How much does a London conference venue cost? Real 2027 rates compared with etc.venues, Convene, TOGETHER and the hotels

A note before the numbers. Like hotel bedrooms and airline seats, London conference venue prices move with supply and demand — but they are far less transparent, for two reasons. First, there is no agreed grading system (nothing equivalent to economy, business and first class), so a “£100 day delegate rate” at one venue can be a different product from a “£100 DDR” at the next. Second, every quote bundles different things: some include VAT, some do not; some include a private catering room, standard breakout AV or stationery, some charge for each separately. A straight headline-to-headline comparison, on its own, is almost meaningless.

There are, however, some broad truths. Rates in school holidays are cheaper, with the possible exception of the week before Christmas. The same room costs different amounts on a Tuesday and a Friday, in March and in August, twelve months out and three weeks out, and every operator in the London conference venue hire market — Cavendish included — revises its rate card at least once a year. Every figure on this page is a snapshot taken in September 2026 from our own 2027 guide rates and from pricing research we commissioned across the London market during 2026. Treat them as an indication of where the market sits, not a price list. The only number that binds anyone is the one on a written quote for a specific date.

With that said: almost nobody in London publishes venue prices at all, which makes budgeting a conference harder than it needs to be. So here is an indication of what Cavendish Venues charges across our five central London conference venues, how the rest of the market prices, which dates cost less, what our 2026 pricing research found, and how our numbers compare with the venues we are most often shortlisted against — etc.venues, Convene, TOGETHER at 88 Wood Street, The Brewery, De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms and the conference hotels: Park Plaza, Hilton, Novotel, Holiday Inn and Leonardo.

London conference venue cost: the short answer

For a one-day conference of 250 to 350 delegates in central London, all figures excluding VAT:

The first three tiers overlap heavily, and within them the date matters more than the brand. The fourth tier is not a better conference room — the Forum at 1 Basinghall Avenue and the Forum at The Minster Building are purpose-built to the same standard as anything in it. It is a different pricing model: exclusive use of a whole building plus a guaranteed spend, which suits a different kind of budget. The rest of this article explains all of that.

What Cavendish charges — 2027 peak rates, Tuesday to Thursday

These are our 2027 guide rates, in force from 14 September 2026, before any date-based discount. Every venue is within five minutes’ walk of a Tube station, every day delegate rate includes standard AV and a dedicated event manager, and there is no minimum spend — only a minimum headcount.

The cheapest and most expensive days to book — and why the gap is so big

This is the part of venue pricing that organisers most often miss, and it is where the real savings are.

Conference venues sell a perishable product. An empty room on a Friday earns nothing, and a room that sits dark for the whole of August earns nothing for a month. So, exactly like an airline filling seats, venues price to fill the days that would otherwise go unsold. At Cavendish the pattern for 2027 is:

The same room, the same food, the same AV team, the same headcount. The only thing that changes is the date.

A few things worth knowing:

Monday and Friday are the easy win. Twenty per cent off, no compromise on the venue, and Monday in particular has the practical advantage that your set-up can happen on the Sunday when the building is quiet. In the enquiries we see, most organisers who ask for “Tuesday to Thursday” have no real reason for excluding Monday — it is habit.

Bank-holiday weeks are not just the bank holiday. The Tuesday after a bank-holiday Monday is a full-price peak day on most rate cards, but it is also one of the softest days of the year for demand, because so many people take the week off. It is a good day to negotiate — more so than the bank holiday itself, when most of your delegates will not come anyway.

School holidays are the biggest lever nobody uses. The Easter fortnight and the six weeks from late July are around 40 per cent off at Cavendish, and materially cheaper across most of the London market. Association conferences, training programmes, exam boards and public-sector events — anything whose audience is not tied to the school calendar — can take a sizeable chunk out of the venue line by moving three weeks either way. For 2027 the Easter school break runs from 26 March to 9 April, and the summer break from the week commencing 26 July to 3 September.

The February and May half-terms are not discounted at Cavendish, and in our experience are treated as normal peak weeks at most City venues. Do not assume every school holiday is cheap — check.

Christmas is its own market. The three weeks from 20 December are heavily discounted for daytime conferences and heavily in demand for evening parties. If you want a December drinks reception, book early; if you want a December training day, you will find it very good value.

Multiple events, or a series, unlock better rates. If you are running more than one event with us in a twelve-month period — a series of quarterly conferences, a rolling training programme, a national roadshow that visits London two or three times, or a set of separate departmental awaydays — that is a materially different conversation from a single-day enquiry. The same is true of a single booking that fills more than one day: a two- or three-day conference, a training week, or a conference with an evening reception and dinner the night before. Ask for a series rate up front rather than negotiating each event in isolation. At Cavendish we routinely offer preferential rates on multi-day and repeat bookings; the level of discount depends on the number of days, the dates and the total value, so it is agreed case by case rather than published on the rate card. Most London venues will do something similar if you ask — it rarely appears on the first quote unless you flag the wider programme at enquiry stage.

