What a craft fair booth actually costs — and how rarely anyone tells you
Snapshot: September 9, 2026. Every number here comes from Canopy Season's own database on that date. You can check any of it by opening the site and counting.
There are 9,593 published events in the database right now. 972 of them have a booth fee on record. The other 8,621 haven't been through verification yet.
Nine out of ten listings, missing the single number you need most. That's a measurement of the industry, not of the database — and here's how I know. In the eight states I've verified by hand, 74% of listings carry a fee. Everywhere I haven't, it's 6%. Same organizers, same kinds of events. The only variable is whether somebody sat down and dug for it.
So the fee is usually findable. It just takes a person, one event at a time, and nobody else does it.
What the ones that publish actually charge
Across the 972 events with a fee on record, the median booth is $100. A quarter of them are $40 or under. A quarter are above $257. The top ten percent start at $475.
Where an event lists separate rates for craft and food vendors, I've taken the craft rate; where it lists only one, I've taken that. Either way this is one fee per event rather than one per rate.
The range runs from free to $19,000. That top number is real and it's one event; it tells you nothing except that the tail is long.
It splits hard by category
Events with a fee | Median | Middle half | |
|---|---|---|---|
Farmers market | 263 | $30 | $20–$55 |
Holiday market | 66 | $137.50 | $60–$279 |
Festival | 295 | $150 | $75–$300 |
Craft fair | 131 | $165 | $67.50–$355 |
Artisan market | 51 | $180 | $65–$350 |
County/state fair | 84 | $267.50 | $100–$381 |
A farmers market and a county fair are not the same financial decision, and averaging them together produces a number that describes neither.
The eight verified states
These are the states where every listing has been checked by hand, so the fee coverage is high enough that the medians mean something.
Events with a fee | Median | Middle half | |
|---|---|---|---|
43 | $46 | $30–$183 | |
46 | $85 | $50–$150 | |
42 | $93.50 | $40–$231 | |
56 | $100 | $25–$250 | |
35 | $100 | $50–$255 | |
187 | $120 | $40–$300 | |
22 | $200 | $104–$275 |
D.C. is verified too, but only 8 of its 23 listings carry a fee and one of those is the $19,000 outlier, so any percentile I gave you would be noise. I'd rather say that than print a number.
The fees on top of the fee
215 events charge an application or jury fee. The median is $30, and the middle half runs $25 to $45.
109 events take a commission on your sales. The median is 10%, and the spread runs from 3% to 50%. That's a small sample, but it's worth knowing that a booth fee plus 20% exists, because on a good day that's the most expensive line on your sheet.
What this doesn't cover
The database has no start dates for recurring events on purpose — event timing is stored as free text like "Saturdays, May–Oct." These are also published fees, not what you end up paying (fee assumes a standard 10'x10' space, but this is not 100% consistent). Fee options, corner spots, electricity, extra frontage, and late-application penalties don't appear here because they are highly variable per event. And this is one season of data, so there's no year-over-year yet. Ask me again in 2027.
If you want to know what any of this means for a specific weekend, the cost calculator does the arithmetic that actually matters — the fee is only the first line.