Speak fluent show floor.

Discounted pricing on show services — electrical, internet, rigging, cleaning, material handling — ordered before a published deadline, typically two to four weeks out. The identical service ordered onsite routinely costs far more. Circle the advance deadline the day your exhibitor kit arrives; it is the cheapest money you will ever save on a show.

A storage facility run by the general service contractor that receives your freight in the weeks before a show, then delivers it to your booth for move-in. It costs slightly more per hundredweight than shipping direct to show site, but your freight is guaranteed on the floor when setup starts — which is why experienced exhibitors use it by default.

Screens, LED walls, projectors, speakers and the hardware driving them. On a tech-forward booth, AV and technology can reach 20–30% of the build budget — the fastest single way to move a booth’s cost in either direction. Order power to match early: a video wall that arrives without its electrical order is a very expensive crate.

The rear structure of an inline booth, typically eight feet tall and spanning the full width of the space. Show rules generally hold inline height to the back half of the booth so neighbors stay visible. The backwall carries your largest graphic and most of your lighting, so it earns a disproportionate share of design attention.

The contractor’s holding area on or near the show floor where empty crates and equipment sit during show days. Labeled empties go there at setup and come back at teardown — in no particular order, and not quickly. If a crate is missing at move-out, the boneyard is the first place to look.

What the show includes with your space rental — usually pipe and drape, an ID sign, sometimes a table or carpet. It is the bare minimum, not a booth. Everything an exhibitor actually gets noticed with — structure, graphics, lighting, flooring — is brought in separately, which is why “the booth is included” surprises first-timers.

Flooring for your space — most shows require the concrete to be covered. Options run from show-rented carpet to owned custom flooring and printed plank. Rented flooring at onsite rates adds up fast; owned flooring pays back across a season. Double padding is the cheapest booth-staff morale upgrade in the industry.

Proof of liability coverage that show management requires from exhibitors and from any exhibitor-appointed contractor working the floor, with minimum coverage amounts and named additional insureds. If your booth crew’s COI is not on file by the deadline, they do not get on the floor — file it with the same urgency as the space contract.

An inline booth at the end of a row, open to aisles on two sides instead of one. The extra exposure usually carries a price premium and delivers meaningfully more traffic and sightlines. If the budget allows one real-estate upgrade for a 10×10 or 10×20 program, the corner is usually the highest-value move available.

The custom wooden shipping container an exhibit travels in. Crates matter more than they sound: drayage is billed by weight, so crate engineering directly changes the material-handling bill, and a well-planned crate cuts install time by unpacking in the order the booth goes up. Ours are built alongside the exhibits they carry.

The billing unit for drayage: one CWT equals 100 pounds. The contractor weighs your freight, rounds up per shipment, and multiplies by the published CWT rate, with surcharges for special handling. The consequence: two hundred pounds of over-built crate costs exactly as much to move across the dock as two hundred pounds of exhibit.

Logos and lettering built with physical depth — routed acrylic, fabricated metal or 3D-printed forms — rather than printed flat. Depth catches light and reads as quality from across an aisle. A lit dimensional logo on a backwall or hanging sign remains one of the most reliable premium cues a booth can carry.

Where freight enters the hall — and the choke point of every move-in, which is why shows run marshaling yards and targeted move-in schedules to meter trucks through it. Your carrier does not simply drive up: it checks into the marshaling yard and waits for a dock assignment.

A booth with a second story — meeting space upstairs, presence everywhere. Double-decks need engineering review, permits and rigging coordination, and they multiply the fabrication budget by roughly 1.5×. In exchange they double the usable footage on the same floor space and stay visible across the entire hall.

The fee for moving your freight from the loading dock to your booth space, and back out after the show — billed by weight (per CWT), not distance. The forklift may travel two hundred feet; a mid-size booth still commonly pays $1,500–$5,000+. It is the most underestimated line in exhibit budgeting. Full math in our drayage guide.

