Community theatre statistics 2026

Sooner or later a board member asks how your house compares, or a grant application wants a number, and the figures you can find have no year and no source attached to them.

These are the ones a board packet can actually cite. Association surveys, federal participation rates, published rate cards. Every figure below names where it came from and the year it describes.

What is missing is missing on purpose. There is no coast-to-coast community theatre audience total here, no volunteer-army headline, and no vendor fee we could not find printed on that vendor’s own page. Places sells tickets, so our dollar is on the fee chart with our name on it.

The short version

• AACT estimates well over 6,000 community theatres in the United States (AACT, association estimate, read 2026).
• Most of them are small. In AACT’s 2023–24 trends survey (n=332), 70.7% of responding houses reported budgets under $250,000, and 75.8% have 299 seats or fewer (AACT, 2023–24).
• They mostly balance the books, and they are mostly short of crew. 75% of those houses reported a break-even or surplus budget, and 45.1% saw a marked decrease in tech and general volunteers (AACT, 2023–24).
• In the 2026 Season Survey (n=110), the most common budget band was $100,000–$249,999, at 22.73% (AACT, 2025 survey for the 2026 season).
• About 72% of Season Survey houses run on fewer than 200 volunteers a year (AACT, 2025).
• Audiences have not come back to 2017 levels. Among U.S. adults, musical stage-play attendance fell from 16.5% (2017) to 10.3% (2022). Non-musical plays fell from 9.4% to 4.5% (NEA SPPA, 2022).
• An hour of that volunteer help was worth $34.79 in 2024, up from $23.07 in 2014 (Independent Sector, released 2025).
• Nonprofit arts and culture activity was $151.7 billion in 2022, supporting 2.6 million jobs (Americans for the Arts, AEP6). Counting commercial work too, arts and culture was $1.17 trillion, or 4.2% of GDP, in 2023 (BEA).
• On a $25 ticket, published per-ticket fees in this set run from $1 to $3.44. Ours is the $1 (published rate cards, read 21 Aug 2026).

How many community theatres are there?

AACT’s published estimate is well over 6,000 community theatres in the United States.

That is an association figure on AACT’s own impact page, not a building-by-building census. AACT’s history page is honest about how hard the count has always been. Groups start, go dark, and change names faster than anyone can keep a list. Treat “well over 6,000” as the association’s working estimate, not a headcount you can audit.

Neither survey on this page describes every house in the country either. They describe the houses that answered: 110 in the 2026 Season Survey, 332 in the 2023–24 trends survey. Both lean toward organizations already in AACT’s orbit, so cite them as a survey of respondents rather than as a national count.

What does a typical community theatre budget look like?

In the AACT 2026 Season Survey, the most common annual budget among 110 responding houses was $100,000–$249,999 (22.73%, 25 theatres).

The next band up, $250,000–$499,999, is close behind at 19.09%. Fifteen percent of houses run a whole year on under $25,000. Two reported $3 million or more. Zero reported $1.5–$2 million. Community theatre is not one budget. It is a folding-table season and a staffed building on the same survey page.

The larger 2023–24 trends survey (n=332) found a similar shape with coarser bands: 28.6% under $50,000, 18.1% at $50,000–$99,999, 23.9% at $100,000–$250,000. AACT’s own sum: 70.7% of responding houses under $250,000.

How many volunteers does a community theatre run on?

Most Season Survey houses run on fewer than 200 volunteers a year.

Question 14 asked how many volunteers the theatre generally has in a year. Of 110 answers, 28 houses (25.45%) reported fewer than 50, 24 (21.82%) reported 50–99, and 27 (24.55%) reported 100–199. That is 79 houses, about 72%, under 200. The chart rounds those bands to 25%, 22%, and 25%.

Under 200 names is a short enough list that everybody knows everybody, and somebody on it is doing three jobs.

The trends survey, a year earlier and a larger sample, asked about change rather than headcount. 45.1% of those 332 houses reported a marked decrease in tech and general volunteers. 26.6% said the bench stayed the same. 15.2% saw an increase. Acting pools moved the other way: 40.7% reported an increase.

