Minneapolis Trade Show Booth Rentals

For most Minneapolis exhibitors the math favors renting, and the local twist is storage: a booth you own has to live somewhere between shows, and in Minnesota that means heated warehouse space billed all year so the materials survive the freeze-thaw cycle. The owned booth still pays drayage, labor, and show services every time it exhibits; a rental resets the design each cycle and drops the ownership overhead entirely.

Ownership pencils out only for teams running one large footprint at many shows a year — and even then, most of them stop owning the winter after their first drayage-and-storage reconciliation.

Our published fixed pricing runs $13,000–$15,500 for a 10×10 up to $60,500–$71,500 for a 30×40 — and that figure covers design, fabrication, graphics, freight, install and dismantle coordination, and project management, contractually. Separately, exhibitors are billed by the show or venue for space, the Minneapolis Convention Center’s in-house electrical, drayage where a show contractor handles freight, and rigging; we forecast those lines against your specific booth before you sign, so the complete cost of exhibiting is visible up front.

When your freight moves through a show’s appointed contractor — Paramount Convention Services runs PEAK, for example — drayage is billed by the hundredweight (CWT), so the crated weight on your paperwork is the number you pay for. Drayage is billed by the show, not by us. What we do is estimate it line by line in your Minneapolis quote from your booth’s real crated weight — and because our booths are engineered light and crated tight, that number is usually smaller than exhibitors fear. Worth knowing: the MCC itself runs an open-dock policy, so on shows that allow it, your own full-time staff may bring material in without a drayage line at all.

Half on signing, which opens design and production; the other half 30 days before the show. Nothing follows — no true-ups, no post-show reconciliation invoice. To see how the fixed model works size by size, browse the priced rental exhibits.

Yes — and Minneapolis practically begs for it, because the calendar stacks the Auto Show, the Boat Show, the Golf Show, and the Home + Garden Show into eight winter weeks, with PEAK in April and MD&M Midwest in October. Booking a program locks pricing across the run, holds your design and graphics between shows, and puts one PM across the whole sequence instead of separate projects.

Both, and that’s the point. We fabricate every exhibit ourselves — structures, graphics, finishes — then deliver it on a rental model. You get build-shop quality without buying, storing, or maintaining anything, and every booth is stood up and tested in our shop before it’s crated for the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Three things, honestly. The price is contractual — the figure you sign is the figure you pay, with the venue- and show-billed costs forecast beside it rather than discovered later. The booth is proven before it ships — fully assembled in our shop and photo-approved by you, so the crew in Minneapolis re-assembles a known quantity in fewer hours. And one project manager owns everything from sketch to closeout, including the utility orders, the rigging call, and the marshalling-yard timing that eat event managers’ weeks.

The structure, custom graphics, flooring, lighting, furniture, and AV if the design calls for it — plus freight to the venue, I&D coordination, show-services filings, and a dedicated PM. One quote, one line on your budget. The rental packages page breaks down scope in detail.

You pick or commission a design; we build it, stand it up in the shop, and send you photographs to approve. Then we crate it, weigh it, schedule the marshalling-yard window, file the venue paperwork and utility orders, manage the install, stay on call through the show, and handle dismantle and return freight. Your involvement peaks at the design stage — by show week, your only job is working the booth.

One, from kickoff to closeout — the same person who priced your booth answers the phone during move-in at the convention center. No handoffs between a sales rep, a producer, and a site lead. If you’d like to start there, talk to a project manager before you commit to anything.

Yes — your PM is reachable through move-in, show days, and dismantle. A flickering screen or a last-minute graphic swap gets handled while the hall is open, not logged in a ticket system for next week.

Yes — drayage, the MCC’s electrical, labor, and rigging are each estimated as their own line in the quote, calculated from your booth’s actual crated weight and power plan. Those items remain billed by the show or venue, but the estimate is accurate enough that your finance team can budget them as real numbers, not placeholders.

