Trivia · Costs
What a pub quiz actually costs
Hosts, gear, questions and prizes with real numbers — plus the break-even arithmetic that tells you whether a trivia night is worth running in your room.
Every "how to run trivia" guide skips the part where you find out what it costs. Here are the actual line items, the arithmetic that decides whether it pays, and the cases where the honest answer is don't bother.
All figures are US dollars for a small-to-mid independent bar. Your market moves them, but the structure does not change.
The one number that decides it
Not attendance. Incremental gross profit — the extra money you keep, after product cost, that you would not have made on a normal night, minus what the quiz costs to run.
A trivia night that adds 40 people but costs $300 and only sells them one soda each is a loss. A trivia night that adds 15 people who each stay three hours is a business.
So before anything else, write down what a normal Tuesday does: covers, and average spend per head. You cannot evaluate any of this without the baseline, and most operators guess it wrong by a wide margin.
Line item 1: the host — $0 to $350 a night
Your biggest recurring cost, and the one with the widest spread.
| Option | Per night | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| A staff member who wants it | $50–$120 | A two-hour shift's pay on top of their rate. Cheapest, and they know the regulars by name. |
| A freelance host | $75–$200 | Someone who can work a mic. Usually brings questions; sometimes their own PA. |
| A trivia company, full service | $150–$350 | Host, questions, gear, often their own promotion. Turnkey. |
| You | $0 in cash | Not free. It is two hours a week you are not managing the floor. |
One thing worth saying plainly: do not ask a bartender to host for free while also working the bar. It costs nothing on paper and it is the most common reason a quiz gets quietly worse every week until it stops. If you want a staff member to host, take them off the well and pay them for it.
Line item 2: gear — $150 to $600, once
If you already have a PA for music you may need nothing at all. Otherwise:
- Powered speaker with a mic input — $200–$450. The one purchase that matters.
- Wired dynamic mic, cable and stand — $100–$180. Wired is fine, and never runs out of battery.
- All-in-one battery PA with a wireless mic — $250–$500 if you need to move it around.
Spread $400 of gear across a year of weekly quizzes and it is about $8 a night. Stop treating it as a barrier. What you do not need: a buzzer system, a projector, or a scoring tablet for every table.
Line item 3: questions — $0 to $100 a week
The invisible cost, and the one that actually kills nights.
- Write them yourself. Free in cash, 2–4 hours a week in reality. Sourcing 50 questions that are interesting, correctly answered and not recycled from last month is real work. At $25/hour of manager time that is $50–$100 a week — and it is the first thing dropped in a busy week, which is exactly when the quiz starts repeating itself.
- Question packs. Roughly $10–$30 for a set of 50 from the online sellers. Cheap and fine. The risk is that your regulars have already seen the same pack at the bar down the road.
- Bundled with a host or company. Included in the fees above.
- Software subscription. Typically $30–$100 a month.
Whatever you pick, budget something here. "The manager will write them" is a plan with a shelf life of about five weeks.
Line item 4: prizes — about $25 a night in real cost
This is the line people overestimate most, because they price prizes at face value instead of at cost.
A $40 first-place bar tab, redeemable on a future visit, costs you the product — call it $10–$12 at typical beverage margins — and it drags a whole team back through the door on another night to spend it. A round of drinks for second place is another $8–$10. A booby prize for last place costs $5.
Prizes are the cheapest line on this page and the one that most directly buys a repeat visit. Cash prizes do neither. Never give cash.
Line item 5: the small stuff
- Answer sheets and pens — $3–$6 a night. A ream of paper is about $10 and covers two months.
- Extra floor labour — if the quiz genuinely fills the room you may need another server for five hours. Call it $90–$130. Be honest about this one; a full room served badly does not come back.
- Music licensing (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR) — if you play recorded music in your venue you already owe this, quiz or no quiz, and a spoken-word trivia night adds nothing to it. An audio or music round is a public performance of recordings and sits under the same licences. Rates are quoted on occupancy and use, and a small bar should expect a four-figure annual total across the PROs. Get real quotes. Do not guess, and do not assume one licence covers the others — they are separate organisations with separate catalogues.
Putting it together: two real weeks
Assume a bar whose average check is $18 on a dead Tuesday and $26 on a quiz night, because teams stay three hours instead of one. Blended gross margin 72%.
Week 1. Baseline Tuesday: 35 covers, $630. Quiz night: 48 covers at $26 = $1,248.
- Incremental revenue: $618
- Gross profit at 72%: $445
- Costs: host $150 + prizes $25 + questions $25 + sundries $5 = $205
- Net: +$240. Modest. Nobody would call that a success.
Week 8, once it has built. Same room, 85 covers.
- Revenue: $2,210. Incremental over baseline: $1,580
- Gross profit at 72%: $1,138
- Costs: the same $205, plus $95 for an extra server = $300
- Net: +$838 a week.
The gap between week 1 and week 8 is the whole point. A quiz is not a promotion that works on Tuesday; it is an asset that compounds if you keep showing up. Judging it on night one is judging it before it exists.
The break-even, which is the number to actually remember
Costs of about $205 a night, at $26 average spend and 72% margin, means each extra guest brings roughly $18.70 of gross profit.
$205 ÷ $18.70 = 11 guests.
Eleven extra people through the door pays for the entire night. Everyone after that is profit. That is a low bar, and it is why trivia keeps being the default answer to a dead midweek — not because it is magic, but because the cost base is genuinely tiny next to what a bar makes on a table that stays three hours.
Run that division with your own numbers before you commit. If your break-even lands at 40 guests, either your host is too expensive or your average check is too low, and that is the problem to fix first.
When it is honestly not worth it
- A room with bad acoustics and no fixable sound. If the back half cannot hear the questions you are paying $200 a night for people to sit in silence. Fix the sound, or pick a different idea.
- Under about 30 seats. The economics still work but the atmosphere does not — six teams is a quiz, two teams is an awkward conversation.
- A night that already fills. You are spending $200 to move covers you already had.
- Nobody who wants to host. A reluctant host is worse than no quiz, and this is not something you can make a person do.
The line you are really paying
Look back at the cost table and notice where the money goes: the host and the questions. Gear is a rounding error and prizes pay for themselves. What you buy every week, forever, is fifty fresh questions and someone competent to read them out.
That second part is what First Round takes over — questions, scoring, standings on the screen, and the Tuesday-afternoon reminder to last week's teams — so the host line becomes a staff member with a phone rather than a $200 booking. It does not change the arithmetic on this page. It changes which line you are paying.
Either way, do the division first. Eleven guests — or whatever your own number turns out to be — is the only figure that decides this.