Which Outdoor Formats Charge a Festival Premium, and Which Hold Flat All Year (2026)

It is the second week of September. Somewhere a marketing manager is being told to get a festival campaign on the road, and is bracing for the surcharge everyone assumes is coming. So we went and read every rate card we publish, five formats across ten cities, looking for seasonal pricing. There is exactly one. A 25 percent premium on Kolkata mobile van routes between 1 and 15 October, which takes a T-Shape van from Rs.2,200 a day to Rs.2,750. Everything else on the site, the Rs.650 auto hood, the Rs.45 no-parking board, the Rs.1.25 newspaper insert, is the same price in October as it is in February.

Who this is for, and what you will get out of it

This is written for whoever has to put a number on an October campaign: a brand manager briefing a festival push, a regional marketing lead splitting budget across two or three cities, or a shop owner deciding whether to replace a fascia now or clip an overlay over it. It assumes you are working from our published rate cards rather than an emailed quotation, and that your dates are somewhere between late September and Diwali.

By the end you will know which single rate on this site rises for the season and by how much, which four formats do not move at all, how to tell a seasonal surcharge apart from a rush fee and a material upgrade, and how far ahead each format has to be booked so that you never pay for speed. The arithmetic is all from published rates, so you can check every figure against the service page it came from.

Two things to have in hand before you start. First, the exact date the campaign has to be visible on the street, not the date you expect to sign, because every premium in this post is charged for compressing the gap between those two. Second, the city list, since the one seasonal surcharge we publish applies to a single city and a single format, and a national plan that assumes it applies everywhere will be over-budgeted.

Which outdoor rates actually rise for a festival?

One, and only in one city. We checked the published rate card for every format on every city page, and the table below is the complete answer. Where a cell says no seasonal premium published, that is a statement about our own rate cards rather than a promise about what any vendor will quote you.

What does the Kolkata Puja premium actually cost?

It is a straight 25 percent on the day rate for routes running between 1 and 15 October. Here is the arithmetic on all three van formats, with a ten-day booking worked out both ways so you can see what the window is worth in rupees rather than in percentages.

Two honest observations about that table. The first is that a 25 percent premium on the lowest van rate in the country still lands below what eight other cities charge as their everyday price, so a Kolkata Puja van is not expensive in absolute terms. The second is that the premium is published rather than negotiated at the point of booking, which is the part that matters: you can budget for it in September instead of discovering it in October.

Why does auto branding not charge a festival premium?

Because of how the format is sold. An auto hood is a one-time print and install on a vehicle that then works for six to twelve months, so there is no daily rate to load a surcharge onto. You pay Rs.650 an auto whether the campaign starts in June or the last week of September, and the vehicle keeps working through the festival and out the other side.

The Kolkata auto page makes the consequence explicit, and it is the most useful sentence on that page: during Durga Puja the same autos carry an estimated 4 crore pandal-hoppers, and the page describes that as a seasonal surge of roughly 3 to 5 times normal impressions built into the standard rate. Read that as the page states it, an estimate of audience volume rather than a guarantee of response, but the structural point holds. On a one-time format the festival raises what you get without raising what you pay, which is the opposite of how buyers expect festival pricing to work.

What is a Puja overlay board, and is it a premium?

It is a product, not a surcharge, and the distinction is worth a quotation line of its own. Kolkata shops typically run a permanent bilingual board all year and clip a themed overlay over it for the festival. The permanent board is priced per square foot like anywhere else, Rs.450 to Rs.700 for ACP, Rs.180 to Rs.320 for a GSB backlit unit and Rs.60 to Rs.100 for non-lit. The overlay is a separate Rs.120 to Rs.250 per sq ft item with a two-day turnaround.

Ahmedabad offers the same idea for Navratri, also on a two-day turnaround, but publishes no price for it. If you want one, ask for the figure in writing rather than assuming it matches Kolkata, and do it before the fabrication queue fills.

The premium buyers actually pay is rush, not season

Here is the fee that quietly costs more than the festival ever does. A 48-hour emergency shop board installation carries a 20 percent premium on the Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chennai and Pune pages. The standard timeline those pages publish is five working days for ACP and GSB boards and three for non-lit, so the premium is what you pay for compressing a five-day job into two.

There is a discrepancy worth naming, and it is the same shape as the one we flagged in our city rate card comparison. The national shop name board page prices a rush order inside 48 hours at a 30 percent surcharge, while every city page that publishes the figure says 20 percent. Those cannot both be the quote. Ask which applies to your city before you agree to a rush, and treat the city page as the one to book from, as we do for vans.

