-row correction and the panel’s first clean cycle, a trade we would make again. Full breakdown below. Live percentiles at /rates.
The quiet issue: what a steady market looks like
Every month until now, the headline was growth or change. June’s headline is that nothing much happened, and in an index that is a genuinely useful reading. The national wedding median moved £9, from £996 to £1,005. That is under 1% and well inside the noise. Corporate held at £839. Pubs and clubs held the floor. A settled market, measured twice, giving the same answer.
One caveat before the table, same as always: these are asking-rate-weighted figures, not settled invoices. Confirmed bookings, the gold-standard source, are still to arrive in volume (more on that honestly below). Here is where each gig type landed for a 3–4 piece:
| Gig type | p25 | p50 (median) | p75 | p90 | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wedding | £738 | £1,005 | £1,281 | £1,849 | 11,936 |
| Private party | £643 | £977 | £1,387 | £2,083 | 6,470 |
| Corporate | £669 | £839 | £892 | £1,025 | 14 |
| Festival | £649 | £669 | £872 | £892 | 12 |
| Club (ticketed) | £450 | £600 | £1,463 | £1,463 | 33 |
| Pubs & bars | £288 | £425 | £630 | £950 | 455 |
| 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, 3 July 2026 refresh.
The one mover worth your attention sits in row two. Private parties closed to £977, within 3% of the wedding median. That gap was 11% only last month. If you are a function band quoting for a 40th birthday, the days of automatically knocking a chunk off your wedding rate are ending: the market now prices the two jobs within £30 of each other. And if you are a venue or a private client, the same logic applies in reverse. A realistic offer looks like a wedding offer.
Cell count dipped from 313 to 310, and that is the quality bar doing its job, not coverage shrinking: this issue’s correction removed a cell that should never have published, and anything we cannot back with at least 3 trusted observations falls back to the regional or UK figure on the live calculator rather than publishing a guess.
The city league, carried forward honestly
Straight talk: June added very little here. The month’s inflow skewed heavily to the artist panel, which reports asking rates rather than city-tagged event fees, so no city cell drew enough new evidence to move. The league below is the market’s standing record, unchanged because unchallenged, not because a wave of new bookings confirmed it.
| 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 |
| Leeds | £730 | £910 | £1,254 | £1,437 | 96 |
| London | £573 | £903 | £1,200 | £1,640 | 285 |
| 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, 3 July 2026.
Edinburgh holds the crown at £1,186 for a third consecutive issue, with Brighton (£1,050), Cardiff (£987), Leeds (£910) and London (£903) in exactly May’s order. London remains the widest spread we publish, £573 at the budget end to £1,640 in the premium tier, everything from a registry-office solo to a Mayfair gala. Newcastle and Nottingham share the foot of the table at £663.
There is a promise to score here too. In May we targeted four new city cells for June: corporate for Nottingham and Sheffield, festival for Brighton and Edinburgh. None of the four cleared the three-observation bar. They stay on the board, and the honest route to building them is gig-workers reporting real fees at /rates. Sixty seconds of your time is literally the missing data.
The correction we made in public
This is my favourite part of the issue, which sounds odd for a section about our own mistake.
Preparing the June report, our quality checks caught 25 rows carrying labels that should not exist. Twenty were filed under a gig-type name we retired back in April 2026; they had slipped through because the ingest firewall only rejects labels it has bounds for, and a retired label has none. Five more sat in the catch-all “other” bucket, which by our own rules must never publish, and had quietly formed a published cell anyway.
The fix: the 20 merged into the pubs & bars cell where they always belonged, the 5 went back to human review, and every affected cell recomputed. The visible consequence is that the 3–4 piece pub figure you see today reads £425, down from May’s £487. Nothing in the market moved; our labelling got cleaner and the number got truer.
An index that corrects itself in public is worth more than one that pretends it was never wrong. The rejection log, the audit trail and the correction are all part of the product, and the ingest gap that let a retired label back in is now on our engineering list with a fix scoped. If you cite one thing from this issue, cite the £425, and cite why it changed.
The artist panel’s first full cycle
June’s growth came from an unusual direction. Of the 189 net new observations, the monthly artist panel delivered 154 stated-rate snapshots on 28 June, against roughly 40 new agency listings. That is the first time since launch that working musicians outfed the agencies.
Two mechanics worth understanding:
- The panel’s trust weight rose from 0.16 to 0.38. We raised it after May shipped, and June is the first issue computed with it. The old weight treated an artist’s stated rate as barely better than an anonymous tip; the new one recognises a maintained profile rate as a serious, longitudinal signal. It still counts for well under half of a confirmed booking (weight 1.00) or a post-event verified report (0.85).
