GigXchange Index — UK Live Music Rates, August 2026

Published fee percentiles for UK live music engagements, broken down by place, event type and band size. Every figure is artist take-home in GBP: agency-published rates are normalised by stripping a 20% commission before any percentile is computed. This release is a snapshot of exactly what gigxchange.app published on 2026-08-12 — the same figures shown on the site and in the monthly report, with no export-side filtering. It is a mid-month interim release, deposited so that a version built on the current methodology is citable; the full August issue is generated from the month-end snapshot. What changed — new methodology (model v5) August 2026 is the first release under model v5. These figures are not directly comparable to earlier versions. Every city answers the same 22 questions. Previously a city published only the cells it happened to hold data for, so city figures partly ranked coverage rather than pay. The grid is now every event-type/band-size combination the national baseline can anchor, identical in all 13 cities. Location-less observations feed every city. A national agency rate card or a union minimum applies everywhere, so they now contribute to every city cell rather than only to the national baseline. Around 60% of the corpus carries no location. The split is published per row (local_sample_size / blanket_sample_size) so the blanket layer can be isolated or removed. Source quotas now reach every figure. Each source class may own at most a fixed share of any published cell — agency rate cards are 83% of the corpus and may decide at most 10% of a figure. A query path that had been bypassing that cap was fixed in this release, which moved the headline national figure materially. Provenance columns added: is_imputed, imputation_method, local_sample_size, blanket_sample_size, model. Filter is_imputed = false for measured-only figures. Files gx-index-august-2026.csv — 403 published rate cells as at 2026-08-12 sources.csv — every source class, its observation count and its quota README.txt — column definitions and limits Honest limits These are advertised, asked or budgeted rates — not a record of money that changed hands. Around 83% of the underlying corpus is agency rate cards. Not a census. Most UK gig fees are agreed privately and surface nowhere. Not a recommended price, not a regulated benchmark, not financial advice. Many cells rest on few observations. Every row carries its sample_size — weigh it. A derived cell is an estimate of what a city would pay given how it prices elsewhere. It is never counted as evidence and never used to compute another figure. Publisher GigXchange — the UK peer-to-peer live music marketplace. Wikidata: Q139677384 Author: Naumaan Zahid — Wikidata Q139677387 Parent: Eclipse Labs AI Ltd — Wikidata Q139677374 Sources, live updates and methodology Live data: GigXchange Rate Index Methodology in full: gigxchange.app/rates/methodology Mirror on Hugging Face: gigxchange/uk-live-music-rates-2026-08 Mirror on Kaggle: naumaangx/uk-live-music-booking-rates-august-2026-gx-index Licence CC BY 4.0 — free to use, share and adapt, including commercially. Please credit GigXchange.