How to price a soft play session

Start with the child-hour

The unit that makes soft play pricing tractable is the child-hour: one child, on your floor, for one hour. Every session sold is some number of child-hours, so once you know what one costs, you know the floor under every price on the board.

Take the costs that arrive whether or not anyone walks in — rent, utilities, insurance, licences, software, equipment depreciation, cleaning, and the core staff rostered regardless of traffic — and total them for a month. Then take the costs that appear only when a child does: wristbands, grip socks, consumables, and the extra floor staff added on busy days. Those are variable, estimated per child rather than per month.

Formula. Cost per child-hour = (monthly fixed costs ÷ child-hours realistically sold in a month) + variable cost per child-hour.

The word that carries the weight is realistically. Dividing fixed costs by the child-hours a full house would sell gives a flattering, dangerous number. Use the child-hours actually sold last month where the history exists, or a cautious utilisation estimate before opening. A session price is then the cost per child-hour times the session length, plus the margin the business needs.

The ceiling: capacity times turns

Capacity is the number of children your floor holds at once — a figure your regulator or insurer sets and you honour, never one invented for a spreadsheet. Turns is how many times that floor refills in a day.

Formula. Maximum daily child-visits = capacity × (opening hours ÷ session length) × a turnover factor below one.

The turnover factor is where optimism hides. Ten opening hours and two-hour sessions do not make five clean turns: families arrive on their own schedule, sessions overlap, and the afternoon is fuller than the morning. Start conservative and replace the factor with a measured one after a few weeks of real trading. The venue capacity planner runs this arithmetic and shows its working; the capacity management guide covers the operating side of the same number.

Daily maximum times price is the most a day can ever take at the door. If that figure at realistic utilisation only just clears your daily costs, the price is too low, the session too long, or the venue too big for its market. Better to learn it on paper than at the end of a quarter.

Length is half the price

The length of a timed play session and its price are one decision, not two. A long session feels generous and sells easily, but it lowers turns and raises the odds that a family leaves before the clock does, which means selling hours you never delivered. A short session turns the floor faster, yet parents compare the ticket price rather than the price per minute, and cheap-and-short can read as poor value.

Price the child-hour first, then offer two or three lengths sitting on that line with a gentle curve: the longer slot a little cheaper per hour, the shorter one a little dearer. The greeting, the wristband and the waiver check happen once however long the family stays, so a modest discount for length is earned rather than given away.

Then watch how long families actually stay against what you sell. Two-hour tickets with children leaving at seventy minutes point to a ninety-minute product priced slightly lower: fairer to the parent, and a faster floor for you.

The rates around the base price

Everything else on the board is a variation on the base price, and each variation should have a cost reason behind it.

• Peak and off-peak. On a weekend afternoon the scarce thing is space, so a low price simply gives away a place you could have sold fairly. On a school-day morning the scarce thing is the family, and anything above variable cost is money that would not otherwise arrive. Price the busy hours first and build off-peak as a discount from them; it can be deep, since the fixed costs are already sunk. Two guardrails: stay above variable cost per child, and make the off-peak product visibly different — a shorter slot, a weekday morning — so the discount has a reason a parent can see rather than a reason to wait until Tuesday.
• Toddlers and siblings. A crawling child takes little floor and rarely stays long, which is why a lower toddler rate or a dedicated toddler morning is common. A second child from the same family arrives with the same adult, the same waiver and the same greeting, so a fixed reduction on the second and later children reflects a real cost saving. Keep it small enough that a family of three still pays more than a family of two.
• Adults. Supervising adults are usually free, because you want them present and your regulator may require it. Charging for additional adults, or for adults at a party, is common where seating is the constraint.
• Extra time. Extra minutes are a product, not a favour. Price them at or a little above your standard per-minute rate: they are served at the busiest moment of the visit and displace the next arrival. The overstay and extensions guide works through the wording as well as the price.
• Passes. A multi-visit pass is prepaid discounting: cheaper per visit, paid for today, redeemed on days the family picks. Make the per-visit saving real but the total meaningful, and treat the cash as owed rather than earned until each visit is punched. A weekday-only pass folds the off-peak logic in, which is why its discount can go deeper. The passes and memberships guide covers pass design and the deferred-revenue caution.

Tax, and the number on the board

For a consumer-facing venue the answer is almost always tax-inclusive display: show the price a parent will pay and let the receipt do the breakdown. Many markets require it; confirm yours with your own tax authority rather than assuming.

The arithmetic runs both ways. Working down from a shelf price, the net you keep is the price divided by one plus the rate. Working up from the net you need, the shelf price is that net multiplied by one plus the rate, rounded to a figure that looks deliberate rather than calculated. The VAT pricing calculator does both directions, and VAT for play areas in the UAE covers what a receipt has to carry here.

An illustrative example, start to finish

Imagine a venue whose fixed costs come to 60,000 a month in its own currency, whose regulator allows forty children on the floor at once, and which opens ten hours a day, twenty-six days a month. It sells two-hour sessions. Its variable cost per child, wristband and consumables, is 3.

1. Theoretical child-hours. 40 children × 10 hours × 26 days = 10,400 child-hours a month if every place were always taken.
2. Realistic child-hours. The owner assumes the floor averages about 35% full: 10,400 × 0.35 = 3,640 child-hours.
3. Fixed cost per child-hour. 60,000 ÷ 3,640 = 16.5, rounded.
4. Variable cost per child-hour. 3 per child over a two-hour session = 1.5.
5. Cost per child-hour. 16.5 + 1.5 = 18.
6. Two-hour session at cost. 18 × 2 = 36. That is the floor, not the price.
7. Adding margin. The owner wants each session to contribute a third above cost: 36 × 1.33 = 48, rounded, net of tax.
8. Tax-inclusive board price. Multiply the net by one plus whatever rate applies in the owner's market and round to a figure that looks deliberate; here the owner lands on 50.
9. Off-peak variant. A weekday-morning slot at 35 still clears the variable cost many times over and fills a floor that would otherwise be empty.
10. Extra time. Thirty minutes at roughly a quarter of the session price, rounded to 13.

If the utilisation assumption is wrong, so is every number after it. That is the method working, not failing: it tells you exactly which figure to go and measure. The break-even calculator runs your own numbers through the same steps.

Then test it against your own trading

A price is a hypothesis, and the only fair test is your own venue before and after — a figure from someone else's venue describes their space, their market and their costs. Record four weeks of visits, minutes sold and revenue per child. Change one thing: the peak rate, or the off-peak length, or the extra-time product. Give it another four weeks, so the change meets every day of the week several times and a school holiday if one is due. Then compare like with like — same weekdays, same season where possible. Visits may dip a little while revenue per child climbs, and that is usually the point. Keep it or revert it, then change the next thing. The KPI glossary defines each of those measures.

All of which rests on a baseline that is real. This is the work PlayAreaOS does underneath the method: play timers hold every child's clock and the live occupancy of the floor, the POS records every sale, passes are punched off visit by visit, and the reports put sessions, minutes sold and revenue side by side over any range, exporting to CSV when you would rather work the numbers yourself. The prices stay yours — the board, the rates and the wording on it are exactly what you write.