Exhibition Design Budget Calculator

Complexity level drives which line items dominate the budget, not just how much fancier the materials are. Basic installs are mostly labor and simple mounting hardware, so the $50-80/sq ft band mostly reflects fabrication and graphics. Immersive exhibits add heavy AV hardware, custom media programming, and built environments that require skilled trades, which is why the range jumps to $200-400/sq ft — the calculator reflects that by also shifting the AV/media budget share from 5% at Basic up to 25% at Immersive.

The total budget (low/mid/high) is driven entirely by gallery square footage, complexity, and contingency — duration never enters that calculation. Cost per month is a separate, purely arithmetic view: it takes that same fixed total and divides it by however many months you plan to run the show, so a longer run amortizes the identical fixed cost over more months and brings the monthly figure down without changing what you actually need to raise or spend.

The low, mid, and high figures start from three different per-square-foot costs — the low, midpoint, and high end of your complexity level's published cost band — each multiplied by your gallery's square footage and then by the same contingency multiplier. So the spread between low and high isn't the contingency percentage; it's the underlying uncertainty in per-square-foot costs for that complexity tier, with contingency applied uniformly on top of all three.

Contingency multiplies the entire base budget (square footage times cost per square foot) before that total gets split into the design, fabrication, AV, graphics, lighting, and project-management line items. So a 15% contingency doesn't sit as its own separate line — it's baked proportionally into every category, meaning the design and fabrication figures you see already include their share of the buffer.