The working set is — counters, tables, seating, and lockable storage sized to the design. If your brand standard calls for specific premium pieces, we source and include them in the same fixed number rather than tacking on a rental line later.

Four things. First, the good news: the MCC lets full-time employees of the exhibiting company unload, install, and dismantle their own exhibit — a genuinely permissive policy for a hall this size. Second, the boundary: utilities are the building’s exclusive business — electrical, telecom, compressed air, water — and only MCC staff may open floor boxes or make connections, so those orders need to be filed, not improvised. Third, anything hung over 50 pounds must be installed by qualified rigging personnel. Fourth, move-in runs through the rear marshalling yard on a schedule, and from mid-October to mid-April the dock doors operate under winter protocol. All four are manageable if the booth was designed with them in mind, which is precisely how ours are designed. First Minneapolis show? Start with a planning call — it costs nothing and saves plenty.

Yes. We coordinate experienced I&D crews, file the EAC paperwork and insurance certificates shows require, and — more importantly — hand the crew a booth engineered to install fast: pre-assembled once, labeled, and documented. Minnesota is not a right-to-work state and larger shows bring their own contractor rules, so we plan each build to the specific show’s labor model rather than assuming one.

Your booth ships as one coordinated freight move — either to the show’s advance warehouse or direct to the convention center on its target date. Trucks come in on I-94 or I-35W, which meet at the edge of downtown, and check in at the rear marshalling yard, where a Dock Marshall controls access to the Hall B–E docks. Where the show’s contractor carries freight from dock to space, that leg is drayage, billed per hundredweight. We book the carrier, time the window, build in the winter buffer, and estimate the drayage from real crate weights in your quote.

Saint Paul RiverCentre across the river, and hotel and ballroom events throughout the Twin Cities. The model doesn’t change with the address: fixed price, photo-approved prebuild, coordinated install — only the freight plan changes, because nothing else in the metro has the MCC’s docks.

Yes — the consumer run from the Auto Show through the Home + Garden Show and the fall MD&M Midwest floor are regular weeks on our calendar. Fixed-price rentals run from 10×10 inlines to islands, every one pre-staged and photo-approved. The January and February shows book earliest because their builds cross the holidays — and if you’re already late, the 24-business-day rush track exists for exactly this.

That’s the whole job. We start from your brand guidelines and show objectives, design in 3D until you approve, and then — unusually — you approve again from photographs of the physically built booth before it ships. Two sign-offs, zero surprises on the floor.

Everything visible and most of what isn’t: layout, signage, screen count and placement, counters, lighting temperature and intensity, demo stations. The gallery on this page is all rentals — none of them look like they came from the same kit, because the kit is only the skeleton.

Yes — iteration is budgeted into the process, and most teams take two or three revision rounds before final sign-off. What we don’t do is convert your changes into surprise change-order fees; the fixed price already assumes the design will evolve.

All of them, from a 10×10 inline to 30×40+ islands and peninsulas — each configured to its space type’s rules (line-of-sight limits for inlines, height and hanging-sign allowances for islands, the 50-pound rigging threshold for anything hung) and prebuilt in-house before shipping to Minneapolis.

The structure is the least memorable part of any booth — what people remember is what happened inside it. A demo they touched, a meeting that felt private on a loud floor, a message they could read from thirty feet. We spend the design budget on those moments, which is why our rentals get mistaken for owned customs on floors like MD&M Midwest.

Eight to twelve weeks covers most Minneapolis shows comfortably — design, approvals, graphics, prebuild, and the venue paperwork all fit. The exception is the January cluster: for the Auto Show and the Boat Show, start around five months out, because the build calendar crosses the holidays and freight capacity thins exactly when a Minnesota winter is at its least cooperative.

Behind schedule already? The rush track compresses the whole build to 24 business days without touching the price or skipping the photo proof.

If you can tell it’s a rental from the aisle, we’ve failed. The underlying structure is modular, but everything an attendee actually perceives — graphics, layout, lighting, finishes, furniture — is produced for your brand and your show. Book a design consultation and judge the difference from the portfolio yourself.