A £150 Socket Becomes £217 on the Day: The Electrics Deadline Most Exhibitors Miss

A single 500W socket on a stand at WTM London 2025 cost £150.73 if it was ordered before 2 October. Order the same socket after 20 October and the price was £217.05. Nothing about the socket changed, only the date on the order form, and the gap works out at 44% on every item on the price list.

Two jumps of 20%

The official services contractor’s electrical form runs in three tiers. The standard rate sits 20% above early bird, and the onsite rate sits another 20% above that. A 1000W socket goes from £231.30 to £277.56 to £333.07, and a single LED spotlight goes from £71.10 to £102.38. The order form for DTX Manchester 2025 shows the same 20% step, and adds a further 20% surcharge on anything ordered once the event is in build, with payment needed 15 days before opening.

Take a modest stand with one 1000W socket, one 500W socket and two spotlights. Ordered early, that comes to £524.23. Ordered onsite, it comes to £754.88. The extra £230.65 buys nothing at all, before the £18.50 testing fee and VAT at 20% are added to either total. A 24 hour supply for a fridge or screens that stay on overnight costs three times the standard socket, £451.83 against £150.73 early, and the same form warns that booked power is only guaranteed during show open dates.

Why the early bird is harder than it looks

The catch is that the form asks for diagrams showing where every electrical item sits on the stand. That means the early bird price is really a deadline for locking the floor plan, and for a space-only stand that can fall weeks before the exhibitor manual’s other deadlines start to bite. A design still being tweaked in the final month can lose the discount on electrics alone, and cancelling an order later can cost up to 100% of what was booked.

What this means for a brief

The question worth settling before a contractor is appointed is who places the electrical order, by which date, and who pays the difference if it’s late. For a custom stand the contractor usually knows exactly what power the build needs, which makes them the natural person to order, but only if the exhibitor has told them which show’s price list applies and when the early bird closes. It’s the same kind of dated paperwork covered in the exhibitor manual paperwork nobody warns first-time exhibitors about, and it belongs in the same planning conversation as the wider cost of building a stand. These figures come from 2025 show forms, so prices and dates will differ from show to show, but the pattern of paying more as the show gets closer holds across the ones we looked at.

Stand Between introduces exhibitors to contractors who put ordering deadlines in the brief rather than discovering them at the service desk. If a show is on the calendar and nobody has said who is ordering the power, get in touch with Stand Between before the early bird closes.