How the figures are built

Fee basis and the commission haircut

Every observation carries a fee_basis field. Gross-of-commission sources — industry rate cards and agent-rostered artist profiles — are converted to artist take-home before percentile computation using a 20% default agency commission haircut (net = gross ÷ 1.20); agent-brokered bookings use the booking’s recorded commission. Already-net sources (MU/Equity rates, venue budgets, verified submissions) pass through unchanged. Every published figure is therefore artist take-home — client-facing gross prices typically run ~20% higher.

Re-sighting, deduplication — and what n really counts

A listing that survives week after week is information — the price is stable — but it must never count twice. When a weekly scan meets a listing it already knows, it bumps that observation’s sighting counter instead of inserting a copy.

Reading note: the n shown against a cell counts weighted samples, not unique gigs — an observation counts at every geographic level it informs and once per re-sighting, so cell-level n runs far higher than the pool of unique observations. The distinct pool size is published in every issue (4,290 approved observations in the July 2026 issue).

Cell thresholds and geographic fallback

Publication happens at three levels: city (major UK metros, with satellite towns folded into their hub — Hove reads as Brighton, Oldbury as Birmingham), region (the twelve official UK regions), and the UK baseline. Every level publishes on the same threshold: three distinct observations in the cell — three separate gigs, not three sightings of one rate. When you look up somewhere we cannot yet publish, the live calculator walks the chain — city, then region, then the national figure with a regional adjustment — and tells you which level answered. Thin cells additionally carry a low-sample flag.

Three is deliberately low while the Index is young. A thin cell published with its sample size attached is more useful than no cell at all, and every figure carries its n so a reader can weigh it. The threshold ratchets upward as coverage grows, and it only ever moves up — it is never lowered to make a cell publishable. At present more than half of all measured cells rest on fewer than ten observations, so single-city figures are indicative; the national baselines carry the weight. Cells with no observations behind them at all are derived rather than missing — § 11 explains how, and every one is flagged.

Regional adjustments

The adjustment layer blends ONS regional household income and family-spending data with public industry price benchmarks, tuned per gig type: corporate fees track regional wealth closely, wedding spend barely does, and pub fees hardly flex at all because venue economics set the ceiling everywhere. Adjustments only ever fill gaps — wherever real observations exist, they win outright.

Derived cells, and how they are marked

Coverage is uneven: a city may have plenty of wedding observations and none at all for a four-piece in a pub. Rather than leave a hole that makes cities incomparable, the Index fills that gap with a derived cell — and marks it as derived everywhere it appears, in the API, the dataset and on the page. The value is the national figure for that same gig type and band size, scaled by how that city prices against the national baseline on the cells it does have. We use the city’s own observed pay level rather than its neighbours’, because geography is not what sets gig fees — Brighton’s nearest large market is London, and borrowing London’s rates would simply make Brighton look dearer than it is.

Every city carries the same grid. An index is only an index if you can look up any town and find the same data points, so the grid is every gig type and band size the UK baseline can anchor — 22 cells, identical in all thirteen cities. It is not narrowed to whatever a city happens to have collected; that would make towns incomparable, which is the fault derived cells exist to fix.

Two rules keep it honest, and they are deliberately the ones that stop nonsense rather than the ones that limit coverage. A city needs three real cells of its own before we will estimate how it prices at all — below that it gets no derived cells. And a real cell more than three times, or less than a third of, its national counterpart is treated as unusable and replaced by the derived figure, with the original retained in the record. Both thresholds only ever ratchet upward as coverage grows; they are never loosened to make a figure publishable.

Derived cells are never evidence. They are never counted in a sample size, never used to calculate another cell, and never written back into the observation record — the raw data stays purely observed. They are rebuilt from scratch on every refresh, so the moment real observations arrive for that city and gig type, the derived figure disappears and the real one takes its place. Anyone wanting measured figures only can filter them out in a single step.

Refresh cadence

The cells rebuild nightly at 05:00 UTC. Industry rate cards re-scan on Mondays; the artist panel snapshots on the 28th; approved submissions flow daily. Every rebuild is archived rather than overwritten — that is what makes issue-on-issue comparisons possible. The full report ships monthly.