How to Budget a DIY Tour (With the Numbers Working Bands Use)

Most first tours don't lose money on stage — they lose it between the stages. The good news is that experienced DIY bands run on a handful of boring, dependable numbers. Steal them.

Routing numbers

• Show days: aim under 4 hours of driving, hard ceiling ~6; the golden rule is 300 miles or less between shows

• Days off: one per every 4–6 show days — voices and vans both break without one

• Hub-and-spoke beats the great-circle route: 2–4 hours out from a base city keeps fuel spend sane

Our tour manager flags same-day conflicts, day gaps, and seven-plus-day runs without a break automatically as you route.

Money numbers

• Per diem: $15–25 per person per day is the working range ($20 ≈ gas-station meals; $30 ≈ real ones)

• Lodging: $40–60/night budget tier — or floors, which is why the guest-list favor economy exists

• Fuel: at 15–20 MPG, every 200-mile hop costs roughly $34–45

• A lean 10-show run lands around $1,250–1,800 before lodging; add beds and backline and it's $3,000+

Before you book anything, run each room through the free show break-even calculator — guarantee, door split, merch per head — and let the math veto the 12-hour drive to play for ten people.

Settle every night, on paper

The saddest tour money is the money you were owed. A one-page settlement per show — deal terms, the counts, deductions, merch split, amount received, two signatures — is the difference between a discrepancy and a dispute. Musavise generates a printable settlement sheet for every gig, pre-filled with your ticket scans and deposit status, and the gig tracker carries the 'owed to you' balance until it's paid.

And come April: the gig tracker logs mileage per show and applies the current IRS rate, because those miles are usually a DIY tour's biggest deduction.

Everything above lives in one free Musavise account — no credit card, no trial clock, and your data exports any time you want it. Create your free account and it's yours in about two minutes.