Any contractor an exhibitor hires who is not the show’s official contractor — your exhibit house supervising the install, for example. EACs must be declared to show management by a deadline, usually about thirty days out, with a COI on file. Miss it and your crew can be denied floor access while you pay the official crew to assemble a booth they have never seen.

The label that marks a crate as empty and ready to leave the floor during show days. Labeled empties go to the boneyard and return at teardown. The details that matter: stickers come from the service desk, unlabeled crates can be discarded, and empties come back in no particular order — number and inventory everything.

The show’s master document — order forms, rates, deadlines, rules, target dates and floor plans. It arrives months out and reads like a phone book, which is why so much of it goes unread, and why so many budgets blow up onsite. Read the material handling and electrical pages first; that is where the money is.

A service that must be bought from the venue’s or show’s designated provider — commonly electrical, rigging, plumbing and catering. No outside crew may perform it, regardless of who built your booth. Which services are exclusive varies by venue and city, so check the kit before assuming your install crew can do everything.

An access point in the exhibit hall floor carrying electrical, water or data lines. Utilities are delivered through the nearest port, which is why power drops land where the floor allows rather than where you imagined them. Mark utility locations on your booth drawing early so cords surface under the booth, not in the aisle.

What happens when your outbound paperwork or carrier is missing at teardown: the general contractor re-routes your freight onto its house carrier at prevailing rates — always more than a booked carrier. Turn in the material handling agreement and confirm your carrier’s check-in time before you leave the floor.

Round-trip transportation of the exhibit between shop, warehouse and show. Cross-country for a 10×20 runs $3,000–$8,000; a booth built in Las Vegas for a Las Vegas show crosses town instead, and the line nearly disappears. Freight is separate from drayage — freight reaches the dock, drayage covers the last two hundred feet.

The show’s official contractor — responsible for the hall itself: aisle carpet, drayage, rigging, signage, labor and the service desk. Exhibitors buy some services from the GSC by requirement, like material handling and most rigging, and may bring an exhibitor-appointed contractor for others, like booth install and supervision.

The printed skin of the booth — fabric murals, backlit SEG panels, vinyl and dimensional lettering. Typically 8–15% of a custom build, and the highest-leverage line in the budget: fresh graphics on an owned structure make last year’s booth read as this year’s. Backlit fabric costs more than flat print and outperforms it in nearly every hall.

A structure suspended from the ceiling above an island or peninsula booth — visible across the hall in a way nothing at floor level can be. Adds roughly $2,500–$9,000+ to a build depending on size and complexity, plus rigging, which is usually an exclusive service ordered at advance rates. It is how people find you from three aisles away.

Booth construction from rigid panels — wood, laminate or aluminum-framed — rather than fabric or pipe and drape. Hardwall reads as permanent and premium, supports mounted screens and shelving, and defines enclosed rooms. It is heavier than tension fabric, which shows up in the drayage line; most custom booths mix both deliberately.

The labor that assembles the booth before the show and takes it down after — at most major venues, union labor billed hourly with overtime multipliers outside standard windows. A booth engineered to go up fast saves money at every show for the life of the structure. See also straight time, overtime and labor call.

A booth in a row, flanked by neighbors and open to one aisle — 10×10 and 10×20 are the standard footprints. Height limits, typically eight feet at the backwall and lower toward the aisle, shape what is possible. Inlines are the workhorse of the show floor and the best-value real estate for most first-time and mid-size exhibitors.

A booth open to aisles on all four sides — 20×20 and larger. No shared walls means far higher height allowances, which unlocks hanging signs, towers and double-decks. Custom islands generally start around $50,000+; see the full breakdown in our booth cost guide.

A freestanding unit built for one focused job — product demo, lead capture, check-in — either inside a larger booth or standing alone. Kiosks travel light and reconfigure easily. Retail and point-of-purchase programs use the same form factor, which is why exhibit kiosks and retail kiosks tend to come from the same shops.

