How Much Does Hosting a Zoom Webinar Cost in 2026? Real Numbers, No Guesswork

The short version: a Zoom webinar for up to 500 attendees costs roughly £54 to £57 a month (around £650 to £690 a year) on top of a paid Zoom licence, which adds another £11 to £14 a month. Bigger capacities go up sharply from there, with 1,000 attendees costing around £1,100 to £1,300 a year and 3,000 attendees pushing past £3,000 a year. But here's the bit Zoom's own pricing page won't tell you: most people who buy the Webinar add-on never needed it in the first place.

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What Zoom charges, tier by tier

Zoom splits webinar hosting into two separate purchases, and this catches people out constantly. First you need a paid Zoom licence, minimum Pro, which runs about £11.99 to £13.99 a month per host depending on billing and currency. On its own, that licence only lets you run a Zoom Meeting for up to 100 people (or your plan's meeting cap), not a Webinar with registration, Q&A, and practice sessions.

Then you add the Webinar licence on top. Based on Zoom's published pricing structure:

• 500 attendees: around £54 to £57 a month, or £650 to £690 billed annually
• 1,000 attendees: around £96 to £108 a month, or £1,100 to £1,300 annually
• 3,000 attendees: around £280 to £300 a month, or roughly £3,000 to £3,500 annually
• 5,000 attendees: around £500 to £540 a month, closer to £6,000 a year
• 10,000 attendees: closer to £830 to £850 a month, around £9,500 to £10,000 a year

Zoom changes these numbers more often than people expect, sometimes twice in a year, and prices vary by region and currency, so treat these as a working range rather than gospel. Always check the live pricing page before you commit annually, because I have seen the 500-attendee tier move by nearly £100 a year between two of my own renewals.

The extras nobody budgets for

The headline tier price is rarely the full bill. Things that quietly add cost:

• Cloud recording storage beyond your plan's included allowance, typically £30 to £40 a month once you're running a webinar a week and keeping recordings live
• Live translation or closed captioning add-ons, priced separately and billed per language
• Zoom Events, a different product entirely, needed if you want ticketing, sponsor booths, or a multi-session virtual conference rather than a single webinar
• Extra host licences if more than one person on your team needs to run webinars independently rather than sharing one login

None of these are hidden fees exactly, they're all listed, but they're easy to miss when you're comparing the headline £57-a-month figure against a competitor's landing page price.

A real example: what I paid, and what I wasted

Two years ago I signed up for the 500-attendee Zoom Webinar tier ahead of a lead-generation campaign, expecting a big turnout because our email list was around 4,000 people. I paid £690 for the year, plus the Pro licence, so call it around £830 total for the year before I'd run a single session.

Average registration across the next six webinars: 62 people. Average live attendance: 21. Not one session came close to needing a 500-person room. I was paying for headroom I never used, and when I crunched the numbers at renewal, a standard Zoom Meeting licence with the built-in registration feature (which Zoom now offers on Meetings too, not just Webinars) would have covered every single one of those sessions for a fraction of the cost. That's the uncomfortable bit most webinar cost guides skip over: the word "webinar" sounds more professional than "meeting," so businesses buy the bigger, pricier product for the branding, not because they need the capacity.

If you're not sure whether you even need webinar-specific features like registration pages and practice sessions versus a simple meeting link, it's worth reading how to host a webinar using common video tools before you buy anything, because the tool you pick changes the maths completely.

How to work out which tier you need

Before buying anything, pull three numbers from your last email campaign or event: your list size, your typical open rate, and your typical show-up rate for live events. As a rough rule from running dozens of these:

• Registration rate from an engaged list is usually 3% to 8% of people who see the invite
• Live show-up rate on the day is usually 30% to 45% of registrants, sometimes lower on a Friday

So a list of 2,000 people, emailed with a decent subject line, might get you 100 registrations and 35 to 45 live attendees. That's comfortably inside the 500-attendee tier, and honestly could often run on a Meeting licence with the free registration feature turned on. You only need the 1,000 or 3,000 tier if you're running paid ads to cold traffic at scale, doing a joint webinar with a partner's list added to yours, or you've got a large existing audience, think 10,000-plus engaged subscribers.