Booking window matters less than you would think. Unlike airlines, most venues do not ratchet the rate up as the date approaches. What changes is availability. Peak Tuesday-to-Thursday dates in the City for 150-plus delegates go six to twelve months out; late availability on those days is rare, but a Monday or Friday four weeks out is often a good conversation to have.

For evening and weekend events specifically, see our evening and weekend events page.

Three things that decide the price of a London conference venue

1. Which pricing model the venue uses — and what “included” actually means

Day Delegate Rate (DDR). One per-head price that bundles the room, arrival coffee, mid-morning and afternoon breaks, lunch, water, projector, screen, Wi-Fi and an event manager. This is what Cavendish, most purpose-built conference centres and most four-star business hotels use. Multiply by your headcount and you are within a few per cent of the final invoice. Our guide to how to budget a corporate event walks through the other line items.

Room hire plus minimum spend. You pay a fixed hire fee for the space, then commit to a guaranteed food-and-beverage floor that you must spend whether your delegates eat it or not. Convene, the flagship etc.venues sites, TOGETHER, The Brewery and most City livery halls price this way. It suits large budgets that want exclusive use of a landmark building; it is a poor fit for a 200-person AGM that needs sandwiches and a projector.

Be very careful here: what venues include and do not include varies enormously. Some include “basic AV”, but in reality you can never run a conference on what is included, so you end up buying additional kit and technicians — and for those extras some venues charge an absolute fortune. Some charge separately for a catering room, which leaves open the question of how you are supposed to use a catering package without a room to serve it in. The list goes on: what it costs if your event overruns, what you pay if you have to cancel, what happens if your numbers change, whether VAT is included, whether any breakout rooms are included. Our thirty-second checklist further down covers the questions to ask before you compare two headlines.

2. The date — see above

3. What sits on top of the headline rate

A DDR may or may not cover standard AV. Camera crews, live streaming, comfort monitors, exhibitor stands, drinks receptions, evening dinners and breakout-room AV are priced separately almost everywhere. For a well-produced 300-delegate day with a drinks reception and one breakout AV package, budget an extra £3,000 to £8,000. For hybrid and virtual events, add the streaming and vision-mixing costs set out in our hybrid events guide.

What the market actually charges: our 2026 pricing research

Because so few London venues publish prices, in 2026 we commissioned an external agency to do the comparison for us. Between May and September they analysed the quotes issued by London venues for three comparable one-day conference briefs — 250 to 350 delegates, each sent to a shortlist of four to eight venues through a venue-finding agency — and we set them against our own rate card. Every figure below has been converted to exclude VAT so it can be read directly against the Cavendish rates above.

Brief A — 250 to 300 delegates theatre-style, two breakouts of 70, a Monday to Friday in the first two weeks of October 2026. Eight venues quoted, from £16,100 to £25,600. Two mid-market hotel chains came in lowest at £16,100 and £16,250; a Covent Garden ballroom at £18,200; a Southwark event space at £21,800; a purpose-built conference centre in Southwark at £22,700; Cavendish, The Minster Building, at £22,800 for the Monday; and a five-star hotel on the South Bank at £25,600.

Brief B — 250 delegates cabaret, a 150-seat theatre breakout and 15 to 20 exhibitors, a Thursday in November 2026. Four venues quoted, from £22,300 to £39,200: a Kensington hotel at £22,300, a Victoria hotel at £24,000, a stadium conference suite in east London at £30,800 and a landmark riverside venue at £39,200.

Brief C — 300 to 350 delegates cabaret, 25 to 35 exhibitor stands, five or six breakouts, full AV, mid-to-late April 2027. Four venues quoted, from £28,750 to £43,900: the same Covent Garden ballroom at £28,750, a west London conference hotel at £38,250, a riverside hotel at £39,300 and a south London cricket ground at £43,900. This brief is larger than any single Cavendish room, which is why we do not appear in it.

Two honest observations from those numbers.

First, on a bare headline Cavendish is not the cheapest name on a London conference shortlist, and we do not pretend to be. What the headline misses is that a hotel figure is typically a DDR with third-party AV, breakout room hire and catering upgrades still to come, while ours is the number you will pay. A dedicated conference venue is a specialist operator, with the expertise and credentials to back it up. A hotel’s primary business is letting bedrooms, then banqueting (which often comes attached to those bedrooms), and conferences come third — and that order of priority tends to show up in the attention and customer service a conference client receives. At Cavendish, our reviews and industry awards speak to a laser focus on conferences, and nothing else.

