UK comedians earned £21,143 in 2025, down £5,635 on 2024

Seventeen per cent of them made nothing at all

Seventeen per cent of the comedians who filled in the UK Live Comedy Sector Survey earned nothing whatsoever from comedy. The year before it was 7 per cent. That’s the figure I’d hand to anyone who still thinks the circuit’s trouble is that acts won’t take the work. The number that got the coverage was the average: annual turnover of £21,143, down from £26,778. Chortle worked out that fall as 21 per cent. It arrives before expenses such as travelling to gigs, and compares with a UK median salary of just over £39,000.

The survey was published on 4 February 2026 by the Live Comedy Association, working with the Centre for Comedy Studies Research and British Comedy Guide. It is the second annual run of the exercise. A total of 272 people working in comedy volunteered to complete the questionnaire. I’ve driven back from a Tuesday gig in Wolverhampton on a fee that didn’t cover the diesel and a service station meal deal. The phrase “before expenses” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. Comedian earnings measured as turnover flatter what actually lands in a bank account. The bottom of that range is not hypothetical: it looks like the whip-round for Mike Newall.

How much does a stand-up comedian earn in the UK?

The average was £21,143 across 2025, according to the Live Comedy Association’s survey of 272 people working in the sector. Chortle described that figure as average annual turnover. The LCA’s own survey page calls it average wages, dropped to £21,143 in 2025, down from £26,778 the year before. Those are two different things once you subtract petrol, train fares, a Travelodge and the accountant. Nothing in the published summaries reconciles the two, and £21,143 is the number that arrives before the Travelodge invoice does.

The volume fell alongside it. Comedians responding this year averaged 2.54 gigs a week, against 3.2 for those who answered the previous survey. The LCA’s summary of the same data puts the share needing income from outside comedy at 74 per cent, up from 62 per cent. Chortle’s write-up rendered that as nearly three-quarters needing second jobs. You’ll be tempted to divide one average by the other to get a fee per gig. It won’t work: the two figures come from different questions, answered by an overlapping but not identical set of people. Anyone quoting per-gig comedian earnings off the back of this report has done arithmetic the report doesn’t support, and I’d like to see it written out on the back of a beer mat.

272 people, and not the same 272 as last time

Chortle flagged what the press release didn’t dwell on: the 272 respondents this year are a different cohort from those who answered 12 months earlier. A year-on-year comparison is comparing two self-selecting groups rather than tracking the same wallets. The same caveat sits over the organisation-side figure: an average annual turnover of £527,296 against £962,213 the previous year. That is a drop so violent that sample composition has to be part of it. Sixty-three per cent of respondents were comedians, the rest working in other roles.

So it’s a thermometer, and comedian earnings measured this way will always carry a wobble. What makes me take it seriously anyway is that the venue-side answers point the same direction as things I can count without a questionnaire: rooms going dark, rooms changing hands, and closure posts landing in my inbox on a Tuesday afternoon with the same three paragraphs of thanks in them.

The £5 to £12 room hasn’t moved

Ticket prices in grassroots comedy have essentially stood still. The LCA reports 33 per cent of tickets priced between £5 and £12, broadly in line with the 31 per cent recorded in 2024. The share of promoters selling between 71 and 90 per cent of their tickets fell to 31 per cent, from 45 per cent. Chortle’s read of the same dataset found only 2 per cent of comedy organisations always sell out. Five per cent now sell less than a quarter of their tickets. The largest group, 37 per cent, shifts between 51 and 70 per cent.

Put those together and you get a room selling two-thirds of its seats, at a price set before the last two rounds of cost increases. My own view, which nobody asked for, is that the £5 ticket is now actively harmful. It prices the night below a pint in the same building, and trains an audience to treat comedy as the cheap option on a Friday. Venues aren’t getting rescued from the other side either. Comedy clubs were left out of Andy Burnham’s 20 per cent business rates cut, and even a well-capitalised operator can decide the sums don’t work. That is what happened when Underbelly broke its Soho lease.

