Seven medians rose. Not one fell.

Of the 22 national tiles we can compare with September, seven moved and every move was upward. The biggest was the private-party solo, which rose £31, from £323 to £354, on a sample that grew by one. At the 3–4 piece lineup, four of six gig types held: weddings rose £10 to £1,000 and private parties £3. All four pub medians held, though most of their new rows are panel members restating the rates they gave in September.

• 5,192Checked observations in the pool
• +420Net growth since the September issue
• 7 of 22National medians that moved, all upward
• £17Width of the city league

Source: GigXchange Index ingest telemetry and the nightly cell archive. Growth and median moves are measured between the 28 September and 28 October 2026 refreshes, both taken at 05:00 UTC.

Where the market stood in October

Every figure that follows is a fee for performers, paid or asked, in pounds. Ticket income, door splits, equipment hire and travel are refused by the database before they can be counted. One note governs every n in this report: n counts the approved observations applicable to a cell, not unique gigs booked in it. Each row counts once in every cell it informs; a published-rate listing seen again on a later refresh adds nothing, but a panel member's monthly rate is a new row each month; and at city level n includes the rows that carry no location and so apply to every city.

By gig type

Six gig types publish a 3–4 piece median, and four of them are where September left them. Weddings rose £10 to an even £1,000, on a cell of 1,616 rows, and private parties £3 to £869, so the gap between the two dearest bookings at this size widened from £124 to £131. Corporate (£812), festival (£669) and club (£600) did not move, and the corporate and festival figures still rest on six and five observations. Pubs remain the cheapest 3–4 piece booking at £350, the figure September printed, now on 379 observations rather than 274. Theatre has no 3–4 piece figure; its one national tile, at solo, is on the next page.

By band size

From solo to five-plus, the wedding curve now reads £333, £541, £1,000 and £1,489. The lower three rungs each rose a little, by £3, £8 and £10, while five-plus printed its September figure to the pound, so the top step shrank by £10. The steepest step on the curve is from 3–4 piece to five-plus, at £489. A second player on a solo booking adds £208 at the median, and turning a duo into a band adds £459. Per head there is no steady discount for size: £333 for a solo act, about £271 each in a duo, £250 to £333 in a 3–4 piece and about £248 to £298 at five or six players.

Across the whole grid

Read the grid by column and the market splits by occasion. In the solo column corporate leads at £392, and private parties, at £354, have moved ahead of weddings, at £333; in September the order of those two was the other way round, £330 to £323. At the two extremes sit festival five-plus, the dearest tile at £1,560, and theatre solo, the cheapest at £175, both unchanged. Eight tiles carry the low-sample dagger, the same eight as in September, and not one of them gained an observation this month: each still rests on between three and nine. Quote them only with their n attached.

Thirteen cities, £17 from top to bottom

Every city with a wedding 3–4 piece cell sits between £1,065 and £1,082. Edinburgh leads on its own; Birmingham, Liverpool, London and Manchester share the foot of the table. The spread is £17, three pounds wider than the £14 September printed.

Coverage outlook

Of the 299 city cells, 100 now rest on three or more observations collected in the city (September printed 99) and 173 on none at all (September: 174).

September's promises, scored. July's 225 quarantined rows remain out of the pool. Platform bookings and venue budgets have yet to supply a row. The pub duo, promised a second look, held at £325 on 93 observations. And the fee form, which took no reports in September, took three.

Weddings

No gig type has more observations behind it than weddings, and no 3–4 piece booking costs more. The flagship 3–4 piece went from £990 to £1,000 on eleven more rows; the duo rose £8 and the solo act £3, each on one or two more, and five-plus printed £1,489 again. The 3–4 piece top end moved with its middle, p75 up £35 to £1,405 and p90 up £20 to £1,900: small moves for a cell that spans £729 to £1,900.

