What does festoon lighting cost in NZ
The honest answer is that festoon lighting cost in NZ is a range, not a rate card. Two jobs with the same bulb count can land on very different numbers, because the bulbs are the cheap part. What you are really paying for is metres of span, site access, power, rigging and crew time. This guide walks through each of those, so that when a quote arrives you can see where the money goes.
What actually drives the price
Six things move the number more than anything else.
- Span length and bulb count. More metres means more cable, more fittings and more time in the air. A single 20 metre span over a courtyard is a small job. A canopy over a dance floor plus perimeter runs around the whole site is hundreds of metres, and the price follows.
- Site access. A flat lawn beside a driveway is the cheapest site there is: the van parks next to the work. A hillside garden where every crate gets carried by hand, or a rooftop where everything goes up in a service lift, adds hours before a single lamp is hung. Access moves quotes more than most people expect.
- Power. If the site has suitable power close to where the lights go, good. If it does not, the job needs power distribution, longer cable runs or a generator, and all of that shows up in the price. Incandescent festoons draw far more than LED, so lamp choice and power cost are tied together.
- Rigging complexity. Existing anchor points, things like solid posts, mature trees or building fixings that can take the load, keep rigging simple. No anchor points means poles, and poles mean bases, ballast and more crew time. Long or high spans also need proper tensioning so they hold their line instead of sagging by nine o'clock.
- Install or dry hire. The single biggest fork in the price. Covered properly below.
- Travel. Auckland is our backyard. Past that, distance is a real line on the quote, and we would rather explain it than hide it. Also covered below.
Dry hire versus installed budgets
Dry hire is where festoon hire prices start, because you are paying for kit rather than crew. You collect the festoons, hang them yourself, sort your own power and return everything afterwards. In exchange you take on the ladder work, the layout decisions and the responsibility for the lights staying up all night. For a small site with simple spans and someone practical on hand, that trade is often worth making.
An installed job costs more because it includes everything dry hire does not: a layout designed for the site, power distribution planned for the actual load, rigging kit and anchoring, a crew to install it on the day, and pack-out once the event is over. You are buying the outcome, not just the equipment. For long or high spans, tricky sites, or a date where nothing is allowed to go wrong, installed is usually the right call.
Both options are laid out in more detail on our festoon hire page.
Travel and the North Island
Auckland pricing is the baseline. Beyond it, three things change the number: crew time on the road, freight for the kit, and occasionally accommodation when pack-in and pack-out fall on different days, or when the drive home after a late pack-out is not a sensible idea. A job in Hamilton carries a bit of road time each way. A job further down the island might carry an overnight stay. None of it is a mystery charge. It is hours and kilometres, priced at what they cost.
Travel also scales better on bigger jobs. The drive costs the same whether we install one span or forty, so the further the site is from Auckland, the more sense it makes to have us light the whole thing while we are there rather than a single run.
Getting a real number
No two sites price the same, and any fixed figure published here would be wrong for half the people reading it. Our FAQ covers minimum spend for the same reason: there is one, and it moves with scale and travel.
[Dillon to supply: indicative starting price bands for dry hire and installed jobs, if we want to publish them]
The fastest route to a real number is a short enquiry with three things in it: your date, the site, and a rough sense of scale, even if that is just "the lawn behind the house" or "a marquee for 120". From that we can tell you whether dry hire or installed makes sense, what the kit list looks like, and what it costs. Start an enquiry and we will come back with a straight answer.