Trade Show Booth Cost Calculator

The calculator has no way to know your real crate weight, so it approximates it from booth footprint at about 8 lbs of freight per square foot, billed at $2/lb. A 10x10 booth (100 sq ft) lands around $1,600 in estimated drayage. If you know your actual shipped weight from a past show, use that figure directly with your show's drayage rate instead — it's typically more accurate than the square-footage proxy used here.

Those two outputs are built on a fixed $5,000 average deal value and a fixed 5% lead-to-close rate baked into the engine — they don't adjust to your industry or sales cycle at all. Break-Even Leads is simply Total Show Cost divided by that $250 assumed revenue-per-lead ($5,000 × 5%), and Expected Revenue is Expected Leads times that same $250. Treat both as illustrative rather than a forecast, and recompute them by hand with your own deal size and close rate for a number you can actually plan around.

Beyond your entered Display/Booth Build and Travel costs, the calculator adds space rental ($40/sq ft of booth), drayage, electrical ($400 per 100 sq ft), a flat $300 internet fee, staff costs (a fixed 3-day show at $250/day per staffer for hotel, meals, and per diem), and marketing collateral at $5 per expected lead. All eight line items sum to Total Show Cost.

Cost per Lead is a straightforward division of Total Show Cost by your entered Expected Leads — it tells you what each captured contact costs to acquire, independent of any sales assumptions. ROI, by contrast, layers on the hard-coded $5,000 deal value and 5% close rate to estimate whether the show pays for itself in revenue, so it's a much more speculative number than Cost per Lead.