Pubs and bars

All four pub tiles grew (solo from 370 rows to 546, duo 66 to 93, 3–4 piece 274 to 379, five-plus 223 to 307) and all four medians held, at £250, £325, £350 and £525. The duo, which September flagged after a £50 fall, stayed at £325, quartiles and all. The 3–4 piece lower quartile rose from £255 to £275 and the five-plus upper quartile fell from £1,125 to £1,050, so both cells narrowed around a still median. How much of that stillness belongs to the market is the question in the note below.

Built with Method v5 - method history and corrections policy.

How an observed fee becomes a percentile you can quote across a table. October ran on the rules August and September ran on: no source weight and no range bound has changed.

What we cover

Live music in the UK, nothing else. A published cell sits where three axes meet: where (a canonical city, one of twelve UK regions, or the national baseline), what kind of gig (seven types, weddings through to theatre and pit work), and how many musicians (solo, duo, 3–4 piece, 5+). Each cell prints four percentiles, p25, p50, p75 and p90, and never a mean, because a mean folds a festival headline slot into a Sunday lunchtime set.

Where the data comes from

Nine source classes appear in the weights table on the next page; six currently hold approved observations, and three of them supplied rows this window: the artist panel, the weekly published-rate refresh and, after none in September, anonymous fee reports. The six are weekly refreshes of published UK market rates, Musicians' Union and Equity published minimums, a monthly panel of artist asking rates, externally sourced rate schedules checked on import, fees reported anonymously by people who played or booked the gig, and human-reviewed extractions from public pages. Venue budgets and the ticket-derived club model have contributed nothing since July's audit. Every observation arrives tagged with source, gig type, band size, venue type and location, or, for just over half of them, with no city at all.

Cities, and what a city cell means

Cells publish at three levels: city (major UK metros, with satellite towns folded into their hub, so Hove counts as Brighton), region (the twelve official UK regions) and the UK baseline. A city cell is fed by its own observations and by every observation that carries no location, because a national price list is a price on offer in that city too. Its sample size therefore counts observations applicable to the city, not observations gathered there, and each cell stores the two counts separately. A city cell is measured on three rows collected in the city; below that it still prints, labelled imputed, and 173 of 299 have no local rows at all. Region and national cells work as before.

Regional adjustments

Where evidence runs thin, an adjustment layer blends ONS regional household income and family-spending figures with public industry price benchmarks, tuned per gig type. The layer lets corporate fees follow regional wealth closely, wedding spend hardly at all, and pub fees barely flex, on the assumption that venue economics set a similar ceiling in every town; that is a setting, not a finding. The adjustments only ever fill gaps; wherever real observations exist, they take precedence outright.

One grid, every city

Every city publishes the same grid of cells, so the cities we know least about still answer the same questions as the ones we know best. The count is now 414 cells: 299 city, 93 regional and 22 national. The regional layer shows the thin spots most plainly: London and the North West publish twelve cells each, Northern Ireland two.

Refresh cadence

Cells rebuild every night at 05:00 UTC; published market rates refresh each Monday; the artist panel snapshots on the 28th; approved submissions flow in daily. Each rebuild is archived, never overwritten, so one issue can be compared with the last. This issue covers 28 September to 28 October; its figures are the 28 October 05:00 UTC refresh.

Honest scope

A record of what the UK market paid or asked over the observation window, and no more. It is not a price recommendation, not a regulated benchmark and not financial advice, and a perfectly fair fee can fall outside every range in it. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

Source weights: how much each source can count for

Each source class has a fixed top weight, the column headed max share below, and reaches it only as volume earns credibility: in any cell a source counts for its top weight times n ÷ (n + 50), where n is its own row count there, so a handful of rows counts for little beside a well-stocked source. The nine top weights add up to 1.00, which makes each one the share a source would hold if every source were present at full strength. In a real cell the weights of the sources actually present are scaled to add up to one, so where little else exists a source holds far more than its column figure: in the wedding 3–4 piece cells for London, Manchester and Edinburgh, published market rates carry 67 to 69 per cent of the weight. The weights were last set on 8 August.

