The Exhibit Cost Record
The public record of what museum exhibits, interactives, and AV actually cost.
The record of what exhibits and interactive media cost already exists in public — federal contracts, grants, state procurement portals, UK tenders, and nonprofit tax filings. It has just never been assembled in one place. No firm's internal finances appear here; every row traces to a source you can check yourself.
Browse
| Browse the data | Search and filter all 1,629 records, with a source link on every row. |
| Findings | What the data indicates about exhibit pricing, computed directly from the data. |
| Methodology | Sources, classification rules, the scope-normalization standard, QA results. |
| Published benchmarks | Industry cost figures from named public sources (MGAC, Praxis Exhibits). |
Five public sources, one comparable record
Every transaction type discloses cost differently. This dataset normalizes them into one schema — recipient, client, year, amount, description, and a consistent project-scope classification — while keeping each row's own source distinct and citable.
| Federal contracts | USAspending.gov awards for exhibit design, fabrication, AV integration, and interpretive media — Smithsonian, NPS, and other federal agencies, 2015–present. |
| Federal grants | NSF's Advancing Informal STEM Learning program and IMLS museum-grant programs — the science-center and small-museum slice federal contracts miss. |
| State contracts | Open-checkbook and contract-transparency portals in Texas, California, New York, and Washington. |
| UK tenders | Public tenders from UK national museums, kept as non-US comparables and never mixed into US figures. |
| IRS Form 990 disclosures | Every nonprofit museum must disclose its five highest-paid independent contractors over $100K — the only source that captures nonprofit museum spending directly. |
The scope-normalization standard
Published exhibit-cost figures vary mostly by what's bundled into the
number — not by the underlying market. The canonical unit of
comparison across every row is the full interactive scope, hardware
and software combined — design, software, content, hardware,
and integration — excluding exhibit fabrication and base-building
infrastructure. Awards that deviate are flagged
(fabrication_inclusive) rather than silently mixed in. Read
the full standard on the methodology page.
About the data
Every row traces to a public, independently checkable source — a government procurement record, a grant database, or a nonprofit's own IRS filing. This is a descriptive record, not price advice, and makes no commentary on any firm's pricing. Data is licensed CC BY 4.0. See the About page for the full rules of the road.