Randy Bates spends roughly $1.2 million a year to scare people for six weeks. He runs the Bates Motel outside Philadelphia, a haunted house stacked on top of a hayride and a haunted trail, and he hires 340 seasonal workers to staff it. Insurance alone runs about $50,000. New props and sets eat $200,000 to $300,000 every season, because repeat customers notice when nothing changes. Last fall roughly 60,000 people walked through, a site record, and he told The Hustle he was aiming at about $2.5 million.
The answer to how much do haunted houses make looks like that only at the very top. Before haunted houses, Randy Bates fixed VCRs for a living.
That’s the ceiling. The middle looks nothing like it. The average American haunt grossed $105,501.52 in 2025, according to the sixth annual HauntPay industry survey, and 27% of operators reported fewer than 1,000 guests across the entire season. The distance between those two numbers is exactly where most people searching how much do haunted houses make get misled, because page one of Google is packed with business-plan template sites quoting invented margins that no operator recognizes.
A haunted attraction business is a seasonal entertainment operation that sells timed admission to a themed scare experience and earns almost all of its annual revenue inside a six to eight week window between late September and early November. That compression is the entire business model, and it explains every cost decision an operator makes.
Last updated: October 2026
Quick answers
How much do haunted houses make? The average US haunted attraction grossed $105,501.52 in 2025, up 8.43% from 2024, according to the HauntPay industry report. Industry-wide, America Haunts estimates ticket sales of $300 million to $500 million a year across roughly 1,200 paid attractions.
How much does it cost to start a haunted house business? A purpose-built attraction averages around $250,000, including $30 to $40 per square foot of build-out and $2 to $3 per customer in acquisition cost. Low-overhead haunts in donated or already-owned space have launched for $25,000 or less.
Is a haunted house business profitable? It can be, but profitability concentrates at the top. Consultant Leonard Pickel of Hauntrepreneurs puts the threshold at the capacity to move 500 to 1,000 people per hour. Below that, a rained-out weekend can erase the season.
How much do haunted houses make in a season?
The average haunt made $105,501.52 in 2025 sales, and that single figure does more damage to the industry’s mythology than any other number in this article. It comes from the sixth annual HauntPay report, summarized by Haunted Attraction Network, built on more than 1,000 responses from owners, staff, and volunteers. Sales grew 8.43% over 2024, which sounds healthy until you see where the growth landed.
Growth scaled with size. Haunts reporting under $25,000 in total revenue were the only band whose sales fell year over year. Every larger band grew, and the bigger the haunt, the faster it grew. That’s a consolidating market, not a rising tide.
Attendance tells the same story from another angle. About 27% of operators reported fewer than 1,000 guests in 2025, nearly double the 15.6% the prior report had projected. The most common bracket was 1,001 to 5,000 guests, and roughly three-quarters of respondents came in under 10,000. America Haunts, the trade association, puts the typical attraction at about 8,000 paid guests and says under 3% clear 35,000.
Pricing has quietly compressed too. HauntPay found 68.5% of haunts charging $30 or less for admission, down from 77.1% a year earlier, and 62.9% selling a single flat fee rather than tiered tickets. America Haunts says most of its members average about $25, with a ceiling near $45, while amusement park Halloween events like Universal’s Horror Nights push toward $75.
One number every operator should copy: online transactions averaged $84.00 versus $54.71 in person, per HauntPay platform data, and online made up 68.32% of sales for haunts selling both ways. Moving a ticket window to pre-sale raises average order value by more than 50%. That’s the cheapest margin improvement in this entire business, and it’s the same lesson behind why pre-sold inventory beats walk-up demand across seasonal businesses.
How much does it cost to start a haunted house business?
Haunted attraction startup costs average roughly $250,000 for a purpose-built attraction, broken into $30 to $40 per square foot of build-out plus $2 to $3 per customer in acquisition spend, according to the figures The Hustle gathered from operators and consultants. That’s the number for someone leasing an empty warehouse and framing a maze from nothing.
It isn’t the only path, and the spread is enormous. Randy Bates built the original Bates Motel haunted house for about $25,000. Ian Miller launched the Slaughterhouse in Des Moines as a side business in 2010, lived out of his car for a stretch, and sometimes slept inside the haunt itself. The Slaughterhouse now runs about 13,000 customers a year. Both of those outcomes started with a fraction of $250,000 and a building someone else was already paying for.