More people want to be in the show than want to run the light board. Every production manager reading this already knew that. Now it has a number on it.

Independent Sector puts a dollar on an hour of that work. The national value of volunteer time was $34.79 in 2024, up from $23.07 in 2014.

That rate is a national average of private-sector wages, not a community-theatre payroll. It is useful when a board wants a sense of what the unpaid hours would cost if they were paid. It is not a bill.

Are audiences coming back?

Live theatre attendance among U.S. adults has not returned to 2017 rates.

The National Endowment for the Arts Survey of Public Participation in the Arts asked U.S. adults whether they attended specific live events. Musical stage plays: 16.5% in 2017, 10.3% in 2022, a 38% drop. Non-musical stage plays: 9.4% to 4.5%, a 52% drop.

Read that chart as national adult participation, not as your Saturday. SPPA does not split community theatre from Broadway, touring, or a high-school auditorium. It does not give a U.S. community-theatre attendance total, and this page does not invent one. What it does say is that fewer adults reported sitting in a theatre for a play in 2022 than in 2017.

AACT’s trends survey, asked of houses rather than of adults, is the closer picture of our own door. 75% of those 332 theatres reported break-even or surplus budgets after Covid. The same write-up said 75% were seeing flat or decreasing sales over six years. Both of those can be true at once. A house can clear the year and still feel the seats.

How big is the nonprofit arts economy?

Nonprofit arts and culture is far larger than a volunteer season, and far smaller than the whole arts economy.

Americans for the Arts’ Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 study reported $151.7 billion in nonprofit arts and culture economic activity in 2022: $73.3 billion in organizational spending and $78.4 billion in audience spending tied to events. That activity supported 2.6 million jobs and $29.1 billion in tax revenue. AEP6 is the nonprofit arts and culture industry, not community theatre alone.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis measures a wider circle: nonprofit, commercial, and education. Arts and cultural economic activity accounted for 4.2% of U.S. GDP in 2023, or $1.17 trillion, and 5.4 million jobs. That includes streaming, publishing, and a lot of work that never sees a community stage.

Keep the two numbers on separate lines. $151.7 billion is the nonprofit study (2022). $1.17 trillion is the BEA satellite account (2023). Neither is a community-theatre box-office total, and neither is money in your account. They are the size of the room you are standing in, which is usually what a city council or a grant panel is really asking about.

Broadway vs community theatre

Broadway’s 2024–25 season is a commercial New York season. It is not a measure of community theatre.

The Broadway League reported $1.89 billion in grosses ($1,892,650,959) and 14,658,531 in attendance for 2024–25, with an average paid admission of $129.12. That is one district, paid tickets, a 53-week season.

Sources: Broadway League 2024–25 season wrap and detail table; AACT impact page and 2023–24 trends survey. As of 12 Sep 2026. Download the data (CSV).

A $25 community ticket and a $129 Broadway average are not the same product, and a 200-seat volunteer house and a League season are not the same market. The contrast worth drawing is scale and price, labeled as such. It is not a claim that community theatre “adds up” to Broadway.

What do ticketing fees cost on a $25 ticket?

On a $25 ticket, published per-ticket fees in this set run from $1 to $3.44. The lines do not all include the same things, and ThunderTix also charges a monthly subscription that is named on its bar rather than drawn as height.

$25 is where our own calculator opens, the middle of the $15 / $25 / $40 range this site works from. There is no single published national average community-theatre ticket price, so treat $25 as a worked example rather than a benchmark. This is one pass through published rate cards, not a ranking. Places is the vendor on the last bar: tools are free, a reserved seat is $1, comps are $0, and general admission is free for small events for a limited time.

