Percentage of the house is the only figure that travels
Dollar break-evens cannot be compared between shows, venues or years. Seventy-one per cent of the house can. It is also the number that a producer, a board and a director all understand the same way, and it lands very differently from the same information expressed as a budget total.
The arithmetic is short. Work out what one paid seat actually contributes after fees, after any venue share and after adding whatever a person spends in the interval. Divide the total to cover by that, and lay the answer against the seats the run contains. If the answer needs more than about eighty per cent of everything you can sell, the plan is fragile, because sell-through never lands evenly across a run.
Comps come out of the top
Ten comps a performance in a 230 seat house is more than four per cent of the run, given away before pricing starts. There are good reasons for most of them — press, the licensor, the crew who built it — but they are seats, and a seat you gave away costs exactly as much as one that did not sell.
The place this bites is a house with a low break-even margin. If break-even needs seventy-five per cent of the sellable seats and comps have already removed five per cent of the house, you are really needing seventy-one per cent of the room to walk in and pay. Take the comps out before the percentage, which is what this page does, rather than discovering them in the settlement.
Fees and shares attack a ticket in different places
A per-ticket fee is regressive against your price list: a dollar twenty-five off a ten dollar student seat is twelve and a half per cent, and off a twenty-two dollar full price seat it is under six. A percentage of gross is neutral across tiers. A venue share is often both. Before any venue share at all, that ten dollar seat contributes $9.96 against the full price seat at $21.61 — under half — so a heavily discounted tier gives up more than its face value suggests, and adding cheap seats can move break-even in the wrong direction.
The calculator handles this by working the whole paid house through in one pass — gross, then the venue share, then the fees — and deriving the net as the remainder, so the three lines add back to the gross exactly. The per-seat contribution that falls out is a weighted average across your actual tier mix rather than an average of the prices.
The second week is a different business
Once the fixed spend is covered, an extra performance only has to cover its own running cost. If a performance costs $260 to run and a seat contributes $18, that is fifteen seats. Fifteen. Meanwhile the run as a whole needed several hundred. This is the reason producers extend runs that look marginal on the average, and the reason a cancelled midweek performance saves almost nothing.
It cuts the other way too. A show that has not covered its fixed spend by the last performance does not recover by playing one more, because the extra performance brings in its own contribution and nothing else. The break-even seat count is a property of the whole run, decided months before, and the box office cannot renegotiate it.
Questions people ask
How do I calculate the break-even for a theatre production?
Add everything spent before opening to the running cost times the number of performances. Then work out what one paid seat actually contributes: the price, less the per-ticket fee, less the percentage the card processor and the venue take, plus whatever that person spends on a programme or at the bar. Divide the first by the second. Express the answer as a share of the seats the run can sell, because that is the only form of the number that means anything to somebody who has not seen your budget.
What percentage of the house does a show need to sell?
There is no benchmark worth quoting, because it depends entirely on the ratio between what the production cost and what the room can take in. What is worth saying is what different answers feel like: below about half the house and the plan has room to be wrong, around three quarters and it needs the marketing to work, and above about eighty-five per cent it needs almost every performance to beat what a midweek performance usually does. That last case is not impossible, it is just not a plan.
Should comps count against break-even?
Yes, because a comp occupies a seat that could have been sold and contributes nothing towards the total. Take them out of the sellable capacity before working out the percentage, which is what this page does. It does not mean comps are wrong — press seats, licensor seats and crew guests all earn their place — it means they should be a decision with a visible price rather than a habit that quietly moves the break-even up several points.
Why does adding a performance need so few seats?
Because the set, the costumes, the rights and the rehearsals are already paid. An extra performance only has to cover the cost of running that night, so at a $260 running cost and $18 of contribution a seat it needs fifteen seats. The whole run needed hundreds. That gap between the average and the marginal is the single most useful thing to understand about the economics of a run, and it is why the decision to extend is nothing like the decision to programme.
How does a cheap ticket tier affect break-even?
More than the price difference suggests, because per-ticket fees are flat. A $1.25 booking fee is twelve and a half per cent of a ten dollar student ticket and under six per cent of a twenty-two dollar one, so the cheap seat loses proportionally more before anything reaches the show. Add the venue share and a ten dollar seat can contribute barely half what a full price one does. Cheap tiers are usually still worth having, for the audience they bring rather than the money, but they should be priced knowing what they contribute rather than what they cost.