The Complete Guide to Race Registration Pricing

Pulling off a successful race comes down to your pricing and bottom line.

As much as you’re focused on delivering a fun and memorable experience for your participants, you need to break even. And, you want to have some money left over so you can make your race even better next year.

When you set your prices, you’re putting a monetary value on your race experience. If registration is too cheap, the experience may not be worth it. Conversely, if registration is too expensive, you’ll miss out on participants. You need to get it just right.

Rates and strategy implementation vary by race distance and race type. We’ll cover some of these instances when we discuss each strategy.

We’ll also discuss pricing strategies that increase registrations and how to know when to raise prices. Once you’ve settled on your pricing strategy, communication is key to successful implementation.

Top pricing strategy for races

You’ll want to use a competitive pricing strategy, especially if it’s your first year organizing a race.

With a competitive pricing strategy, look at the cost of races in your area. You’ll want to focus on races that have a similar distance to yours. Remember that a cycling race will have different price points compared to a running race. Relays have different price points, too.

As your race becomes more established, you may be able to move into value-based pricing. Value-based pricing focuses on the perceived value your race offers participants. The greater the perceived value, the more people are willing to pay to participate in your event.

As you transition to a value-based pricing strategy, understand what your participants care about and deliver. Maybe you always have a great band at the finish line. Maybe you attract olympic qualifiers or other prominent athletes in your sport. Whatever is the biggest draw for your event, capitalize on it to draw more people and increase prices.

Increase registrations

You want to get revenue flowing as quickly as possible, and you want to capture the most participants you can.

Open sales ASAP

Open your registration as soon as possible. Races, especially long-distance ones, require preparation. Often people look for a goal to work towards – participating in your race could be the motivation they need to exercise.

If you’re hosting an expo at the finish line or packet pick-up, you’ll want to give vendors enough lead time to prepare. Opening sales for booths early makes it easy to fill all of those spots. It’s hardly even a last-minute decision for a vendor to display at your race..

Opening sales as soon as possible makes it easier to sell out and helps generate revenue so you can pay for expenses as you’re putting on your race.

Communication tips

Email all of your past participants the day sales open. Include registration categories and pricing information in your email. If you’re doing a small promotion to help encourage sales, include the deal and the expiration date.

If you don’t have past attendees to email, find other ways to promote that your open for registrations. You could post an announcement on social media, place an ad in the paper, connect with local running clubs, etc.

Create an enhanced experience option

Develop a VIP option for your participants. Participants will pay more to have a better experience – maybe they can cut the line at packet pick-up or they get dinner the night before. 

As you decide what to offer in your VIP experience, consider common pain points for your participants and offer ways to avoid those by paying more.

Your next consideration is meaningful perks. For example, including a dinner the night before is a great perk for athletes.

You’ll price these enhanced experiences higher than your normal registrations. Even if the VIP registrations don’t sell out, they help increase sales of your lower value tickets.

Communication tips

Find ways to create excitement around your event and the VIP registration. Include details about perks on your registration page, email communications, and social media posts.

Raise rates for most popular times and best seats

If your race offers multiple distances, consider raising prices on the most popular ones. When registrations sky-rocket for a particular distance, then you can start raising the price. Participants will either pay more for that distance or opt for another distance that’s cheaper.

So, you’ll have more spots filled for your less popular distances and more revenue per registration for your most popular distance.

Communication Tips

Let your email list know that you’re increasing the registration price before you make the change. And, post about it on social media. You’ll get more people to make a decision about running your race, and you’ll see a boost in new registrations.

Offer group discounts

Offering group discounts also helps drive registrations. Everyone loves feeling like they got a good deal. And, if you’re strategic, you’ll also drive more revenue.

For example, you could offer 10 percent off on orders with at least 4 registrations. Let’s say a registration costs $50. An order with three registrations generates $150. A cart with four tickets at 10 percent off generates $180. So, you’re capturing $30 more dollars, or 20 percent more revenue, than you might have without the group discount.

Communication tips

Display information about group discounts on your registration page. It can even be helpful to communicate these group discounts in your digital ads and other paid marketing.

Increase registration prices as your race nears

Consider the timing of your price increases. Timing them with important sales events like Black Friday and with preparation time. 

For example, it takes longer to train for a marathon than a 5k or a mile fun run. So, you’ll want to start increasing prices for a long-distance race before you start increasing prices for a 5k or mile fun run.

Reward early buyers with lower prices, and raise prices strategically as your race gets closer. Start increasing prices for a marathon about 6 or more months before the race. Increase it every month as the race gets closer. For a 5k, start increasing prices 2-3 months in advance.

The Deseret News Marathon raises marathon, half marathon, and 10k prices five times over the year before race day. Price increases range from $5-$10. In 2024, it had an average boost of 70 registrations the day before each price increase.

Overall, about 10-12 percent of 2024 participants were influenced by price increases.

Alternatively, raise prices based on participant sign-ups. Once you’ve calculated how much your race costs to produce and estimated how many participants you anticipate having. For example, maybe you can sell 50 registrations at $50, so you offer the lowest price to the first 50 people who register. Then, you raise the price to $75 for the next 100 registrations, and so on. You’re still increasing prices as your event nears, but the price can change in a day if you’re selling fast. 

Communication tips

Email your participants and past participants a few days before your next price increase. Your participants may have family and friends they want to get to participate. Sharing information about price changes helps you get a boost in sales right before the price increases. Display a countdown to the next price increase on your purchase page to create a sense of urgency for participants.

Leverage marketing and growth tools

In your pricing, include some margin for marketing campaigns and promotions to increase sales. Consider working with a local business to create a mutually beneficial promotion. Even offering a special for a set period of time can help increase sales.

Encourage your participants to help you get the word out. For example, offer rebates to participants who get their friends and family to register. Race Entry’s software makes this strategy simple to set up and track.

You can also encourage participants to share your registration page on Facebook by offering a few dollars off. You’ll promote your race organically on social media and get more traffic to your registration page.

Sometimes your would-be participants get interrupted before they finish their payment. You can automated email reminders that include a link to the page they left. All they have to do is finish their payment. You can close more sales with these reminders.

In 2024, the Teton Dam Marathon used Race Entry’s tools to attract 13 percent of its participants. It converted 27 percent of abandoned registrations with emails and generated 7x more revenue from its referral incentives.

In 2023, the Kauai Marathon and Half Marathon had similar success. It generated 19x more revenue from each dollar spend on referral incentives. It also converted 13 percent of abandonded registrations into completed registrations with abandoned cart email reminders.

Communication tips

You can automate many of these strategies with Race Entry’s software. When you turn on the Facebook share and save feature, a button with a link and social media message is added to your online purchase pathway. 

When you turn on your referral program and set incentives, details about the rebate opportunity are included in the confirmation email.

When you turn on abandoned cart reminder emails, they are sent automatically after 30 minutes if an order isn’t completed. 

When to raise prices

While some price increases are designed to drive sales, larger, overall price increases focus on generating more revenue per ticket or registration. 

But, before you can do that, you need to know that people are willing to pay more to participate or attend your event.

Selling Out

When you start to sell out regularly, you’ll know you can raise ticket prices. If you’re selling out, you’re probably turning people away because you only have so many tickets. So, you’ll still be able to sell tickets even if the prices are higher.

When you generate more revenue, you can invest more in your event and deliver a better experience.