The scheduled crew request for booth work: how many workers, which trade, what start time. Labor bills from the call time whether your freight has arrived or not — the classic expensive mistake is a crew standing idle waiting on a late truck. Coordinate the labor call against your targeted move-in date, not against hope.

The badge-scanning system rented from the show that turns booth conversations into a contact list tied to the registration database. Order it at advance rates and brief the staff on actually using it — most booths capture a fraction of their real conversations. The booth gets people in; lead retrieval is how the booth proves it worked.

A video wall assembled from LED tiles — seamless at any size and far brighter than stitched monitors. Plan on technology like this consuming 20–30% of a tech-forward booth budget once hardware, mounting structure, power and content are counted. Motion on an LED wall is the strongest single traffic driver on a modern show floor.

A frame with internal LED illumination behind tensioned fabric — the glow that makes a graphic read from across the hall and makes color saturate. Backlit costs more than flat print and changes booth presence more per dollar than almost anything else. Most premium booth walls today are SEG lightboxes.

The staging lot where trucks check in and wait for a dock assignment — freight does not drive straight to the hall. A carrier that misses its window goes to the back of the queue, which cascades into late freight and idle labor. Marshaling discipline is half of what a good freight plan is actually buying.

The show-services term covering drayage plus everything around it: receiving freight at the advance warehouse or show site, delivering it to the booth, storing empties, returning crates and loading out. On the invoice, material handling is the line item; drayage is what everyone calls it. Billed per CWT, with surcharges for special handling.

A booth built from standardized, reconfigurable components — frames, panels, counters — that assemble into different footprints. Lighter and cheaper to ship and install than full custom construction, at some cost in distinctiveness. Strong programs mix both: custom presence where it counts, modular efficiency everywhere else. See our custom vs. modular guide.

The scheduled window when exhibitors and contractors may build in the hall — several days for large shows, one frantic day for small ones, with bigger booths targeted earlier. Everything about a smooth move-in was decided weeks before it: freight at the advance warehouse, a confirmed labor call, and your targeted date on the calendar.

Teardown — from show close until the hall must be empty, always less time than move-in. Freight has to be crated, labeled and matched to a booked carrier before the deadline, or it gets forced. The show is not over when the aisles close; it is over when the crates are on the truck.

The show-designated firm — the general service contractor — running the hall’s services: drayage, rigging, aisle carpet, the service desk. Some services may only be bought from the official contractor; others can go to an exhibitor-appointed contractor of your choosing. The exhibitor kit spells out which is which, venue by venue.

Labor billed outside standard weekday windows — typically 1.5× evenings and Saturdays and 2× Sundays and holidays, varying by venue and trade. Show schedules routinely push installs into overtime windows, so the same booth can carry very different labor bills depending on its move-in date. Have labor modeled at the actual scheduled hours, not straight time.

A booth open to aisles on three sides, backing onto another booth — usually 20×20 and larger. More presence than an inline, fewer restrictions than a shared row, with height rules on the shared back side. A common intermediate step between an inline program and a full island.

The aluminum uprights and fabric curtains that define raw booth spaces at most shows — included in the booth package, and the visual definition of having brought nothing. Useful as infrastructure; as a booth, it is the baseline every exhibit exists to rise above.

Point-of-purchase display — retail fixtures and merchandising units built to sell product in stores. Same materials, engineering and graphic production as trade show work, aimed at retail. Shops that build both let a brand carry one design language from the show floor to the store shelf; see our POP display work.

The lightweight folding-frame booth with magnetic fabric or graphic panels — the classic portable 10×10 backwall that fits in a car and installs in minutes without contracted labor. Unbeatable economics at the entry level, with a low ceiling on presence. Most exhibitors graduate to modular or custom as show count and stakes rise.

The umbrella category for exhibits that travel light and install without contracted labor: pop-ups, banner stands, tabletops and small tension-fabric systems. Portables make sense for small footprints and regional circuits — especially where drayage and labor charges would otherwise dwarf the cost of the hardware itself.

