GigXchange Index — UK Live Music Rates, May 2026

Monthly open dataset of UK live music booking fees by city, gig type and band size. Built from 3,847 weighted observations across confirmed bookings, post-event submissions, Musicians' Union and Equity published rates, agency rate cards and venue budgets. Issue 02 — May 2026. What changed since April 2026:- 176 new observations (3,847 total, up from 3,671)- Third agency source added — Bands For Hire joins Encore Musicians and Alive Network (39 URLs total)- 313 published cells across 13 cities, 7 use cases and 4 band-size buckets Files:- gx-index-may-2026.csv — weighted percentile distribution (p25, p50, p75, p90) per (scope × use_case × band_size × city)- sources.csv — source-weighting reference table (nine sources, trust weights 0.16–1.00)- gigxchange-index-2026-05.pdf — full 11-page report with methodology, coverage and commentary Spatial coverage: United Kingdom (13 cities + regional fallback + UK national).Temporal coverage: 1 May 2025 – 20 May 2026.Refresh cadence: underlying figures rebuild nightly at 05:00 UK time; a new monthly issue is published the third week of each month as a separate Zenodo version. Live calculator: https://gigxchange.app/rates/Full report: https://gigxchange.app/rates/reports/may-2026Also available on Hugging Face and Kaggle