The AV quote you were sent is not the AV bill you will pay. Published rate cards say so in their own small print: the Baltimore Convention Center’s in-house supplier charges set and strike at 50% of the equipment total or USD 475, whichever is greater, and the Chestnut Conference Centre at the University of Toronto adds a 20% service charge to every rental on its sheet. Neither number is hidden. Both arrive after the budget has been signed off, because the equipment list is what gets circulated and the rate card footnotes are what get skipped.
This estimator puts the footnotes back. Pick a rate card, build a kit list or drop in your own subtotal, and it stacks the service charge, the set and strike labour, the technician time, the late-order premium and the tax in turn. The figure it ends on is the invoice, and the line under it tells you how many times the equipment quote that is.
The kit
What stacks on top
Nothing you type leaves your browser. Blank fields count as zero, so a charge your supplier does not levy can be left empty.
The five charges that sit on top of the kit
Service charge. A flat percentage of the rental, applied before anything else. The Chestnut Conference Centre states 20% on all equipment rentals at the top of its price list. It is not a tip and it is not negotiable at the room level, so treat it as part of the unit price rather than as an extra.
Set and strike. The labour of preparing, delivering, installing, supporting during the show, striking and returning. The Baltimore order form prices it at 50% of the equipment total or a USD 475 flat fee, whichever is greater, and lists all six of those activities as covered. The floor is the part that catches small orders: a booth taking a single 55 inch screen pays the flat fee, which is more than a third of the screen itself.
Technician time. Priced per day or per hour depending on the house. Chestnut publishes CAD 400 for a technician day, or CAD 40 per hour on weekdays and CAD 60 after hours and at weekends, both with a four hour minimum. Status AV in the UK publishes GBP 275 for a full day and GBP 150 for a half. Marina Bay Sands publishes SGD 35 per hour per person with a four hour minimum. Those minimums matter more than the rate on a short job, because a two hour call is billed as four.
The late-order premium. Exhibition AV is in many cases priced twice, once for orders placed before a deadline and once for everything after it. The Baltimore form runs an advance column and a standard column down every line and states the advance discount as 20% for orders confirmed 15 days before move-in.
Tax. Applied to the lot, after the labour. The Baltimore form itemises Maryland state sales tax at 6.00%. Most cards do not print a rate, which is why the tool leaves the tax field empty on every other preset rather than filling it in for you.
Add them up and the equipment is about half the bill
Take a modest exhibition order at Baltimore rates: a 55 inch 4K screen at the advance rate of USD 1,350 and a large booth sound system at USD 850, so USD 2,200 of kit. Set and strike at 50% adds USD 1,100. Maryland sales tax at 6% on the USD 3,300 running total adds USD 198. The invoice is USD 3,498 before anybody has touched the technician line, and the equipment list is 63% of it. Miss the advance deadline on the same order and the kit alone goes to USD 2,650, which carries the whole stack up with it.
That ratio is the useful thing to carry between markets, and it is the only figure on this page that is ours rather than lifted from a card. It is not a benchmark and we do not present it as one. It is what these four published cards add up to when you follow their own arithmetic.
What this tool will not tell you
What AV costs in your city. City-level or country-level AV rate benchmarks are not published anywhere. We looked hard for the Gulf in particular, because that is the market our readers ask about, and the 2026 Dubai exhibitor manuals we checked carry no AV rate card at all. Every preset in this tool is one named venue or one named vendor whose published card we read end to end. None of them is a city average and the tool never labels one that way.
What percentage of your budget AV should be. The figures in circulation are 8 to 12, 10 to 15, 15 to 25, and 25 to 40 percent, all published inside the last year, all on AV vendor marketing pages, none of them survey data. They cannot all be right and there is no way to tell which is least wrong. Build the number from a kit list instead. That is slower and it is the only method that survives a finance review.
What your supplier will agree to. Rate cards are opening positions on volume work. What the tool gives you is the shape of the bill, which is what you need before the conversation rather than after it.
Rigging and power are a separate conversation
Two line items are in many venues exclusive to the house and cannot be brought in from outside at any price. The Sands Expo and Convention Centre manual is explicit: the Centre practises no exclusions for AV services with the exception of primary rigging and power distribution. Secondary rigging can be contracted out, primary cannot.
The practical consequence is that a third-party AV quote for a show with anything flown is an incomplete quote. The screens, the audio and the crew may be competitive, and the points those screens hang from will still be billed by the venue at the venue’s rate. Ask for the rigging schedule before comparing two AV bids, because the cheaper bid is in many cases the one that left rigging out.
Using this against a real quote
Pick the last preset, “my own quote and my own rates”, and every field starts empty. Put the equipment subtotal from your quote in the other-equipment box, then add only the charges your supplier has named. Blank counts as zero, so the total stays honest. Three questions are worth asking the supplier before you fill it in:
- Is this priced per day or for the run of the event? The two cards we read that quote per day and the one that quotes per event look identical on the page. A three day conference costs three times as much on one basis and the same on the other.
