What 382 Cornish Events Actually Cost in 2026

We cater for a living, so we know what catering costs. Not what a price list says it costs, what people actually spend.

Every figure below comes from our own diary: 382 confirmed and completed events between January and September 2026, feeding 10,912 people across Cornwall and Devon. No survey, no estimate, no industry average. Our jobs, our invoices.

We have not seen another caterer publish this, so here it is.

The average event is smaller than anyone admits

The median event we catered in 2026 fed 20 people.

Twenty. Not eighty, not a marquee, not a field. Most catering in Cornwall is a wake, a christening, a birthday in a village hall, a works lunch. The biggest thing we did all year was 250 covers, and that is the exception the website photos get taken from.

If you are planning something for twenty and every caterer's site makes you feel too small to ring them, that is a marketing problem, not a you problem.

A quarter of it is booked inside a week

This is the number that surprised us.

Of the bookings where we can measure the gap between the first enquiry and the event itself, a sample of 77 jobs, the median lead time is 23 days.

64% were booked inside a month. 26% were booked inside a week.

Every catering blog in the country tells you to book twelve months ahead. For weddings, fair enough, the good dates do go. For everything else it is simply not what happens. A quarter of our year lands with seven days' notice, and it lands fine, because that is the business we are set up for.

So if you are reading this eight days before something and assuming you have left it too late, you probably have not. Ring and ask.

What people actually pay

Median spend and median per head, by what we were asked to do:

These are medians, not averages, because one 250-cover job would drag an average somewhere useless. Half of each type came in under the figure shown and half came in over.

The buffet line is the one worth sitting with. 255 of our 382 jobs were buffets, typically twenty people at ten pounds a head. That is what catering in Cornwall mostly is.

The season is longer at both ends than you think

Events by month, to mid September:

Two things stand out. September is our biggest month so far this year, ahead of both July and August, and it is not close. And March and April together did as much work as August managed on its own.

Be careful with the back end of that table. We are publishing this in September, so October, November and December are still filling and are not shown. What the figures do say is that the shoulder months are real work rather than a quiet run-up to summer. If you want a Saturday in June you should be asking now. If you want one in March you have more room than you would think.

Where the work is

170 of the jobs we could place by postcode were in the TR area, which is most of Cornwall, and 39 were PL, covering south east Cornwall and Plymouth.

How we worked these out

Straight from our booking records for 2026, confirmed and completed jobs only. Quotes that never became events are not counted, because a quote is not a price anybody paid.

Guest counts are what was actually catered for, not what was first enquired about. Prices are what appeared on the invoice, VAT included, which is how we quote everything.

Everything here is an aggregate. No customer, venue or event is identifiable, and any category with fewer than five jobs in it has been left out entirely rather than published as an average of two people's invoices.

We will run the same figures again at the end of the year.

If you want a number for your own event

The tables above are what other people paid. That is a reasonable sanity check and it is not a quote. Ours are on the [catering prices page](https://www.saltwind.catering/catering-prices-cornwall), or tell us the date, the headcount and roughly what you are picturing and we will price it properly.

Even if it is next Saturday. Especially if it is next Saturday.