Fee methodology
Every number, accounted for.
Speaker fees have run on rumor for decades. This page is the public record of how Stages replaces the rumor with real measurement: who signs off on the methodology, how every amount is labeled, what we will never publish, and how to tell us when something is wrong.
Governance
One owner. Recorded sign-offs. No silent changes.
Every published fee figure traces back to a methodology with a named owner: the Stages founder. Nothing takes effect on any surface, private guidance, organizer guidance, the public fee index, or the benchmark API, until the owner approves that version with a recorded sign-off.
Every approved change documents what changed, why it changed, which surfaces it touches, and whether published numbers shift as a result.
Every version is listed in the changelog at the bottom of this page, append-only. A number you have seen will never quietly become a different number.
Labeling
Every figure tells you what it is, and where it came from.
A fee number without context is a rumor with a dollar sign. So every amount Stages publishes carries two labels: a composition label that says what kind of number it is, and a source label that says how we obtained it.
Amount composition
The full amount the organization paid out, which may include agency commission, travel, or production costs.
The confirmed amount the speaker received for this engagement.
A publicly recorded amount whose split between the speaker and any agency or bureau is not known.
Source family
Based on money that actually changed hands for this engagement.
Based on listed or quoted rates, not confirmed payments.
Based on figures speakers entered themselves, not independently verified.
Based on negotiation and booking activity observed directly on Stages.
Asking prices and confirmed transactions never blend into one unlabeled number. Published asking tiers can run far above what engagements actually close for, and averaging the two without labels would misrepresent the market. Every published range discloses exactly which source families it draws from.
Aggregates only
We publish markets, never people.
Stages never states what a named speaker charges, or what a named organization paid a specific speaker, on any public page, report, or piece of social content. Not as a teaser, not as a case study, not ever.
Benchmark figures appear only as segment medians, percentile bands, and ranges, computed across enough contributors that no individual can be identified. The minimum sample sizes behind that promise are published with each methodology version, not decided quietly.
One thing is different by design: a speaker's own listed fee range on their own profile. That is the speaker publishing their own asking price, controlled entirely by them. It is their statement, never our claim.
Corrections and disputes
Wrong number? There is a front door.
Data this important needs a public way to challenge it. Anyone, speaker, bureau, organizer, or reader, can submit a correction without creating an account. We acknowledge every submission within 2 business days and resolve it within 10 business days. Those deadlines are printed here because the same numbers drive the workflow behind the form: this page and our internal clock cannot disagree.
Fee data corrections
Report a fee-data correction
Consent and your data
The fee data belongs to the speaker.
We collect fee data for two purposes: private guidance for the speaker it belongs to, and anonymous aggregates that make the whole market honest. Individual amounts are never published. Consent is granted family by family, never all-or-nothing, and a speaker can change their mind about any family at any time.
Platform-observed booking activity
Stages tracks the fee amounts in your negotiations and bookings on the platform, including listed ranges, offers, counteroffers, and confirmed paid amounts. We use this to show you your own fee history and, combined anonymously with other speakers' data, to power market fee benchmarks. Your individual amounts are never shown to anyone else by name.
Self-reported gig history
Fees you enter yourself are private by default and are only used, in anonymized aggregate, to help calibrate fee guidance. Self-reported fees carry less weight than confirmed platform or document-backed amounts, and never appear anywhere with your name attached.
Fee-document uploads
When you upload a contract, invoice, 1099, or booking confirmation, we extract the fee amount, currency, event, and counterparty fields to support your fee record. Uploaded files and extracted fields are visible only to you and to the automated process that reads them. We never share the document itself with anyone else.
Connected-account importsExplicit opt-in required
If you choose to connect an email, calendar, or accounting account, we only look for fee and booking amounts, such as invoice totals or booking-confirmation figures. We never read your general inbox, calendar, or ledger content. You can disconnect any time, and we immediately stop and delete anything we have not yet processed from that connection.
Off-platform gig logs
Bookings you log that happened outside Stages are private by default and treated the same way as a self-reported fee: used only in anonymized aggregate, weighted below verified data, and never shown anywhere with your name attached.
The Stages fee survey
Your survey answers are combined anonymously with other respondents to publish aggregate fee benchmarks, such as our State of Speaker Pay report. We publish the sample size, fielding dates, and any known response-bias caveats alongside every published figure. Your individual answers are never shown to anyone else.
Opting out of any family, or all of them, costs a speaker nothing that does not depend on that data. Deleting a record removes it from every future benchmark computation. Already-published aggregates are not retroactively recomputed, because they never contained individually identifying data in the first place. Disconnecting a connected account also revokes its access token and immediately deletes anything not yet processed.
Changelog
The paper trail.
Every methodology version, append-only, in public. This is the same version history the methodology owner keeps internally, and the sample-size thresholds behind the aggregate-only promise ship with each entry.
Charter established; no computational methodology is in effect yet. No fee-data aggregate has been published under this charter. The first computational methodology version ships with Phase 96 (Benchmark Data Model) and must pass the full methodology review checklist before it takes effect on any surface.
Surfaces affected: None yet (governance-only)
Approved by: Founder, 2026-08-03