Nightclub and DJ-night music licence costs: the SFE tariff explained

If your venue runs DJ sets, club nights or dance events (a nightclub, a pub or bar with a regular DJ night, or a hotel hosting functions with dancing) the music licensing cost usually isn't calculated the same way as background music. It runs through PPL's Specially Featured Entertainment (SFE) tariff, PPLPP299, and in 2026 that tariff jumped a lot more than the usual annual increase.

What is the SFE tariff?#

SFE stands for Specially Featured Entertainment: PPL's term for a DJ set, disco, dance or club night where recorded music is the main draw, rather than incidental background music. It's charged per event, based on two things: how long the event runs, and how many people attend, banded in groups of 25. Our plain-English SFE guide and calculator walks through the sum step by step.

The 2026 rate rise#

The SFE hourly rate rose from £1.22 to £1.41 per hour, per band of up to 25 attendees, from the 2026 tariff year: an increase of around 15.6%. That's well above the roughly 4% RPI-linked increase most other TheMusicLicence tariffs saw in 2026. It isn't a one-off surprise: it's part of a phase-in agreed between PPL and the British Beer & Pub Association and UK Hospitality (who withdrew their Copyright Tribunal reference once terms were agreed). The underlying rate keeps stepping up until 2028 (PPL estimates about £1.56 per group per hour for 2027 and £1.63 for 2028), and the discounts for big events shrink until they end in 2031. If your venue runs regular DJ nights, this is a cost that's actively climbing each year, not a flat, predictable line item.

Where it commonly goes wrong#

• Attendance banded incorrectly: a headcount rounded up rather than the actual door figure, pushing the fee into a higher band than the event warrants.
• Event duration measured from doors-open to doors-close rather than from the start to the finish of the DJ set or dance itself.
• An estimate from a busier year rolled forward and never trued up: PPL PRS compares estimates with your actual events at the end of each licence year, but only credits you if you send the real figures.
• Background-music hours and SFE hours on the same night not clearly separated, so the whole evening gets priced at the event rate.

A new, wider tariff to know about#

PPL introduced a related tariff, PPLPP399, from January 2026, extending an SFE-style structure to venue types beyond the original nightclub, pub, restaurant and hotel scope. If your venue doesn't fit neatly into the categories you've always been billed under, it's worth checking which tariff you're actually assessed against, not just which one you were on last year.

This isn't just a 2009 story#

The best-known precedent for challenging a PPL tariff is the 2009 Copyright Tribunal case brought by the British Hospitality Association, British Beer & Pub Association and British Retail Consortium, which forced a tariff rollback and refunds. That's not ancient history as a mechanism: as of August 2026 a nightclub operator has an active Copyright Tribunal reference open against PPL PRS disputing exactly this kind of fee calculation for the current licence period. The dispute mechanism gets used by real operators, not just industry bodies, when a tariff calculation looks wrong.

Run DJ nights, club nights or functions and want a second opinion on how they're being charged? Send us your invoices and we'll check the SFE calculation line by line. One site? The free Invoice Check gives you a written verdict in five working days. Four or more sites? The estate review is free and we only charge if we recover money. See pricing.

This guide is general information, not legal advice, and MLC is an independent consultancy, not affiliated with PPL PRS Ltd, PRS for Music or PPL.