Stage rigger pay in Australian touring has been a quiet crisis for years. The festival season collapses of 2024 brought it to public attention. The conversations through 2025 produced more heat than reform. Where the discussion actually sits in May 2026 is more pragmatic than either side likes.

The basic problem hasn’t changed. The rigging trade in Australian live entertainment is small, ageing, and concentrated. The work is physical, dangerous, and seasonal. The pay rates that the industry can sustain at current festival economics aren’t competitive with construction and major-project rigging once you factor in the irregular hours and the wear-and-tear on the body. Younger riggers are quietly leaving for industrial work that pays better and treats them better.

The festival closures of 2024 didn’t fix this. They mostly meant that the riggers who were already leaving could leave faster, because the seasonal income that was still keeping some of them in the industry stopped being reliable. The 2025 season ran with a tighter rigger pool than any previous year, and the rigger crews that did the work absorbed more risk and longer days than they should have.

The reform conversations through 2025 split into two camps. One camp wanted award-rate enforcement and minimum-crew-size regulation through the Fair Work system. The other wanted festival promoter consolidation and minimum-fee floors negotiated through industry bodies. Both have moved forward in 2026, but neither has actually solved the supply problem.

What’s quietly working: the few promoters that have moved to long-term retainer arrangements with senior rigging crews, paying through the off-season in exchange for guaranteed availability and lead-rigger continuity. It’s expensive on the promoter’s books, but it stabilises the rigging side of the business and means the senior people don’t drift out of the industry between festival seasons. It also produces materially safer shows, because the senior crew has continuity and can train apprentices through the off-season.

What’s not working: ad-hoc rate increases per show, which haven’t made enough difference to retain people. The maths is structural rather than incremental. A rigger making 80 days a year at a rigging-specific rate isn’t matching what the same person can earn on a 200-day commercial construction roster. Adding $50 per show doesn’t close that gap.

The other thing that’s quietly happening is rigging certification reform. The current framework allows enough flexibility that festivals can run with crews whose qualifications would not stand up to commercial-construction scrutiny. There’s been quiet pressure through SafeWork to tighten that, and most senior tour managers in the industry think it’s overdue. The honest read is that the festival side of rigging has been operating at a different effective standard from the commercial side for years, and that gap is closing whether the industry wants it to or not.

For festival promoters planning 2026/27 budgets, the rigging line is going up. The question is whether it goes up gradually through retention investments or sharply through compliance enforcement. Promoters who treat rigging as a controllable cost are about to find out that it isn’t. The riggers know what they’re worth. The industry is starting to catch up.