What Size Party Tent do I Need for My Party Rental Company?

What Size Party Tent do I Need?

Having lots of options is usually seen by society at large as a good thing. "There's no such thing as too many options," the old adage claims. But surely there are times when having too many options is a bad thing, right? Wedding cakes? There's one. Puppies? No one can pick just one. And with party tents coming in so many different styles, colors, shapes, and sizes, a large volume of options can be frustrating. You'll find yourself asking what size party tent do I need? Is there such a thing as a "perfect" tent size?

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Pop-up tents, frame tents, pole tents, and high peak tents each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, and tent sizes are no different. larger tents will of course be more expensive and more challenging to set up, but they'll also accommodate larger events and provide event planners or wedding planners with more usable, functional internal space.

The real question then isn't what size party tent do I need? What you should be asking, really, is what size party tent is right for my business and the needs of my customers? You can always add more party tents down the line. There's no such thing as having too many canopy tents, after all. But for this first few tents, we're going to want to try and find the most useful, highly-applicable tent sizes we can.

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The `Perfect’ Canopy Tent Size? Not So Fast …

Let’s start here with a disclaimer, of sorts: there’s no such thing as a “perfect” size for your party tent. You will not find a one-size-fits-all canopy tent to suit every possible occasion. 

Tents come in all sorts of sizes and styles because there’s a virtually limitless number of tent configurations and layouts that various events might need. What works perfectly for one outdoor wedding won’t work for another, and neither would work for a trade show. And your idea of the perfect wedding tent probably won’t be the same as a customer’s perfect tent.

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When you’re first starting out in the tent rental space, try to focus on getting a few of the more popular tent sizes (we’ll get to those shortly), and try to be as varied as possible. You’ll want one “small,” one “medium,” and one “large” tent coming out of the gate. If you can only afford one, go with the medium for now since it’s the most versatile. But again, you’ll want lots of variety in your tent sizes as your business grows more established.

Again, the question isn't "what size party tent do I need," but "what tent sizes, plural, are the most useful for the largest numbers of events?" If you can only afford one party tent, you'll want to find the one that will best suit the highest volume of events. If you're buying more than one, you'll want to try and purchase tents that cover as much of the potential spread as possible.

Transforming Yourself into a Tent Size Calculator

There’s a very general and over-simplified rule for estimating square footage for a party tent. Event planners and party planners have used this basic rule of thumb for decades, and it will work for you as well in most cases: simply multiply the estimated number of guests for the event by ten, and that tells you how many square feet of tent space you’ll need.

That rule of ten square feet per person allows you to roughly estimate comfortable seating for event guests, assuming each is sitting in a chair at a table. So if you had 180 guests, you’d want to use a 30 x 60 tent. That would make for 1800 square feet (30*60), which is generally ideal for about 180 guests (180*10).

Of course, there are a lot of other factors to consider here as well. Will your guests be sitting or standing? Will you have any other furniture inside the tent, like dance floors, folding bars, or staging? If you’re using a pole tent, have you considered the space required by the center poles?

Once you take all of these factors into consideration, it becomes more difficult to accurately gauge how much functional space you’ll need inside your party tent. We’d recommend getting some graph paper and drawing layouts, scaling them down as accurately as possible. Drawing configurations using tables, chairs, and more—blueprints for configurations, if you will—lets you calculate space usage more carefully, while also seeing a visualization of how all these different components will come together.

The Party Tent Size Calculator Cheat Sheet

You won’t always have time to sit down and meticulously draw out a top-to-bottom blueprint of your party tent setup. And your customers aren’t always going to want to sit around waiting for you to draw a floor plan and crunch all of those numbers, either. 

To those ends, we’ve created this simple party tent size calculator cheat sheet that will help you paint a broad, generalized picture for your customers on the fly. 

These numbers aren’t meant to be super precise. They’re just rough estimates, based largely on various standard configurations using products sold here at Tent and Table. That having been said, we believe this “cheat sheet” will come in handy for your event and party rental company, while helping you answer that question—what size party tent do I need?—a lot more accurately.

What Size Party Tent do I Need? It Varies

We started this out with what should’ve been a pretty simple question, but sadly isn’t. What size party tent do I need? What size is most ideal for my event and party rental company?

The simple answer here is that, well, there is no simple answer. If your customers have been expressing an interest in renting party tents, or you’ve been getting calls asking for them, note what types of events they’re hoping to book and how big those events are going to be. Use our cheat sheet, and the basic rule of ten square feet per guest, to get as close as possible. And take some time to learn the differences between the various types of tents on the market, too.

If you have the budget to buy three tents, we’d recommend getting one 10 x 10 speedy pop up tent, one 20 x 20 frame tent, and one heavy duty 30 x 60 pole tent. This will let you cover (no pun intended) several different event types. If you can only afford one tent, we’d go with a 20 x 20 or 20 x 40 until you can afford to expand more. But again, this all depends on what your customers are asking for, what types of events you’re hoping to provide services for, and how many guests, on average, parties in your area might seat.

That question we've been asking—What size party tent do I need?—is hopefully a little easier to answer now. Knowing what size party tent you need is frustrating at first, but once you’ve handled a few rentals, you’ll be better equipped to calculate space on the fly and accurately estimate how much space a potential customer will need. And in the meantime, if you have any questions, post a comment below or give our tent experts a call at 1-716-832-8368!