Should you hire event lighting or just buy it?

At some point in planning a wedding or event, most people open a browser tab and think: hang on, I could just buy festoon lights for less than hiring them. And on the sticker price of the lights alone, you might be right. So let's do the comparison properly, because the sticker price is where the buying cost starts, not where it ends.

We'll be straight with you about our own interest here: we're a hire company, so of course we think hire usually wins. But we've also spent 10+ years in AV and events watching what happens to bought lighting after its first outing, and we'd rather you make the decision with real numbers than find out the expensive way. There are genuinely cases where buying is the smarter move, and we'll spell those out too — including the point where we'd tell a venue to stop hiring from us.

The short version: for one event, or even one event a year, hire wins on cost, safety and sanity. For a venue running events every week, ownership starts to earn its keep. Everything below is the working behind that answer, starting with what it actually costs to own a quality 60 metre festoon setup — the size covered by our entry festoon package at $895.

First, quality matters. The lights that survive an Australian summer outdoors are commercial-grade: IP65 rated, connectable strings, LED bulbs that can be replaced individually. Cheap consumer strings from a marketplace listing are usually IP20 or IP44, unsafe outdoors, and rarely survive one packdown. Commercial-grade festoon typically runs in the vicinity of $15 to $25 per metre to buy, so 60 metres lands somewhere around $900 to $1,500 before a single light is in the air.

Then comes everything the lights need:

• Rigging: catenary wire, tensioners, shackles and fixings to hang spans safely — commonly a few hundred dollars for a modest setup, because festoon cable should hang from support wire, not from its own plugs.
• Access equipment: a platform ladder tall enough to work safely at hanging height is several hundred dollars; anything higher needs hired access gear anyway.
• Power and protection: outdoor-rated leads, weatherproof connections and safety switches, not the domestic power board in the garage.
• Storage: 60 metres of festoon, wound properly (and it must be wound properly), fills serious shelf space between events — for years.

Realistically you're at $1,500 to $2,500 all-in for a safe, complete 60 metre setup — before your own time. And then there's the part no spreadsheet includes: you're also the installer, at height, the day before your own event.

Be honest about the time, too. A first-time install of 60 metres — measuring spans, tensioning wire, clipping strings, running and protecting power — routinely swallows the better part of a day for someone learning on the job, against the 2 to 3 hours it takes a crew who has done it hundreds of times. That day comes out of the busiest week of your planning calendar, and it's the same week you'd otherwise be confirming caterers and seating charts.

Our entry festoon package is $895 for 60 metres — 60 warm white LED bulbs at 2700K on IP65-rated strings — and the number only makes sense once you know what's inside it. It's not 60 metres of cable in a tub on your doorstep. The package includes:

• Delivery to your venue anywhere in our Gold Coast, Brisbane, Byron Bay and Northern Rivers service area.
• Professional installation — a typical install takes our crew 2 to 3 hours, rigged on proper catenary hardware from rated anchor points.
• Packdown afterwards, so nobody in your family is on a ladder at midnight unpicking cable ties.
• Tested and tagged equipment, which most venues require before external electrical gear comes on site at all.

The 24 hour hire covers a standard event, extended rental is $145 per 24 hours if you want the lights up across a whole weekend, and options like raised 3 metre beams ($200) or a dimmable controller ($145) bolt on where the design calls for them. Larger events step up to 120 metres at $1,495 or 200 metres at $1,945 — and for context, buying and safely rigging 200 metres yourself is a four-figure project plus a genuinely hard installation. If you want to see what the design side adds on top of the gear, our event lighting design service is where hire stops being a transaction and starts being a result.

Suppose you buy anyway. The purchase price turns out to be the friendly part of ownership. The recurring costs are what catch people:

• Testing and tagging: venues increasingly require current electrical test tags on external equipment. That's a recurring cost and an errand, every year, for gear you use once or twice.
• Maintenance: bulbs fail, seals degrade, connections corrode in coastal air. Hire companies absorb this invisibly; owners discover it the afternoon before an event.
• Storage done wrong: festoon stored in loose loops in a garage arrives at event two as a tangle with cracked seals. Correct winding and dry storage is a discipline, not a default.
• The install itself: working at height, rigging load over people's heads and running power outdoors are all skilled tasks with real consequences — it's why safety and compliance is a service page on our site and not a footnote.