Second, where the comparison is like for like — a purpose-built venue with in-house AV and catering — the quotes cluster tightly. In Brief A, Cavendish and the other purpose-built centre were within £100 of each other. That is not an accident: it is what a purpose-built conference day costs in central London, and the choice between us comes down to the building, the food, the team and the walk from the station, not the price.

What a real Cavendish quote is made of

The Minster Building quote in Brief A is a useful one to take apart, because it was a Monday and shows the off-peak rate doing its work.

Move the same event to a Wednesday and it would have been £28,500. Move it to the October half-term week and it would have been £17,100. Same room, same food, same team.

The exclusive-hire tier, for comparison

For a 400-delegate classroom day in June 2026, one flagship City exclusive-hire venue quoted:

That is not an outlier; it is how the exclusive-hire tier prices, and it is the right answer for a global product launch with a seven-figure budget. What you are paying for is exclusive use of the whole building and a hospitality-led service, not a better conference room. For the conference itself — the auditorium, the AV, the catering — 1 Basinghall Avenue and The Minster Building deliver the same standard on a day delegate rate.

Cavendish vs etc.venues, Convene, TOGETHER, The Brewery and the hotels: where the price gap comes from

etc.venues prices compared with Cavendish

etc.venues (Prospero House, County Hall, 155 Bishopsgate, St Paul’s, Monument and others) is the largest purpose-built operator in London and the closest like-for-like comparison to Cavendish. Their standard sites price on a day delegate rate that lands within pounds of ours; our research above bears that out. Their flagship sites — 155 Bishopsgate and County Hall in particular — move to exclusive hire or a much higher DDR for large events. For a 250-to-450-delegate conference in the City on a DDR, the Forum at 1 Basinghall Avenue is the direct equivalent.

Convene London prices (Sancroft, 22 Bishopsgate, 133 Houndsditch)

Convene is premium, exclusive-use and hospitality-led, with minimum hire fees from the mid-£30,000s per day and food-and-beverage minimums that can exceed £100,000. On a comparable headcount that is several times a Cavendish day. The room, the AV and the food are not several times better — the price reflects exclusive use of the building and the hospitality model. Superb for the right brief; for a conference that needs a purpose-built auditorium, in-house AV and a fixed per-head price, 1 Basinghall Avenue and The Minster Building do the same job at a fraction of the cost.

TOGETHER at 88 Wood Street prices

TOGETHER opened in early 2026 with a 500-theatre, 270-cabaret auditorium and a nine-metre LED wall, and prices as a flagship exclusive-hire venue rather than on a day delegate rate. If you need a single 500-seat room with an LED wall it is one of a handful of options in the Square Mile. If you need 250 to 450 delegates with breakouts at a day delegate rate, 1 Basinghall Avenue — a purpose-built auditorium of the same generation, four minutes’ walk away — delivers the same standard of room on a fixed per-head price.

The Brewery, Chiswell Street: hire costs

The Brewery is a landmark for awards dinners and large receptions, on an exclusive-hire model. Strong for evening events; for daytime conferences its hire fee has to be set against a DDR that already includes catering and AV.

De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms day delegate rate

De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms appears on more of our shortlists than any other single venue. A Covent Garden landmark with a large ballroom, pricing on a DDR that for large numbers tends to sit a little under ours. The trade-off is a hotel-style operation in a heritage building rather than a purpose-built conference floor.

Conference hotel prices: Park Plaza, Hilton, Novotel, Holiday Inn, Leonardo

Broad choice, bedrooms on site, DDRs that start competitively. The number to watch is the extras: ballroom hire, AV from a third-party supplier and per-item catering upgrades tend to push a hotel quote 15 to 50 per cent above the DDR headline by the time the contract arrives.

We are not the right choice for every one of those briefs. We are the right choice when you want a purpose-built room, an in-house AV team, catering from our own kitchens, a B Corp-certified operator and a price you can put in a budget on day one and not revisit. See our conference venue City of London and West End conference venues pages for how the five buildings differ.

How to read a London venue quote in thirty seconds

1. Is it inclusive or exclusive of VAT? Agents often present inclusive figures; venues usually quote exclusive. A 20 per cent gap is easy to miss.
2. Is it a DDR or hire-plus-minimum-spend? If the first line is “minimum food and beverage spend”, you are in the £150,000-plus tier, whatever the room hire says.
3. What is bundled in the DDR? Standard is room, three catering breaks, lunch, water, projector, screen, Wi-Fi and stationery. Anything beyond a projector is usually extra — our room layout guide covers what each set-up needs.
4. What is the minimum headcount? At Cavendish it ranges from 70 (44 Hallam Street) to 250 (the Forum at 1 Basinghall Avenue). Confirmed numbers below the minimum are billed at the minimum, at every DDR venue.
5. Are the extras on the first quote? Cloakroom, night-before set-up, security, drinks reception, dinner, streaming. Ask up front. A venue that can only give you the headline is a venue whose final invoice you cannot yet predict.
6. What does cancellation cost? Read the sliding scale before you sign — our venue insurance guide explains what to look for.