A four-outlet electrical drop delivered to your booth by the venue’s electrical contractor, ordered per drop with a wattage rating — at advance rates if you are paying attention. Where it lands is governed by floor ports, so mark locations on your booth drawing. One quad box rarely covers a booth running AV; count devices before ordering.

A booth space rental with nothing in it: concrete floor, a space number, and pipe and drape if the show provides it. Flooring, structure, power and furnishing are all the exhibitor’s to bring. Islands and most large-format spaces are sold raw — at that scale, the space itself is the smallest part of the spend.

A booth engineered to build into more than one footprint — a 10×20 at one show, an island at the next — from one owned inventory. It costs more upfront than a single-format build and materially less per show across a season. This is the design conversation to have before fabrication starts, not after.

A booth used for one show without owning it — structure, and usually graphics, install and freight, quoted as a single package. Packages run from about $3,500 for a 10×10 to $80,000 for large islands. Renting wins below three shows a year; at three or more, owning typically pays for itself in about 18 months. See rental packages and pricing.

Any work done overhead: hanging signs, suspended lighting, overhead AV. Rigging is almost always an exclusive service of the venue or general contractor, billed hourly with equipment, and it books out — order at advance rates with stamped drawings where required. Nothing hangs without it, and nothing about it is cheap onsite.

Fabric graphics finished with a thin silicone strip that presses into a channel in the frame, creating a taut, seamless, frameless face. The dominant premium graphic system in modern exhibits: light to ship, rich in color, quick to change between shows, and the standard skin for lightboxes.

The venue-side services ordered for your space: electrical, rigging, internet, water, cleaning, security. Ordered through the exhibitor kit at advance rates weeks out — or onsite, for far more. Budget roughly $800–$5,000 for a mid-size booth, more with heavy AV. Estimate the whole program with our budget calculator.

A material-handling surcharge for freight that cannot come straight off a truck with a forklift — loose pieces, mixed loads, missing piece-level paperwork, or trucks requiring ground unloading. It bills meaningfully above the standard CWT rate. The fix is upstream: crated, palletized, properly documented freight ships at standard rates.

Between-show warehousing for an owned exhibit — roughly $600–$3,000 a year depending on volume. The better version includes inspection, repair and reconfiguration between shows, so the booth arrives at the next show ready rather than as-left. That service model is why an owned booth gets cheaper every time it goes up.

Labor billed at the standard rate — typically weekday business hours, varying by venue and trade. Everything outside it bills at overtime or double-time multipliers. Install plans that fit inside straight-time windows are one of the quiet ways an experienced exhibit house keeps a program’s labor line down.

Your assigned freight-arrival and setup window, published on the show’s target floor plan — typically by hall zone and booth size, with the biggest islands first. Hit the target and freight flows; miss it and you are into wait time, overtime, or off-target surcharges. The target date drives the whole logistics calendar backwards: carrier booking, advance warehouse deadlines, labor calls.

Exhibit structures skinned in stretched, printed fabric over aluminum frames. Light, packs small, installs fast — all three of which show up directly in the freight, drayage and labor lines. Modern dye-sublimation printing made fabric the default large-format surface; SEG finishing made it premium.

A booth program delivered as one scope and one invoice: design, fabrication, graphics, freight, drayage coordination, install, dismantle and storage. The alternative is the exhibitor acting as general contractor across five vendors and a show-services portal. Turnkey mostly spends the same money — it just spends it with someone accountable for the whole outcome.

At most major convention venues, booth assembly, electrical, rigging and freight handling are performed by unionized trades with defined jurisdictions — and what exhibitors may do themselves varies by city and venue. It is not a problem to route around; it is a system to plan within. Experienced install supervision exists precisely to make it efficient.

The plastic sheeting laid over installed booth carpet during setup and peeled away just before show open, so the floor debuts clean. A tiny line item that quietly signals a crew that knows what it is doing. If carpet went down on day one of a four-day move-in without it, expect to need a vacuum.