Leonard Pickel, who runs the consulting firm Hauntrepreneurs, estimates that one-third to one-half of new haunts now use a transient model: a short-term lease in vacant retail, a build that goes up in September and comes down in November, nothing permanent. Spirit Halloween proved the template at national scale. The transient approach trades a lower build cost for a higher rent per usable week and a venue you can lose next year.
The costs that catch first-year operators are the ones no template site itemizes. Fire-code compliance is the big one, and inspectors have tightened enforcement since the 1984 Haunted Castle fire at Six Flags Great Adventure killed eight patrons. Sprinkler retrofits, egress-width changes, and flame-rated set materials are not optional, and a failed inspection two weeks before opening costs you the season rather than a line item. Pneumatic props run into the thousands each. If you want a cost structure you can model before signing a lease, the discipline is the same one behind a vending machine route or a microgreens operation: price the recurring obligations first, then see what’s left for the fun part.
Four tiers of haunt and what each one clears
Haunted attractions sort into four tiers, and the economics change completely between them. Over 80% of US attractions are operated by or benefit a charity, per America Haunts, which means the median haunt in this country is not a business at all. It’s a fundraiser with a scare budget.
| Tier | Season revenue | Startup cost | Season attendance | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charity or volunteer haunt | Under $25,000 | $5,000 to $30,000 | Under 1,000 to 3,000 | Fire departments, Jaycees chapters, nonprofits with donated space |
| Independent seasonal attraction | $50,000 to $250,000 | $100,000 to $250,000 | 5,000 to 15,000 | Operators with a trade, a lease, and income from another 10 months |
| Regional multi-attraction site | $250,000 to $1 million | $250,000 to $750,000 | 15,000 to 40,000 | Sites selling combo tickets across two or three attractions |
| Major production | $1 million to $3 million plus | $750,000 and up | 40,000 to 60,000 plus | Full-time operators like Netherworld and Bates Motel |
Only 1% to 2% of attractions draw 40,000 to 60,000 guests, and about 10% average 12,000 to 20,000, according to America Haunts. The tier you can realistically reach is set by your building and your market before you buy a single prop. Picking the wrong tier is the same mistake that sinks a lot of first-time business owners across categories: building for the revenue you want instead of the throughput your site allows.
Is a haunted house business profitable?
A haunted house is profitable above a specific throughput threshold and brutal below it. Pickel puts that line at the capacity to move 500 to 1,000 people per hour. Hit it on your busy nights and the fixed costs spread across enough tickets to clear real margin. Miss it and you’re running a six-week business with a twelve-month cost base.
Ben Armstrong, co-founder of Netherworld in the Atlanta area, put the constraint plainly to The Hustle: “You’re only making money for a month.” Amber Arnett-Bequeaith, VP of Full Moon Productions, which runs Edge of Hell and The Beast in Kansas City, was blunter in the same reporting. “You are gambling your livelihood every single year.” She grew up in the business, sprinkling dead graveyard flowers through the sets as a kid to build a decaying smell.
The gambling is literal, because weather is the single largest uncontrolled variable. Rain on the last weekend of October removes the two highest-revenue nights of the year with no makeup date. A deep MLB postseason run in your market does similar damage. House of Shock closed its first run after rain forced a Halloween closure that wrecked the financials.
Revenue mix is where the better operators now separate themselves. Ticket sales are the top revenue producer for 77.2% of haunts, down from 91.6%, with merchandise at 6.5% and concessions at 2.2%. Those secondary lines carry higher margin and keep selling when the queue slows. The same logic applies to a pickleball facility adding paddle sales and clinics: the admission ticket gets people on site, the second purchase makes the month.
Scare actors still beat the props built to replace them
Labor stopped being the industry’s top complaint in 2025, and the reason is more interesting than the headline. HauntPay found promotion at 46.1% and finding new customers at 34.8% ranked ahead of staffing, which fell to third at 31.5%. Operators didn’t solve staffing by automating it. They solved it by paying, scheduling, and recruiting better, because the math on replacing a human with a machine still doesn’t work.
Haunted Attraction Network ran that math directly. A pneumatic prop costs thousands of dollars up front and scares the same way every single night. A seasonal actor costs an hourly wage for about 20 operating nights, improvises, and gets better over the season. Amortize the prop against six weeks of annual use and the payback period stretches past the point where the prop looks dated. Bates Motel’s 340 seasonal workers are a deliberate choice, not a staffing failure.