Liverpool kept the 589-seat room and lost the 136-seat one

Laughterhouse ran from a custom-built 136-seat room beneath the Slaughter House on Fenwick Street. It staged its last night on Saturday 28 March and cancelled every comedian booked after that date. Chortle reported the club citing consistently low attendances and increasing competition from other venues. That is in a city where Hot Water Comedy Club has grown from gigs in hotel function rooms to its own multi-space site. The largest room there seats 589, and it opened in 2024. The Laughterhouse message to acts thanked them for the work: “It has been a real privilege to work with so many brilliant comedians, and we truly appreciate the time and effort you put into making each show special.”

Appetite isn’t the problem in Liverpool: the city has one very big room and one dark basement on Fenwick Street, which changes the maths for anyone chasing a twenty-minute spot. The same compression is visible in the States, where Levity Live Oxnard took 69 jobs with it. Club Comedy Seattle shut after no buyer stepped up. That leaves the same number of acts chasing fewer Tuesday nights, and a lot more of the year spent on the M6.

Balham’s version of this was gentler and worth reading closely. Banana Cabaret played its last night at the Bedford on 30 May, after 43 years (parking anywhere near that place on a Saturday has always been a competitive sport). Dave Vickers, who ran it since the early 1980s, was blunt: “I simply want to retire as I’ve just reached state pension age.” The Club Room didn’t go dark. Three Cheers Pub Co announced that from 4 September 2026 Always Be Comedy will carry the comedy torch, with shows every Friday and Saturday night. That’s a founder-run club replaced by a promoter brand that already runs nights across a string of London pubs.

Nine venues signed up before the report landed

The LCA’s answer to all of this arrived on the same day as the survey: a comedy venue consortium with nine founding members. Komedia in Brighton and Bath, The Stand in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle, The Glee Club across Birmingham, Cardiff, Nottingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Oxford. Then The Bill Murray, The Frog and Bucket in Manchester, Leicester Square Theatre, The Museum of Comedy, Soho Theatre and Soho Theatre Walthamstow. Jessica Toomey, co-Chair of the LCA, set out the reasoning in the announcement:

We know we need more resources to address some of the challenges our sector faces and also to support others who are doing amazing work to build our community and grow our impact.

Notice what that list is: the operators with more than one room, or a theatre building, or both. The survey found 25 per cent of single-location comedy organisations are based in London, a city holding about 13 per cent of the UK population. The geography of who gets to be in a consortium is baked in before anyone signs anything. The LCA has Live Comedy Day on 1 April 2026, and previously lobbied DCMS into a parliamentary evidence session on the sector. That’s more institutional traction than grassroots comedy has ever had, and none of it reaches an act on a £30 door split in a room above a pub in Hull. Acts at that end have taken to organising for themselves, which is what the unpaid comics who started their own Leicester festival did. Transparency helps a bit. A fee tracker showing US openers on $500 a night gets passed round a green room in a way a survey PDF never will.

The next edition of this survey should land around February 2027, and the first line I’ll look for is gigs per week. If 2.54 holds, the circuit has found a floor. If it slides again, comedian earnings won’t be the story so much as the shrinking number of Tuesday nights in Britain where anyone is allowed on a stage. Before then there’s 4 September at the Bedford, when a room that ran on one man’s booking taste for four decades reopens under a promoter with ten pubs on the roster, Fridays and Saturdays, and somebody has to decide what happens to the old Banana Cabaret signage.

Sources

• Live Comedy Association: UK Live Comedy Survey published as comedy venue consortium is launched
• Live Comedy Association: Sector Survey
• Chortle: Comedians report a huge wage slump
• Chortle: Liverpool’s oldest comedy club closes
• Chortle: After 43 years, Banana Cabaret slips away
• Three Cheers Pub Co: The Bedford announces new era of stand-up comedy