What it costs beyond the Zoom bill

This is the part that dwarfs the software cost for most small businesses, and it rarely gets mentioned in pricing comparisons. Producing a decent 45-minute webinar takes, in my experience, somewhere between 8 and 15 hours of human time: writing the deck, building the registration page copy, drafting three to five reminder emails, doing a tech run-through, hosting it live, and then chasing the recording afterwards. At even a modest £40-an-hour value on that time, you're looking at £320 to £600 of labour cost on top of whatever Zoom charges you. The software is almost never the expensive part. If you want the full breakdown of where that time and money goes across a whole webinar programme, not just the platform fee, I've laid it out in how much webinars typically cost to run.

There's also the equipment question, which people either overspend on or underspend on with nothing in between. You don't need a studio. I ran webinars for two solid years on a £70 Logitech webcam and a £45 lapel mic before upgrading anything, and attendees never once commented on video quality, they commented on whether the content was useful. If you're wondering whether you even need a proper webcam for this, that's covered in do you need a webcam to run a webinar, and short answer, yes, but not an expensive one.

Cheaper ways to run the same webinar

If the Zoom Webinar add-on feels steep for where your business is right now, you've got real options that aren't a downgrade in quality:

• Run it as a Zoom Meeting with registration turned on, capped at your plan's attendee limit, which for Pro is usually 100 people, more than enough for most first webinars
• Use the free tier for internal or small partner sessions under 40 minutes, accepting the 40-minute cutoff on group calls
• Stream to YouTube Live instead of using Zoom's webinar product at all, which costs nothing beyond your existing setup and works well if you don't need private registration gating
• Batch several small sessions into one bigger one rather than paying for 1,000-attendee capacity you'll only fill twice a year

I go through a full working stack, tool by tool, with the actual monthly numbers, in how to run a webinar without expensive tools, which is worth reading before you renew anything at the higher tier.

What happens to your money after the webinar ends

One thing people forget to price in: what you do with the recording. Zoom stores cloud recordings for a limited window depending on your plan, sometimes as little as 30 to 180 days before deletion, unless you download and rehost them elsewhere. If your entire follow-up sequence depends on sending that replay link, losing it because nobody downloaded it in time is a real, avoidable cost, both in lost leads and in the time it takes to re-record. If you've ever lost track of where a past session lives, the steps are in where to find your webinar recording after a Zoom call, and it's worth building "download the recording" into your checklist the same day, not the same week.

My actual verdict

For a business running one or two webinars a month with a list under 3,000 people, the 500-attendee tier plus a Pro licence, so somewhere around £830 to £900 a year all in, is the sensible starting point, and it's what I'd tell a client to buy without much debate. Anything bigger than that, wait until your registration numbers force your hand, not before. I've seen too many businesses buy the 1,000 or 3,000 tier on optimism rather than data, and end up paying for a room three times bigger than the one they ever fill.

Related reading: do webinars on zoom show your face.

Frequently asked questions

Is Zoom free for hosting a webinar?

No. Zoom's free plan does not include the Webinar feature at all, and it caps group meetings at 40 minutes, so any genuine webinar needs at minimum a paid Pro licence plus the separate Webinar add-on, putting the realistic starting cost at around £65 to £70 a month combined.

What's the cheapest way to host a webinar on Zoom?

Run it as a Zoom Meeting with registration enabled rather than buying the dedicated Webinar add-on, provided your expected attendance stays under your plan's meeting cap, usually 100 people on Pro. This alone saves most small businesses £650 or more a year.

Does the price change based on how many people attend?

No, Zoom charges based on the capacity tier you select, not actual attendance, which is exactly why so many businesses overpay: you're billed for the 500-seat room whether 15 people show up or 400 do.

Are there hidden costs beyond the monthly Zoom fee?

Yes, the two most common are cloud recording storage once you exceed your plan's free allowance, and the time cost of producing the webinar itself, which typically runs £320 to £600 in staff hours per session and usually outweighs the platform fee entirely.

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