"How much should a corporate away day cost?" It is one of the first questions HR leads, founders and operations managers ask us, and one of the hardest to answer in a single number. UK away day pricing runs from a few hundred pounds to well over £10,000 a day. The gap is not arbitrary. It reflects what you are actually buying: a room, an experience, or a genuine intervention in how your team works together.
Here is the short version. A facilitated away day in the UK typically costs between £1,500 and £4,000 for the day. Activity days are priced per head, usually £80 to £200 each. Room hire alone starts around £300. Our own psychologist-led day is £1,000 + VAT for teams of 4 to 20+, which on a team of ten works out at £100 a head including facilitation, exclusive use of an 80-acre site and all catering.
The rest of this guide explains where those numbers come from, what drives them up and down, and how to tell whether a day is good value rather than merely cheap.
If you would rather have a figure for your own team than read the reasoning, our away day cost calculator gives you a per-head estimate in about thirty seconds.
The four tiers of UK away day pricing
Most away days sit in one of four tiers. Working out which tier you are shopping in is the single biggest factor in setting a realistic budget.
- Room hire only: £300 to £1,500 a day. A space, nothing else. Roughly £30 to £150 a head for a team of ten.
- Hotel day delegate rate: £35 to £85 a person. Room, screen, tea, lunch. No facilitation. Around £350 to £850 for a team of ten.
- Activity-led day: £80 to £200 a person. A provider runs an activity. £800 to £2,000 for a team of ten.
- Facilitated day: £1,500 to £4,000 a day. A professional designs and runs the day around your team. Roughly £150 to £400 a head for a team of ten.
Two things stand out once it is laid out like that.
First, the tiers overlap far more than people expect. A team of fifteen doing axe throwing at £150 a head is spending £2,250, which buys a fully facilitated day from most credible providers. The activity feels cheaper because it is quoted per person, and per person always sounds smaller.
Second, per head is how buyers actually compare, and almost nobody in the facilitated tier publishes it. So here is ours. At £1,000 + VAT a team of four is £250 a head, a team of ten is £100 a head, and a team of twenty is £50 a head. The bigger the team, the better the value, which is the opposite of how activity pricing works.
1. Room hire only: £300 to £1,500 a day
You book a space, a country pub function room, a co-working venue, a National Trust property, bring your own agenda and run the day yourselves. Catering is usually extra. There is no facilitator, no design and no follow-up.
Good for: small teams who already know each other well with a clear, simple objective, such as a quarterly planning session.
Where it disappoints: the hidden cost of a senior leader spending two weeks designing and facilitating the day themselves, which is usually far more expensive than hiring someone. And the person running the day cannot also be fully in it, so the most senior voice in the room is the one you hear least from.
2. Hotel day delegate rate: £35 to £85 a person
The standard corporate offer. A meeting room, a screen, tea and coffee, a lunch. Sometimes parking.
Good for: anything that is really a meeting. Board days, all-hands, training with an internal trainer.
Where it disappoints: it is an office with different carpet. If the problem you are trying to solve is that your team cannot think differently in the building they work in, a nicer building does not fix it.
3. Activity-led days: £80 to £200 a person
Escape rooms, cookery classes, axe throwing, treasure hunts, obstacle courses. The provider handles everything and you take part. Costs scale per head, so a team of twenty quickly reaches £2,000 to £4,000 before travel or accommodation.
Good for: social bonding, celebration days, new teams who simply need to meet each other, end-of-year fun. These are real, legitimate goals and an activity day serves them well.
Where it disappoints: the assumption that shared adrenaline converts into better collaboration on Monday. Most teams remember these days fondly and cannot point to anything that changed. If something is stuck, unsaid or being avoided, an activity day will not touch it, and can make it worse by giving everyone a pleasant day that lets the real conversation be postponed again.
4. Facilitated days: £1,500 to £4,000 a day
A professional designs and runs the day around your team's specific situation. This is where an away day starts working as team development rather than a day out of the office. It typically includes a pre-day discovery conversation, bespoke design, venue and catering, and structured follow-up.
Good for: teams navigating change, leadership groups needing alignment, and any organisation where the cost of unresolved tension is higher than the cost of addressing it.
What moves the price within this tier: the facilitator's credentials, which is the biggest single factor. A chartered or clinical psychologist costs more than a generalist trainer. Then venue quality, group size, and whether it is a one-off or part of a longer programme.