Volunteers change the equation again. With over 80% of attractions tied to a charity, a large share of the industry’s labor is unpaid by design, which is why charity haunts can operate at ticket prices that would bankrupt a commercial site. If you’re competing against a fire department haunt three towns over charging $12 with volunteer actors, your $28 ticket has to buy a visibly different experience. That pressure to justify a premium is the same one facing anyone starting a labor-light side business against free competition.
What insurance and liability actually cost
General liability for a haunted house runs $300 to $800 a year for $1 million in coverage at the small end, and about $50,000 a year for a multi-attraction operation like Bates Motel. Bates Motel also spends about $6,500 a season on fake blood and makeup alone, which is roughly one-eighth of what it pays to be insured. That range is the widest gap in the entire cost structure, and it tracks almost perfectly with attendance, attraction count, and whether live effects are involved.
Hiscox, The Hartford, and Nationwide all write these policies, and the pricing factors are location, deductible, employee count, per-occurrence limit, and aggregate limit. What moves your premium most is what your actors are allowed to do. No-contact haunts price differently from attractions where performers touch guests, and the industry has split hard on this. HauntPay found 54.3% of haunts use waivers for at least some attractions while 45.7% use none at all.
Skipping the waiver is a decision, not an oversight. A waiver sets expectations and deters claims, and it also tells a guest the experience is intense enough to need one. Operators who want the broadest family audience often drop it on purpose. Just know which trade you’re making, and get the workers’ comp quote before you hire 40 teenagers, because seasonal payroll triggers coverage requirements that catch first-year operators mid-October. Due diligence here resembles evaluating a franchise: the liabilities you inherit matter more than the revenue you’re shown.
The six-week window is the whole business
Almost all haunted house revenue arrives inside six weeks, which makes working capital the real constraint rather than demand. Bates Motel carried a line of credit of about $75,000 recently and has run up to roughly $500,000 in the past. That credit exists because props, payroll, permits, and advertising all get paid before the first ticket sells.
Consumer demand is not the problem. The National Retail Federation‘s 2026 survey projects record Halloween spending of $13.5 billion, an average of $115.14 per person, with 74% of Americans planning to celebrate. Halloween is the second-largest commercial holiday in the US. The money is there. Getting a share of it inside 20 operating nights is the hard part.
Which is why the marketing collapse in the HauntPay data is the most alarming number in the report. Average marketing budgets fell from $24,620.85 to $11,417.01, and the median fell from $5,000 to $2,000, in the same year that promotion became operators’ number one problem. Haunts cut the exact line item they say is failing them. Word of mouth still carries 86.2% of promotion, digital advertising 73.6%, and organic social 69%, with Facebook the most-used platform.
The opening worth taking: your competitors are spending a median of $2,000 to fill a six-week season. A disciplined operator who commits $8,000 to $10,000 to pre-sale ads, captures emails, and sells timed tickets online is competing against almost no one. Bates Motel’s email list holds 162,000 addresses. That list is the asset, not the building.
Should you start a haunted house in 2026?
Start a haunted house if you already control a suitable building for ten months of the year, and skip it if you’d be leasing a warehouse specifically for this. That’s the whole decision, and the HauntPay revenue bands support it. The only group that shrank in 2025 was haunts under $25,000, which is precisely the group paying commercial rent on sub-scale attendance.
The structural headwinds are real. Consolidation is underway, with groups like 13th Floor Entertainment Group running more than a dozen haunts plus escape rooms and touring events. Escape rooms grew from 22 US locations in 2006 to more than 900 within a decade, pulling directly at the same seasonal entertainment budget. Commercial rents keep climbing and fire-code enforcement keeps tightening.
The tailwinds are real too. The SERP for this topic is dominated by template content with invented numbers, which means the operators who know their actual figures have an information edge over everyone entering the market. Ticket prices are compressing while online average order value runs 54% higher than in-person. Secondary revenue is growing. Geography is wildly uneven: Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri have more than three times as many haunted houses per capita as California, and Washington, DC has none at all.
Run the test in this order. Confirm your building can move 500 people per hour at peak, confirm you can fund the season before revenue arrives, confirm your fire marshal will sign off on the layout you’re planning, then build. If any of those three fails, the answer is no regardless of how good your maze concept is. And if you’re weighing it against other options, GJ’s breakdowns of revenue models with shorter payback periods are a useful comparison, because a haunted house asks you to carry twelve months of cost for six weeks of income. The average haunted house makes $105,501.52 a year, and the operators clearing real money are the ones who stopped treating that figure as a floor.