- Panel rates are asking rates. They tell us what UK artists believe their work is worth this month, which is a real and useful market signal, but it is not a settled fee and it carries no city-tagged event. That is exactly why the city league did not move this month, and we would rather explain that than blur it.
Re-sighting also did its quiet work: the final June scan re-checked 657 agency listings that already exist in the dataset. Each one bumped a sighting counter, a signal of price stability, and none of them became a duplicate row. Sample size grows only when there is genuinely new information.
Scoring May’s promises
The May issue made three forward commitments plus the coverage target scored above. An index that grades everyone else’s prices should grade its own promises, so here is the scorecard, unvarnished:
| What we said in May | What actually happened | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Club fee model runs in shadow mode (computed, not published) | Its ticket-derived estimates entered the pool instead, at the most cautious weight we publish (0.11, 123 observations). The published club figure did not move: £600. | Kept, with a caveat |
| Venue capacity dataset, expected early June | Not delivered. The club model leans on Music Venue Trust survey occupancy and capacity data instead of a dataset of our own. | Missed |
| First confirmed-booking observations | Still zero rows. The integration is built and live; it is waiting on transaction volume, not code. | Missed |
| Issue 03 published the third week of June | Shipped in the first week of July. The extra fortnight bought the 25-row correction and the panel’s first full cycle. | Late, for a reason |
May’s promises, scored in June · Source: GX Index Issue 03, Section Three.
Two misses and a late delivery is not a scorecard to hide. It is the scorecard that makes the kept promises worth something. From this issue on, that table is a standing feature: what we said last month, next to what we did.
How the data mix looks now
Transparency is the whole point of the Index. Here is exactly what fed the June numbers, all 8 live sources:
| Source | Observations | Share | Avg w×c | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agency rate cards | 3,123 | 77.4% | 0.48 | Weekly re-scan: 3 UK agencies, 39 pages |
| Artist profile rates | 262 | 6.5% | 0.38 | Monthly panel; weight raised May 2026 |
| Post-event verified reports | 195 | 4.8% | 0.85 | Artist-reported, matched to a real event |
| MU / Equity recommended | 143 | 3.5% | 0.60 | Union floors, refreshed annually |
| Web-extracted rates | 124 | 3.1% | 0.35 | Pulled from public pages, human-reviewed |
| Ticket-derived club estimates | 123 | 3.0% | 0.11 | Four-archetype model, MVT-grounded |
| Venue gig budgets | 40 | 1.0% | 0.50 | Captured when venues post budgeted gigs |
| Anonymous submissions | 26 | 0.6% | 0.16 | Public form; rate-limited and reviewed |
Observation breakdown by source · June 2026 · Avg w×c = average weight × confidence: how much each observation counts toward the final percentile. Source: GX Index Issue 03.
Rate cards still dominate by raw count at 77.4%, but each carries only 0.48 of a full vote, and their share is falling: it was 85.1% in May. 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, and every row carries its source, weight and a stable reference ID so the arithmetic is auditable end to end.
The band-size curve: where the money bends
The most practically useful output of the Index barely changed in June, which is its own kind of confirmation. For weddings, the UK national curve:
The steepest step is still duo to 3–4 piece, nearly £400, 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 earns roughly £251 a head, a six-piece about £239, since the PA, transport and 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 as 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, budgets and verified reports, not money that provably changed hands on the platform. This is the single biggest thing that will sharpen the Index, and it arrives with transaction volume, not engineering.
- Festival and theatre are thin. 12 and 3 observations respectively at 3–4 piece. The theatre cell rests on Equity floors almost alone. Directional only.
- Corporate is thin too: 14 observations. Entertainment budgets rarely go public. Treat the £839 as an early signal.
- The club five-plus figure is a range, not a promise. It rests on a six-sample cell fed partly by the 0.11-weight ticket model.
- No genre-level cells yet. Every observation carries genre tags; publication waits on volume, not engineering.
- Scotland beyond weddings: Edinburgh and Glasgow have excellent wedding coverage and thin everything else. Corporate and grassroots lookups there fall back to regional figures.
What comes next
June taught us to promise less and score ourselves in public, so Issue 04’s commitments are deliberately modest:
- The four promised city cells stay on the board (Nottingham and Sheffield corporate; Brighton and Edinburgh festival). They publish when three trusted observations exist, and not before.
- The promise scorecard becomes a standing section, in the report and in this write-up, every issue.
- The ingest gap that admitted the 25 mislabelled rows gets closed, so retired labels bounce at the door instead of being caught at audit.
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
Every gig you have played, booked or budgeted is an observation this dataset needs, and June proved the point: the month’s growth came from musicians, not agencies.
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 too: the monthly panel now reads it at more than double its old weight.
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 June 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 4 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.