The practical consequence is simple arithmetic. On a 10 sq ft ACP board in Kolkata at the top of the range, Rs.700 a sq ft is Rs.7,000, and a 20 percent rush premium adds Rs.1,400 for no extra material. Booking three weeks earlier costs nothing at all. That is a larger and more avoidable penalty than the entire Puja premium on a short van booking.

Three premiums that have nothing to do with the season

Festival budgeting goes wrong when every percentage on a quotation gets filed as seasonal. Three of the premiums we publish are about materials and geography, they apply in January exactly as they do in October, and none of them is negotiable by moving your dates.

The first is climate specification. The Ahmedabad shop board page states that a heat-rated build costs about 15 percent more and typically lasts five years or longer, because south-facing boards there genuinely reach 75 to 80 degrees in June. The Chennai page makes the same case for marine-grade materials at 15 to 20 percent more, on the argument that they last three to four times longer in coastal conditions. Both are upgrades you either need or do not, and buying the cheaper spec to save money in a festival month is how a board fails in its first summer.

The second is city cost. Mumbai shop board pricing runs roughly 10 to 15 percent above Bangalore, which the page attributes to monsoon-grade materials and MCGM permit complexity rather than to demand. The third is format, not timing: an LED van costs more than a T-Shape everywhere, all year, and a quotation that presents that gap as a festival rate is misdescribing it. If a percentage on your quote is not the Kolkata van premium and not a rush fee, ask which of these three it is.

What actually tightens in festival months is inventory

The scarcity is real, it just does not show up in the rate card. Three of our newspaper insertion city pages publish a booking window rather than a price change. Ahmedabad states that Navratri and Diwali slots fill early and recommends reserving dates three to four weeks ahead. Kolkata publishes the same advice for the Puja window. Jaipur publishes a wedding season priority booking note running October to March. In all three the per-copy rates stay at Rs.1.25, Rs.1.70 and Rs.2.20.

That is a more useful warning than a surcharge would be, because a price you can pay and a date that no longer exists are different kinds of problem. An insert run is bounded by how many copies a title actually prints on a given morning, and a fabrication queue is bounded by how many boards a unit can finish in a week. Neither expands because you offer more money in the last fortnight. The formats with a genuine capacity ceiling in the festival window are newspaper insertion and shop board fabrication; vans and autos are constrained by fleet availability, which is why 48-hour deployment is published for one and a 300-auto fitting programme for the other.

How to plan a festival campaign without paying for speed

The whole method is working backwards from the date the creative has to be on the street, using the production timelines each page publishes. Five steps, and none of them requires negotiating anything.

The timeline, counted backwards from your on-street date

Every figure here is a lead time published on the relevant service page, so you can build a calendar without asking anyone for an estimate. Counting back from the day the campaign has to be visible: a mobile van needs 48 hours from artwork approval, and 48 to 72 hours is the figure published nationally. A non-lit shop board needs three working days, and an ACP or GSB board five, with a Puja or Navratri overlay at two days on top of an existing board. Auto branding puts the first batch on road within 48 hours in most cities, but a 300-auto minimum is a fitting programme rather than a single install, so treat 48 hours as the start rather than the finish.

Newspaper insertion is the outlier, and the one that decides your critical path. The rate card allows the same production time as anything else, but the three to four week reservation window the city pages recommend for festival slots is about inventory rather than printing. If your campaign includes an insert in a Navratri or Puja window, that reservation is the first date on your calendar and everything else can be arranged around it. If it does not, the binding constraint is whichever of your other formats has the longest published lead time, which will almost always be an ACP or GSB shop board at five working days.

Your festival booking checklist

Six questions to settle before you sign anything for an October campaign.

• Do your dates fall between 1 and 15 October, and is any part of the campaign a Kolkata van route? That is the only published seasonal premium.
• If a quote adds a festival surcharge on any other city or format, which published page is it coming from?
• Are you inside the published production lead time, five working days for ACP and GSB boards and three for non-lit, or are you about to pay a rush premium?
• If a rush is unavoidable, is the premium 20 percent as the city page says or 30 percent as the national page says? Get it in writing.
• Have print-dependent slots been reserved 3 to 4 weeks ahead, given that insert inventory fills before the rate ever moves?
• Is your seasonal shopfront a permanent board, an overlay over an existing board, or both, and are they quoted as separate lines?

The short version, if you take nothing else away: the festival is not what makes an outdoor campaign expensive. One surcharge exists on this entire site, it applies to one format in one city for fifteen days, and at Rs.5,500 over a ten-day booking it is smaller than the rush fee you pay for leaving a shop board three weeks too late. Book early, ask which published page any percentage is coming from, and the season costs you almost nothing. Send us your dates and cities and we will mark on the quotation which lines, if any, sit inside a premium window.