How to price market stalls

Start from what a market day costs you

Add up a single market day honestly: venue hire, your insurance apportioned per day, toilets and waste, staff or your own day at a real rate, marketing, and the boring overheads — then divide by the number of stalls you can genuinely expect, not the number the site could hold. That's your floor. Markets that price below it are hobbies with a rent bill, which is fine only if you know you're running one.

Differentiate by what a stall consumes, not who runs it

A price list stays defensible when every difference maps to something real:

• Food and coffee stalls — they draw the crowd but consume the most: power, bins, water, and the best positions
• Powered sites — power costs you money and cabling effort; charge for it
• Double or corner sites — more frontage, more fee
• A standard site — everything else, at one flat price

Resist bespoke deals. A market where every stallholder pays a different negotiated number is a market where the invoices are a memory test and the stallholders compare notes anyway. On StallsApp, each stall type carries its price, stallholders see the options when they apply, and everyone booking a standard site pays what the last person paid.

Casual and regular rates

Many markets discount for regulars — a stallholder who books every market day is cheaper to administer and makes your market dependable, and the discount buys that consistency. If you offer one, tie it to actual booking behaviour, and keep the casual rate the honest full price rather than a penalty rate you quietly waive.

Raising prices without a revolt

Stall fees creep less than costs do, so most organisers eventually face a correction. It lands best announced a market or two ahead, tied to something visible — a better venue, more promotion, more foot traffic — and applied to everyone on the same date. The stallholders who leave over a fair rise priced their spot below your floor; the mix recovers.

Whether GST applies to your stall fees depends on your own registration, as covered in our stall fees guide — whatever your position, publish prices that say clearly what they include, because a surprise at payment time costs more goodwill than any price does.