How much of a film festival's income comes from entry fees?

Barton Weiss from VideoFest got in touch to ask:Do you know the percentage of a film festival’s budget that comes from entry fees? I have heard that it was 9% - what have you heard?Thirteen years ago, when I interviewed 523 film festival directors, the average was under 14.8% of income.However, when the Raindance Film Festival opened its books to me three years later, its submission-fee income accounted for 35.6% of its total income.So I didn’t have a clean figure to provide to Barton off the top of my head. I went digging around for data sources. In the US, most film festivals are non-profits, and non-profits file a public tax return, the Form 990. Buried inside it, on the Statement of Revenue, the festivals list where their money came from.For example, in 2023, the Portland Film Festival took in $307,194 in income, 82% of which came from fees.So, we can already see that the answer will differ widely between festivals. Let’s take a systematic approach, looking at the details of two…