- What is the set and strike basis, a percentage or a floor? And which one applies at my order size.
- When does the advance rate expire? A diary entry is the cheapest saving available on an AV budget.
Where every number comes from
Four published rate cards, read in full on 8 August 2026, each linked below. Where a card publishes a figure, the tool uses it. Where a card does not, the field starts empty: there is no technician rate on the Baltimore preset because that form prices audio operator labour as call-for-pricing, and there is no equipment list on the Singapore preset because the service manual publishes labour and no equipment prices. The UK card describes itself as the 2018/2019 price list, so its figures are dated and the tool says so on screen when you select it.
- Projection exhibitor audio visual order form, TechNet Cyber 2026, Baltimore Convention Center
- Chestnut Conference Centre, University of Toronto, audio visual pricing
- Status AV hire rate card
- Sands Expo and Convention Centre service manual, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
Put it on your own site
Copy this into any page and the tool loads on its own, with one link back here:
<iframe src="https://wearec4e.com/tools/av-cost-estimator/?embed=1" width="100%" height="1000" style="border:1px solid #e6e9ee;border-radius:8px" title="AV cost estimator"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://wearec4e.com/tools/av-cost-estimator/">AV cost estimator</a> by C4E</p>The rest of the kit
This is one of the free tools we build for people who run events. The run of show generator builds the cue sheet the AV crew works from, the room capacity calculator sizes the room before the kit goes into it, and the event timer keeps the speakers honest. Everything is at tools.
Budgets sit a different way by format, so the shape of the spend differs for a conference, a dealer meet and a corporate offsite. If you would rather hand the AV tender to someone who has read a few hundred of these quotes, tell us about the event.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is my AV invoice so much higher than the equipment quote?
Because the equipment line is one line. Published AV rate cards stack four other charges on top of it: a service charge, set and strike labour, technician time, and tax. The Baltimore Convention Center’s in-house supplier prices set and strike at 50% of the equipment total or USD 475, whichever is greater. The Chestnut Conference Centre in Toronto applies a 20% service charge to every rental. Add a technician day and sales tax and the equipment line is about half of what you pay. This tool makes each of those steps visible instead of leaving them to the invoice.
Where do the default numbers come from?
Four published rate cards, each named on the page with a link: the Projection exhibitor order form for the Baltimore Convention Center, the Chestnut Conference Centre price list at the University of Toronto, the Status AV hire card in the UK, and the Sands Expo and Convention Centre service manual in Singapore. Every preset figure is lifted from one of those documents. Where a card does not publish something, such as a technician rate at Baltimore, the field starts empty rather than filled with a guess.
Can this tell me what AV costs in Dubai, or in my city?
No, and no free tool can. City-level AV rate benchmarks are not published anywhere. We checked Dubai exhibitor manuals for 2026 events and they carry no AV rate card at all. Every preset here is one named venue or vendor whose rate card we read, not a city average, and the tool never labels it as one. What travels between markets is the shape of the bill, which is the part worth modelling.
Is AV 10 to 15 percent of an event budget?
Nobody has published data that supports a number like that. The figures in circulation come from AV vendor marketing pages and they disagree with each other: 8 to 12, 10 to 15, 15 to 25, and 25 to 40 all appear in current guides. None is survey data. Build the AV budget from an equipment list and the charges that stack on it, which is what this tool does, rather than from a percentage somebody wrote in a blog post.
What is set and strike, and why is it a percentage?
Set and strike is the labour of preparing, delivering, installing, supporting, removing and returning the kit. The Baltimore order form prices it at 50% of the equipment total or a USD 475 flat fee, whichever is greater, and lists what it covers. Pricing it as a percentage means a bigger kit costs more to install, which is fair, and the floor means a small order still pays for a crew turning up. Small orders get hit hardest by the floor, so check whether the flat fee exceeds the percentage on your job.
How much does ordering AV late cost?
At the Baltimore Convention Center, about 20%. The order form publishes an advance rate and a standard rate on every line and states the advance discount as 20% for orders confirmed 15 days before move-in. That is a large amount of money for a deadline, and it is the cheapest saving on an AV budget because it costs nothing but a diary entry. Toggle the late-order switch in the tool to see it against your own kit list.
Does the estimator handle multi-day events?
Yes, where the source card prices per day. Toronto and the UK card both quote per day, so the days field multiplies the equipment line. The Baltimore card is different: its rates cover the whole event regardless of length, so the tool fixes days at one for that preset and says so on screen. Reading which basis a quote uses is worth doing before comparing two of them.
Is the AV cost estimator free, and can I put it on my own site?
It is free, there is no sign-up, and nothing you enter leaves your browser. You are welcome to embed it: the snippet on this page loads the tool on its own with one attribution link back here. The run of show generator and the room capacity calculator work the same way.