Overtime charges (venue)

The venue contract buys you a window, and everything outside it is billed at rates designed to sting: labour at time-and-a-half or double time, plus facility charges for keeping the building open, powered, and staffed. Overtime is where operational slippage becomes invoiced money — a slow load-in, a late freight arrival, or an ambitious build that needed one more night all convert directly into premium-rate hours. For organizers, the defences are structural: schedule buffer into move-in rather than planning the build to the exact hour, sequence the load-in realistically, and know your contract's overtime triggers and rates before negotiating, not when the invoice arrives. For exhibitors, the exposure hides in custom builds — a stand that can't finish inside standard hours generates contractor overtime the exhibitor pays, and experienced builders quote build-hours honestly while hungry ones quote optimistically and reconcile later. The common mistake is treating the published move-out deadline as soft; venues often have the next event loading in behind you, and overrun charges at that boundary are both punitive and non-negotiable because the venue genuinely needs you gone. One honest nuance: overtime rates are negotiable at contract time — capped rates or a grace period are gettable — but almost nobody asks until they're already over.