Why the Cavendish number is the number

• Catering is ours. Mayfair Catering is our own kitchen, so the lunch in your DDR is not a third-party contract with a margin on top.
• AV is in-house. The projector, screen, microphones and technician are ours, not a supplier invoicing us and us invoicing you.
• Thirty years of doing one thing. We have run conferences in central London since 1995 — five venues, 2 to 450 delegates, nothing else.
• The quote is itemised on day one. Room, catering, AV, breakouts, reception — on the first email, not the contract.

Frequently asked questions

What is a day delegate rate? A single per-head price covering the meeting room, arrival refreshments, morning and afternoon breaks, lunch, standard AV (projector, screen, Wi-Fi, microphones) and event support for the day.

What is the average DDR in central London in 2027? For a full-day peak weekday at a purpose-built venue or business hotel, roughly £75 to £120 per head excluding VAT. Premium hotels and exclusive-hire venues are higher — typically £150 to £300-plus per head effective once minimum spends are included.

What are the cheapest days to hire a conference venue in London? Mondays and Fridays are usually 20 per cent below the Tuesday-to-Thursday peak. School-holiday weeks — the Easter fortnight, late July to early September and October half-term — are around 40 per cent off at Cavendish. Weekends and bank holidays are cheaper still, at around half the peak rate.

Do London conference venues charge minimum spends? Exclusive-hire venues — Convene, the flagship etc.venues sites, TOGETHER, The Brewery, most livery halls — almost always do. Purpose-built conference venues like Cavendish use a minimum headcount instead: you commit to a number of delegates, not a pound value.

Do venue prices go up closer to the date, like flights? Generally no. Most London venues hold their rate card for the year and change availability rather than price. What you lose by booking late is choice of date, not a better rate.

How far ahead should I book? Peak-season Tuesday-to-Thursday dates in the City for 150-plus delegates go six to twelve months out. Flexibility on a Monday or Friday, or on a school-holiday week, opens up both availability and the discounts above.

Do you discount multiple events or a series? Yes. Multi-day bookings, repeat programmes and a series of events run with us over a twelve-month period are all quoted at preferential rates. The level of discount depends on the number of days, the dates and the overall value, and is agreed case by case rather than published — mention the wider programme at enquiry stage so it is priced in from the first quote.

How much does etc.venues cost compared with Cavendish? On a like-for-like day delegate rate, etc.venues’ standard sites and Cavendish land within a few pounds per head of each other; in our 2026 research the two purpose-built centres quoting the same brief were within £100 overall. etc.venues’ flagship sites, 155 Bishopsgate and County Hall, move to exclusive hire or a much higher DDR for large events.

How much does Convene cost in London? Convene’s London venues (Sancroft, 22 Bishopsgate, 133 Houndsditch) price on exclusive hire plus a guaranteed minimum food-and-beverage spend — hire fees from the mid-£30,000s per day and spend minimums that can exceed £100,000, before AV. For a comparable headcount on a day delegate rate, a Cavendish day is a fraction of that.

How much does TOGETHER at 88 Wood Street cost? TOGETHER prices as an exclusive-hire venue rather than on a day delegate rate, so the figure depends on the brief; expect room hire plus a minimum spend. For 250 to 450 delegates on a fixed per-head rate, the Forum at 1 Basinghall Avenue is four minutes’ walk away.

Are these prices inclusive of VAT? No. All Cavendish rates on this page are exclusive of VAT at 20 per cent, and the market quotes have been converted to the same basis.

Get a London conference venue quote for your date

Send us your date, numbers and format and we will come back with a fully itemised quote — room, catering, AV, breakouts and any evening reception — within one business hour. If your date is flexible, tell us: we will show you what a Monday, a Friday or a school-holiday week does to the number. Request a quote.

• 1 America Square, EC3 — Tower Hill · Fenchurch Street
• The Minster Building, EC3 — Tower Hill · Fenchurch Street
• 1 Basinghall Avenue, EC2 — Bank · Moorgate · St Paul’s
• 44 Hallam Street, W1 — Great Portland Street · Oxford Circus
• 22 Duchess Mews, W1 — Great Portland Street · Regent’s Park

Or browse by what you are planning: conference venues London · meeting rooms · exhibition space · drinks receptions · find us.

Cavendish Venues rates shown are 2027 guide rates as at September 2026, exclusive of VAT, subject to date and availability, and revised at least annually. Market figures are drawn from research commissioned by Cavendish Venues into quotes issued for comparable briefs between May and September 2026, converted to exclude VAT; venues are anonymised, and figures are indicative only. Competitor pricing models are described from publicly available information and quotes seen in the course of that research.