A Checklist for Setting 2025/26 Single Ticket Prices

If your organization operates on the traditional fall to spring season calendar, you’re probably gearing up for your single ticket on-sale. Which means, it’s time to finalize your single ticket prices.

This year, more than most years, there’s uncertainty going into the next season—we’ve heard plenty of talk about economic instability and the chances of a recession. So how do you price your tickets in an uncertain world?

Fortunately, this is why we have dynamic pricing. While we love getting prices as accurate as possible from the start, none of us have a crystal ball. Dynamic pricing allows us to be flexible with our prices and adjust to how audience demand fluctuates due to any number of reasons—including economic uncertainty.

But you have to start somewhere. Here’s a checklist of items to check in on when setting your single ticket prices for the 2025/26 season:

Make sure prices keep with inflation

As of April 2025, inflation had increased by 2.3% in the twelve-month period. This is a good number to use to make sure that your single ticket price increases at least match the pace of inflation going into 2025/26.

Review subscriber demand

Chances are that your subscriptions have been on sale for several months now. Your subscription trends may be a leading indicator of how single tickets sales might sell. What trends have you noticed? Are there certain subscription price levels that are faring better than others? Are you seeing any price resistance at the top end of prices? Are there any changes in the performance time preferred, which might suggest demand has shifted? If you have flexible packages, are there any shows that are outperforming others? The answers to these questions can help you assess potential demand and ultimately inform how aggressive you can be with single ticket prices.

Adjust according to 2024/25 demand trends

Review trends in demand from 2024/25 to see if you need to change how your prices are differentiated for 2025/26. For example, if you have one price for all weekend performances, but the matinee performances performed better than evenings, you might want to create another set of higher prices for matinee performances. Or maybe your balcony substantially overperformed relative to your orchestra, and you need to rethink the pricing scaling in your house.

If you are a Vivian user, Vivian is a great tool to assess demand and where you may need adjustments to your pricing strategy. Here are some key reports in Vivian that will help you assess demand:

• To assess demand by production: Create an “Average Sales by Price Type” report, pull in a few recent seasons, and group by production season.
• To assess demand by performance time: Create an “Average Sales by Price Type” report, pull in the 2024/25 season and group by day of week/time of day.
• To assess demand by zone or seat: Create a “Heat Map of Venue” report, and filter for the 2024/25 season. You can also use a “Sales by Price Type by Zone” report.

Align with 2025/26 revenue goals

Depending on how your organization sets its revenue goals and prices, you may have your revenue goals before pricing is set. In that case, you may need to reverse engineer your prices to make sure you can reach your revenue goals. The simple way to do this is to forecast anticipated ticket sales based on comparable performances and then assess what average ticket yield is needed to reach your revenue goal. If that average ticket yield is higher than comparable performances, that’s a sure sign you need to raise prices relative to those comparators.

This is also a good opportunity to look at where demand was stronger than estimated in 2025/26 (for certain sections of the theatre, shows, performance time ) and increase prices there.

If you are a Vivian user, you can create a sales forecast by using the “Forecasts” module of the tool. Instructions for creating forecasts are here.

Review competitor pricing

We don’t love relying on competitors when setting pricing because every organization is unique and your offering is significantly different than theirs. Very rarely are people shopping around for theatre to attend based on who has the best price (except perhaps in the most high-traffic, tourism-driven cultural districts, like Broadway). But it is good to make sure you’re in line with other entertainment options in your area, to make sure you are not undervaluing your product.

As always, if you need help setting your prices, don’t hesitate to reach out! Our consultants can help you either make small improvements to your pricing or help with a complete overhaul.

Let’s Talk!