There's also a quieter cost: design. Owning lights doesn't tell you where to hang them, what the venue's power can carry, or how to make one product look intentional rather than draped. Part of what hire buys is a thousand previous events' worth of judgement showing up with the gear.

Insurance deserves its own line. When we install lighting, our business carries the responsibility for the equipment and the install — that's part of what the invoice covers. When you buy and self-install, you carry it: if a DIY rig over a dance floor fails, or an untagged lead causes a problem at a venue, the question of whose insurance responds gets uncomfortable quickly. Most people comparing prices never price this in, because nothing goes wrong at most events. Venues, notably, do price it in — it's why so many now insist on professional installation for anything overhead.

Here's the other side, said plainly. Buying makes sense when the usage maths flips, and it flips on frequency:

• Venues running 50+ events a year: if festoon is part of your permanent look, hiring it repeatedly is throwing money away. Buy quality gear, have it professionally installed once as a semi-permanent feature, and put it on a maintenance schedule.
• Planners and stylists with a signature item they use at most events — a set of table lights or battery candles, say — where the item is small, safe at ground level and easy to store.
• Anyone buying decorative, low-risk pieces: lanterns, battery centrepieces and tabletop pieces are great to own. No rigging, no mains power, no heights.

The dividing line isn't really cost — it's rigging, power and height. The moment a lighting idea involves working above head height or running mains power outdoors, frequency has to be high before ownership beats hire, because you're taking on the safety burden along with the asset. We say this to corporate clients regularly: own your ground-level styling, hire your overhead lighting, and let the hire company own the risk. Venues that host our gear often start with our uplighting or festoon on repeat hire and only buy once the bookings prove the pattern.

There's also a sensible middle path between the two extremes: extended hire. If your event runs across a whole weekend — a festival, a multi-day corporate program, a wedding with a recovery brunch — extended rental at $145 per 24 hours keeps professionally installed lighting up for the duration at a fraction of purchase cost. You get ownership's convenience for exactly as long as you need it, and none of it comes home in your boot afterwards.

The plan that makes buying feel free: buy the lights, use them once, sell them for most of the price. We've watched this plan meet reality many times, and reality is unkind to it.

Used event lighting sells into a market of buyers who are all running the same plan, which means supply is high and every listing says "used once for a wedding". Realistically, once-used festoon fetches a fraction of its purchase price, takes weeks to sell, and involves the usual marketplace overhead of no-shows and lowball offers — all landing in the weeks right after your event, which is precisely when you have no energy for it. Rigging hardware, cut to your specific spans, is worth close to nothing to anyone else.

There's a version of the resale plan that does work, for what it's worth: buying genuinely useful ground-level pieces — battery candles, lanterns, table lighting — and simply keeping them. They're cheap, they store in one box, and they'll light every dinner party you host for a decade. It's specifically the overhead, rigged, mains-powered gear where the buy-use-sell plan falls apart.

Run the honest version of the numbers: $1,500 to $2,500 to buy and equip, your own labour to install and remove, then a recovery of perhaps a few hundred dollars months later. Against that, $895 hired — delivered, installed, packed down, tested and tagged, insured against the whole category of things going wrong. For a single event, the maths isn't close. For a couple planning a wedding specifically, our wedding lighting packages bundle the common combinations so the comparison is even simpler.

Strip everything above down to three questions. Will you use this lighting more than a handful of times a year? Does the idea involve height, rigging or outdoor mains power? Do you have somewhere dry and organised to keep it, and the patience to maintain and re-tag it? Unless you answered yes, no, yes — in that order — hire is almost certainly your answer. If you're a venue answering yes to the first question, talk to us anyway: we'll tell you honestly when you've reached the point where buying beats our own invoice, because a client who trusts the advice comes back for the gear we're actually good at.

Whichever way you land, decide early. Hire dates in peak season book out, and buying done properly — researching gear, waiting on shipping, testing everything — takes longer than the fortnight most people leave for it.

And if you're one event deep and just want it to look extraordinary without owning a garage full of cable: that's the job we built the company for. Browse the full hire range, from festoon and fairy light canopies to uplighting and dance floor lighting, or skip straight to a quote — we respond within 24 hours, and every price you see includes delivery, installation and packdown. No ladders, no tangle, no marketplace listing in February.