How much should your race cost? For many race director’s pricing your race is the first question raised, and we wish we could give you a precise formula to answer the question. Unfortunately, it’s a complex question that has to weigh a number of factors including:
- Race Distance: A 5K is typically going to cost much less than a marathon, simply because the overhead (road closures, staffing hours, number of water stops) is going to be much higher for a longer race.
- Race Perks: A race that gives away a premium shirt and medal and provides a full 3 hour festival with live music and free beer at the finish line has inherently higher costs than a Turkey Trot with an optional race shirt and some bananas as you head home.
- Race Location: Perhaps the most nuanced criteria is location. Typically, you’ll see races in high cost of living states priced higher than ones in low cost of living states. But it’s not just the state you live in that matters, it’s the city and even where in the city. A race hosted in a park in the outskirts of a city will likely cost less (for the organizers and the participants) than a race downtown on a typically busy Saturday.
We can’t tell you what the perfect price for your race is because if we filter down by races in your state, and your city, with similar distances and similar perks…we’ll have 2 or 3 races. And that’s not a large enough sample to tell you much! What we can do is look at averages and ranges from our RaceTrends report and let you draw some inferences about where you should fall based on what you know about the perks and costs of your own event.
Average Prices
There are a couple of “averages” we look at with pricing: the average low price (typically what’s charged for “early bird” registration), the average high price (typically, what’s charged on race day), and the average-average (what a race charges when averaging out those highs and lows).
Average Price by Event Distance
This chart looks at the overall average price for a race. It’s not going to tell you everything, but it’s a good starting point. If your average price (the middle-ground between an opening price and a race day price) is a little high, is there a reason (like location, additional costs to the organization, or extra perks)? If it’s a little low, are you covering your costs (including needed revenue)?
This is a starting point, not definitive rule that your race should match this.
Average Low & High Prices
Next, take a look at the average low price for a race. These are typically going to be the price when registration first opens and the price on race day. Like with average prices, you always want to identify and evaluate the things that make your prices higher or lower than the average. However, it’s important to note that having a range of prices can increase your participation. While you never want to be giving away registrations, providing low and high options lets your procrastinators subsidize the cost a bit to ensure room for budget-conscious early purchasers.
Price Increases
Price increases are a common way to both motivate action (register before the price goes up!) and provide pricing tiers for a wider range of people without sacrificing overall revenue. In most cases, we believe there is room for more price increases than a race typically offers – the average 5K actually has fewer than 1 price increase.
The length of time registration is open can be a determining factor for how many price increases you can fit in. Typically, longer races have longer registration cycles. Regardless, there are 4 price points that most races should consider:
- An “Early Bird” price to kickoff registration strong and attract budget-conscious runners.
- A “mid-cycle” price increase to encourage action. In general, you want to time this around (or a little before) the major mid-cycle registration spike seen below. While the exact timing will vary by distance (earlier for longer races), adding a price increase here promotes action at a time when participants are already more likely to act.
- A “late registration” price for the last 1-2 weeks before race day. This provides one more touchpoint to prompt action before the late registration price sets in.
- A final race day price. Many races keep the race day price the same as the race week price, but setting a high race day price serves two purposes encouraging people to register before race morning, and ensuring that late registrants provide a little extra revenue cushion.
Using the “Registration Periods” Report
If you want to get more insight into when runners are registering for your race, and when you might be able to build in additional price increases, you can use the “Registration Periods” report on your dashboard. The data on the screen can feel a little overwhelming, but you can also download it to excel to break it up a little better. If you have one registration period with the bulk of the registrations, there is likely an opportunity there to add an additional price increase.
Additional Notes on Pricing Your Race
The data reviewed here is from the end of 2023 because that’s the last time we ran a full set of data (we do it annually, so look for updated numbers in January 2025!). But we do know from our midyear report that prices have continued to increase in 2024. The average prices for the first half of 2024 increased across the board compared to 2023:
In other words, if your pricing has gone up, that’s not unexpected. Two other tools you can use to help determine pricing for your event:
- Your budget. Calculate your anticipated per-runner cost once you’ve paid for your venue, giveaways, timing, etc. That’s the minimum price you would ever want to charge. Then, build in needed revenue. At the end of the day, your price has to be set by your costs (and those have likely increased).
- Market research. As we noted earlier, there are probably only a few races in your area that are truly comparable to yours. There’s no single aggregator that will definitely show you all of them, but RunningInTheUSA has a fairly comprehensive calendar you can use to peruse the pricing of events near you that appear to be like you.