UK comics are down to 2.5 gigs a week as 14 tours launch at once

Fourteen tours opened in one week and Chortle listed 6,112 events

On Sunday 6 September, Daniel Kitson opened a tour called Thrum at the Junction in Cambridge. By the end of that same week, thirteen more stand-up tours had started somewhere in Britain. Chortle’s weekly picks column introduced the whole lot with a line that reads like a boast and lands like a warning: “The best of the week’s live comedy, picked from the 6,112 events Chortle currently has listed.” Nish Kumar, Phil Wang, Sindhu Vee, Rhys James, Urzila Carlson, Aurie Styla, Alfie Brown and Dom Joly were all among the fourteen. That is a lot of poster art for one seven-day stretch.

Now put the other number next to it. The Live Comedy Association’s sector survey was published on 4 February 2026 with the Centre for Comedy Studies Research and British Comedy Guide. It found that the average comedian was doing 2.5 comedy gigs a week in 2025. The year before, the same survey had it at 3.2. On my own arithmetic that is roughly 36 fewer paid nights across a year for someone gigging all year round. That is not nothing when the fee for a mid-week club spot is what it is. More shows are being listed than ever and individual comics are working less. Both things are true at once, and the second one is the one nobody put in a press release.

(A small aside on the Junction, since we’re here. The car park is shared with a retail estate, and the barriers close before the bar does. Several touring acts have learned that the expensive way.)

How many comedy gigs does a UK comedian do in a week?

About two and a half. The UK Live Comedy Sector Survey 2025 puts the average at 2.5 comedy gigs a week, down from 3.2 the previous year. That is based on 272 people working in comedy who filled in the questionnaire, 63 per cent of them performers. The same survey reported average earnings falling to £21,143, from £26,778 the year before. The UK median salary is just over £39,000. The share of comedians needing income from outside comedy went from 62 per cent to 74 per cent. The share earning nothing at all from comedy went from 7 per cent to 17 per cent.

Dr Sharon Lockyer, director of the Centre for Comedy Studies Research, put the findings this way on the Live Comedy Association’s survey page:

The findings reveal important economic, social and cultural contributions made by UK live comedy but also highlight issues and challenges around precarity, wage stagnation, geographical inequities and inequities related to protected characteristics.

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Two hundred and seventy-two respondents is a small sample for a sector the LCA values at over £1 billion a year to the UK economy. It is worth saying so plainly rather than dressing the number up. But it is the second consecutive year of the same questionnaire asked the same way, which makes the year-on-year direction more useful than the absolute figure. Down 0.7 gigs a week, down £5,635 a year, up twelve points on people who need a second job.

One act in the room instead of four

Here is the bit of reasoning the survey does not do for you, and I want to flag that it is reasoning rather than a reported finding. A club bill is a compere, two middles and a headliner. That is four paid slots for one room on one night, sometimes five if there’s a new-material spot. A solo tour date in the same size of room is one paid slot, plus a support if the act is generous or the promoter insists. So when the touring calendar swells and the club calendar does not, the total number of events can rise while the total number of paid comedy gigs falls, because the shows have got hungrier for tickets and thinner on performers.

The organisational figures point the same way. Chortle’s report on the survey has the average turnover of comedy organisations dropping from £962,213 to £527,296. Roughly halved. Whatever is going right in live comedy at the moment is not going right in the accounts of the promoters and clubs doing the week-in-week-out work, and it is those accounts that decide whether a Tuesday new-material night exists in March.

None of this means the touring acts are the villains. A comic taking a forty-date run is doing the sensible thing with the audience they’ve built, and most of them came up doing exactly the four-act bills now being squeezed. It’s just that the money has moved into a shape that employs fewer people per ticket sold.

The £5 to £12 band that hasn’t moved

Ticket prices are the part of this that has stubbornly stayed still. The survey found 33 per cent of tickets priced between £5 and £12 in 2025, against 31 per cent in 2024. Meanwhile the share of promoters selling 71 to 90 per cent of their tickets fell from 45 per cent to 31 per cent. Cheaper-ish tickets, fewer of them shifting. One anonymous respondent quoted by Chortle said flatly: “All costs have increased but ticket prices haven’t changed.” Another: “I earned more per gig in 2004 than now.”

You can see clubs testing the other direction. Banana Cabaret’s Balham room came back at £20 a ticket with no lineup refunds, which is a bet that the audience is buying the night rather than a specific name. And from this summer every flyer and listing has had to show the booking fee in the headline price, so a £12 ticket now advertises as £13.50 and the punter’s mental arithmetic happens before the checkout instead of during it. Over in the US, Pollstar’s own executive survey has CAA’s head of comedy touring, Matt Blake, attributing a soft patch in 2025 partly to Ticketmaster’s move to all-in pricing. Nobody has yet published UK numbers on what the same change did to conversion here, and I would very much like to see them.

Nine clubs putting their own money in

Alongside the survey, the LCA announced a venue consortium with nine founding members committing to support a Stand Up And Give Fund: Komedia in Brighton and Bath, The Stand in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle, The Glee Club across Birmingham, Cardiff, Nottingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Oxford, The Bill Murray, Leicester Square Theatre, the Museum of Comedy, Soho Theatre and Soho Theatre Walthamstow, and Manchester’s Frog & Bucket. LCA co-chair Jessica Toomey said the association was “delighted to be able to publish this second annual report showing the size and impact of the grassroots live comedy sector”.

Read that list again and note who is on it: the rooms that still run multi-act bills most nights of the week. They are, in effect, funding the thing that keeps them supplied. That is either admirable self-interest or an admission that nobody else is going to do it, and it sits awkwardly next to the fact that 47 MPs signed a letter about grassroots comedy and the sector still has no statutory levy of the kind music has been arguing for.

What the consortium cannot fix is the diary. A fund helps a venue survive a bad quarter. It does not put a fourth act back on a bill that has been restructured into a solo tour date, and it does not create the Wednesday gig where a comic learns to do the Saturday one.

Sources

• Chortle, FOURTEEN stand-up tours kick off this week, 6 September 2026
• Live Comedy Association, UK Live Comedy Sector Survey
• Live Comedy Association, survey published as venue consortium launches
• Chortle, Comedians report a huge wage slump, 4 February 2026
• Pollstar 2026 Comedy Special
• Pollstar 2026 Comedy Executive Survey

The number I want in next February’s survey is the one nobody currently collects: paid performer slots per event, tracked across a year. The comedy gigs per comedian figure tells you what happened to the people who answered the questionnaire. Slots per event would tell you whether the British circuit is still building the acts who fill those fourteen tours, or whether it is quietly running down the stock it inherited. Until somebody counts it, everyone gets to keep pointing at 6,112 events and calling it health.