5. Overnight and multi-day: £3,500 to £10,000 and above
Accommodation, evening facilitation and deeper work. These exist because some conversations genuinely need more than a day, particularly for leadership teams setting strategy, post-merger integration, or a team recovering from a difficult period. Our own overnight option is £3,500 + VAT.
Where it disappoints: luxury spa retreats marketed as executive development. Check what is actually being facilitated rather than where you will sleep.
The cost nobody puts in the proposal
The biggest cost of any away day is not the invoice. It is the salary cost of the people in the room.
Work it through. Ten people on an average UK salary of around £38,000 costs roughly £150 to £200 per person per day in salary alone, before employer's National Insurance, pension or overheads. That is £1,500 to £2,000 of payroll for a single day. For a leadership team on senior salaries it is comfortably double.
So the real arithmetic of a £1,000 away day for ten people is not £1,000. It is around £3,000, of which two thirds is your own people's time.
This reframes the value question completely. A free away day that wastes ten people's time still costs the business £2,000. A £1,000 day that genuinely changes how the team works is excellent value before you count the cost of the problem it solves. The question is never "what is the cheapest day we can run". It is "what is the least wasteful way to spend the £2,000 of salary we are committing anyway".
What you are actually paying for in a facilitated day
The headline rate hides the work that makes the day function. A credible facilitated day includes:
- Pre-day discovery. One to two hours with the leader or sponsor to understand the team, the moment, and what a good outcome looks like.
- Bespoke design. Three to five hours of facilitator time shaping this day for this team, rather than running a template.
- Facilitation on the day. Six to seven hours of structured group work, sometimes with a second facilitator for larger groups.
- Venue, catering and materials. Ask whether these are included or billed separately. This is where quoted prices stop being comparable.
- Follow-up. A written summary of themes, agreements and next steps. Without it the day evaporates within a fortnight.
If a provider cannot tell you what is included, the day is being run from a template.
Three questions that separate cheap from good value
- Who is actually facilitating, and what is their background? Ask for credentials, not testimonials. A clinical psychologist, organisational psychologist or experienced systemic practitioner is doing something different from a generalist trainer, particularly when a conversation gets difficult. Our approach explains what that difference looks like in practice.
- How is the day designed? A template costs less to deliver and it shows. A bespoke day needs real preparation and produces a different conversation.
- What happens afterwards? No written follow-up and no named next steps means no change. This is where most cheap away days fail.
Watch for these when comparing quotes
- Venue hire minimums. Many venues have a minimum spend that only appears late.
- AV charged separately. Screens, microphones and flip charts are often extra.
- Catering as an add-on. A day rate without food is not a day rate.
- Facilitator fees quoted separately from the venue. Two invoices for one day.
- Travel time as paid time. A venue two hours away costs half a working day each way for everyone attending.
Not-for-profit pricing
Many providers, including us, discount significantly for registered charities and not-for-profits, typically 25% to 50%. Most do not advertise it and apply it readily, so always ask. Our discount is 50%, which puts a fully facilitated psychologist-led day at £500 + VAT for a registered not-for-profit.
Our pricing, in full
Wilder Away Days is £1,000 + VAT for a standard facilitated day, for teams of 4 to 20+, larger groups by arrangement. The overnight option is £3,500 + VAT and adds bell-tent accommodation on site, an evening meal, informal facilitated space in the evening, and breakfast.
Both include everything described above: pre-day discovery, bespoke design, facilitation by Dr Chloe Constable, a clinical psychologist and systemic psychotherapist, exclusive use of an 80-acre rewilding site and its venue in Monmouthshire, all catering prepared on site using market garden produce where possible, and written follow-up. There is no separate venue hire charge. Full detail is on our pricing page and what we offer.
Registered not-for-profits receive 50% off. All profits support Wilder Connections, a charity running nature connection programmes for young people, so the day funds work with schools and communities as well as your own team.
That places a psychologist-led day at or below the bottom of the facilitated tier, and in the same range per head as an activity day for a team of ten. We are aware that is unusual. It is deliberate: we would rather the price was not the reason a team that needs the day does not have it.
If you want to talk it through, book a discovery call. We will tell you honestly when we are not the right fit, and some of the time we are not. If your team needs a celebration rather than a conversation, an activity company will serve you better and cost you less. If you are weighing the two up, our guide for remote and hybrid teams may help.
If you are at the planning stage rather than the budgeting stage, our guide to planning a team retreat covers purpose, format, timeline and a checklist, step by step. And if you just want the number for your team size, the away day cost calculator will give you one.