Where each bar comes from, and what it leaves out:

• Eventbrite $3.44 (13.76%). Published 3.7% + $1.79 service, plus 2.9% processing. On a $25 ticket that is $2.715 of service and $0.725 of processing, charged as one fee: $3.44. Buyers pay it by default on Eventbrite’s public pricing page.
• BookTix $1.84 (7.36%). Published 3.75% + $0.90 per card ticket, processing included. Cash and comps free.
• SimpleTix $2.32 (9.28%). Published online fee is 79¢ + 2%, which is $1.29 on a $25 ticket. Their pricing page’s processor example is 2.9% + $0.30, which is $1.03. SimpleTix routes processing through your own Stripe, Square, or PayPal, so that second line is a processor charge rather than SimpleTix’s platform fee.
• ThunderTix $1.25 plus a subscription. Published reserved seating is $1.25 per ticket plus $25 a month. The bar is the $1.25, on the same scale as the other per-ticket lines, and the subscription is written on the label rather than drawn as height. Processing sits outside the bar. Their GA line is $1.00 plus $20 a month.
• Places $1 (4%). One dollar on a reserved seat. Comps are $0, general admission is free for small events for a limited time, and processing is still TBD. We are the vendor on this bar, so weigh it accordingly.

On The Stage does not publish a formula we will treat as fact, so it is not on the chart. Compare is where named-vendor arithmetic lives, with a slider you can move off $25. What it costs to sell a ticket is our dollar without the other logos.

Methodology and update log

Last verified 12 Sep 2026. This page is a Places aggregation of primary sources. Places sells tickets, and our own $1 reserved-seat line is on the fee chart with our name on it.

What we collected. Association surveys (AACT Season Survey for the 2026 season, n=110; AACT Community Theatre Trends 2023–24, n=332). Federal participation rates (NEA SPPA 2022 highlights). Nonprofit and whole-economy arts studies (AEP6 for 2022; BEA Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account for 2023). A commercial Broadway season wrap (League, 2024–25). A national volunteer-hour series (Independent Sector, 2014–2024). Published ticketing rate cards read 21 Aug 2026.

What we did not collect. We did not invent a national community-theatre attendance total. We did not treat third-party headlines about “1.5 million volunteers,” “86 million in the audience,” or “$980 million” as AACT facts. We did not invent On The Stage dollars. Survey percentages describe respondents, not every U.S. house. SPPA describes U.S. adults, not your door. Broadway describes Broadway.

How the charts were drawn. Budget percents are the survey’s published figures, labeled to one decimal on the figure. Volunteer columns use the survey counts (28, 24, 27, 12, 8, 4, 7) and the rounded percents from the figure (25, 22, 25, 11, 7, 4, 6). Fee bars apply each vendor’s published formula to a $25 face, the figure our own calculator opens at. Where a vendor charges one combined fee, it is rounded once to the cent. Where processing is a separate charge, each line is rounded on its own and the split is named. Percentages are the fee shown divided by the $25 face. ThunderTix bar height is the $1.25 reserved fee, and the monthly subscription is named on the label rather than drawn as a second segment. CSV files under /stats/data/ are the machine copy.

Update log

• 12 Sep 2026. Fee arithmetic correction. SimpleTix is $2.32 on a $25 ticket: $1.29 to SimpleTix, plus a $1.03 processor example. The page previously summed those same two lines to $2.31. Percentages are now the fee shown divided by the $25 face, which moves BookTix from 7.35% to 7.36% and SimpleTix from 9.26% to 9.28%. Eventbrite, ThunderTix, and Places did not move.
• 12 Sep 2026. Fee chart correction. ThunderTix bar height is $1.25 only. Label is $1.25 + subscription. Monthly dollars are not drawn on the bars. Places stays $1, with no plus.
• 12 Sep 2026. Fee chart correction. Places bar labeled $1, with no plus. ThunderTix stacked as $1.25 reserved plus $25/month in the figure. Processing for ThunderTix remains outside the bar.
• 12 Sep 2026. First publication. Sources listed on this page. Fee cards last read 21 Aug 2026 against the URLs above. Fee worked example uses a $25 face.

Use these numbers

Take them to the board meeting, the grant application, the city council. They describe the houses that answered a survey, so name the survey and the year when you use them, and the number holds up under a follow-up question.

If you are pricing your own production, what it costs a community theatre to sell a ticket is our dollar without the other logos. If you can name your next production, apply.