Bombyhead ✦ Pageant Research Lab

We don't guess how pageants run. We count.

The Pageant Research Lab is Bombyhead's analytics division. We study data from the pageants we host — what contestants pay, how many enter, how scoring lands, what fundraising actually returns — and we use what we find twice: to set better defaults inside the product, and to publish benchmarks the pageant industry has never had.

Directors have run on instinct and hearsay for decades, because nobody was in a position to count. We process the registrations and the payments, so we are. Everything here is free to read, free to quote, and free to disagree with.

Published01

The studies.

24 August 2026 · 99 completed pageants

What should you charge for pageant entry?

The typical contestant paid a median of $75, and the median field was 19 contestants. The surprise: sorting pageants into thirds by fee, the most expensive third had the largest fields — not the smallest.

Read the study →

In progress · 2027

State of the Pageant Industry

Everything above is measured from what people did. This one asks what they think. The 2027 Director of the Year ballot carries a short set of questions to the people who actually turn up for pageants — supporters, parents, contestants and directors — and the answers become the first survey this industry has had at any scale. Reported in aggregate, segmented by how people are connected to pageantry and how long they've been part of it.

Method02

How we work.

We sell pageant software. Research published by a vendor is worth exactly what its method is worth, so here is ours.

We separate what people did from what people say. Our benchmarks are measured, not reported — they come from payments we processed, so a figure like the median entry fee is what contestants actually paid rather than what was advertised or what a director remembers charging. When a finding comes from asking people instead, like the 2027 industry survey, we label it as such. Both are worth having. They fail in different ways, and you should always know which one you are reading.

Denominators, always. We publish "16 of 36", never a bare percentage. If the sample is small enough that the denominator changes how you read the number, you should be able to see it.

We publish results that don't flatter us. The entry-fee study set out to show that raising fees shrinks the field. The data said otherwise, so the study says otherwise. A finding we like is not a better finding.

We say what a number can't do. Every study names its limits. Cross-sectional data can describe a market without predicting your pageant, and we would rather tell you that than let you over-read it.

We re-run before we republish. Figures get refreshed against live data rather than copied forward. A number that was true last season and is quietly wrong this one does more damage than no number at all.

On privacy. We publish aggregates only. No contestant, no voter and no individual director is identifiable in anything the Lab releases, and we never share voter identities with directors or anyone else.

Using it03

Quote us. Please.

These numbers exist because the industry didn't have them. Use them in your director meetings, your board packets, your articles and your classes. Attribution to Bombyhead's Pageant Research Lab, with a link to the study, is all we ask.

Writing something and want a figure checked, or a cut of the data we haven't published? Email support@bombyhead.com and we'll run it.

Bombyhead Pageant Research Lab

The data comes from real pageants.

Every figure here was produced by directors running actual pageants on Bombyhead. It is free for directors — registration, payments and judging, with every dollar going to your own Stripe account. We never hold your money.

Start a free pageant →