What changed in the October dataset

The pool stands at 5,192 approved observations, 420 more than at the 28 September refresh: 390 artist-panel rates, 27 published-rate listings and three anonymous fee reports. Nothing was withdrawn or sent back for review, so the 420 rows admitted since that refresh are exactly the growth. The 225 rows quarantined in July stay out. The table is the mix at the 28 October refresh.

Deduplication and re-sighting

A published-rate listing still online a week later shows its price holding, but it must never vote twice: the Monday refresh updates the existing row's last-seen date instead of adding a copy. 561 older published-rate rows were re-sighted this window without widening a sample. The artist panel works differently, adding a row per member each month: 201 in August, 310 in September, 390 in October. Of the 390, 307 were members also recorded in September, every one restating the same rate.

How we keep junk out

Every observation meets the same gates whatever its source, and every refusal is logged with its reason, because the audit trail is part of what we publish. In this window every logged refusal came from one gate, the range check, and nothing that got through had to be taken back out.

1. Has the basicsA row with no amount, no source or no gig type is refused outright, never patched up afterwards.
2. From a known sourceOnly vetted sources can write to the index, all of them through one ingest funnel. A new feed must pass a share review before it counts.
3. Is an artist feeTicket income, gear hire, licensing and door splits are refused by the database itself. Only money that reaches performers counts.
4. Passes the range checkPer-musician-per-hour bounds, set per gig type. It logged 243 refusals across the window, 145 of them new since the September issue, and 536 since it was restored in July.
5. Not a duplicateEvery observation is fingerprinted. A listing seen again updates its sighting record; it never becomes a second row.
6. Is not our own test dataRows traceable to a seed or test account are refused at intake across all six sources, and the check fails closed whenever it cannot tell.

Anonymous submissions

Anyone who has played or booked a UK gig can report the fee at gigxchange.app/rates, with no account. Reports are rate-limited, sanity-checked and read by a person before they reach a cell, and three reports unlock every cell and trend line for 30 days. Three reports came in this window, after none in September: two pub bookings and one private party.

External references used for regional adjustments

• ONS regional household income and family-spending data (latest releases).
• Music Venue Trust grassroots venue occupancy and capacity data (2025 survey).
• Public 2026 UK wedding and function-band price benchmarks.
• Help Musicians / Musicians' Union — Musicians' Census (~6,000 respondents).

A transparent record of what UK gigs paid or asked, in which every cell shows its sample size, its sources and its refresh date. City cells also record how much of that sample was collected locally and how much applies nationally, and the dataset published with this issue carries both counts for every city cell, so a reader can tell a city we have measured from one we are estimating.

1. Not a recommended price.We report where the market sits, not where you ought to sit in it. Charge above or below any figure here with a clear conscience.
2. Not an official benchmark.No industry body endorses or regulates these numbers, and that independence is the reason to use them.
3. Not financial advice.The evidence is ours; the decision is yours.
4. Not a city guide, yet.When thirteen cities sit within £17 of each other, the closeness reflects thin local evidence rather than cities that price alike.

What's still missing

• Fees collected city by city. 173 of the 299 city cells hold none, so their figures are national evidence applied locally, however large their n.
• Fresh pub evidence. The monthly panel largely re-records the same members, so most new pub rows repeat a rate we already held; reported pub fees would test the pub medians in a way the panel cannot.
• Rows from confirmed platform bookings and from venue budgets. Both sources still hold a top weight and no data.
• Theatre beyond its single solo tile, and enough club bookings to lift the solo and duo cells off four and three.
• Cells by genre. Rows carry a genre hint where the source gives one; publication waits on volume.

Licence

This report, the live figures at gigxchange.app/rates and the raw dataset are all published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: use them, republish them, build on them commercially, and credit "GigXchange Index, gigxchange.app/rates".

Help shape the next issue

The city at the top of this month's wedding league, Edinburgh, is there on ten fees collected in the city, and Newcastle, joint second at £1,079 with four other cities, rests on eight. Each approved fee reported from either city adds to its local tally. Three reports came in this window; add yours anonymously at gigxchange.app/rates, in about a minute and without signing up, and three reports unlock full granular access for 30 days.