What is the difference between occupancy and attendance?

Occupancy is how many people are in the room, and it should include crew, because a headcount for safety counts bodies rather than job titles. Attendance is how many people came at all, and it excludes crew, because staff are not attendees. Collapsing them produces two screens that disagree.

Should check-in be blocked when a room reaches capacity?

No. A geofence usually covers the queue outside, so refusing the next person removes them from the record while they are still about to walk in — leaving you believing fewer people attended than did. Report the overage instead; the door controls entry, not the software.

Does crew count towards venue capacity?

For safety purposes, yes. Anyone inside the building is a body that has to leave it in an evacuation. For measuring how full a room is relative to the audience you sold to, crew should be excluded, or four staff will appear to fill a room of four.

How to know when a room is over capacity during an event

Capacity, occupancy and attendance answer three different questions and are routinely collapsed into one number. Separating them is what makes "this room is over its limit" observable while the event is running rather than a fact you establish afterwards.

Three numbers, not one

Number	Answers	Counts crew?
Capacity	What is this room allowed to hold?	—
Occupancy	How many people are in it right now?	Yes
Attendance	How many people came at all?	No

Most systems store one counter and use it for all three. That works until two screens read it with different assumptions, and then one says "full" while the other says "110%, eight over" — both from the same row.

Why occupancy counts crew and attendance does not

A headcount for safety counts bodies rather than job titles. In an evacuation, the sound engineer is a person who has to get out of the building. So occupancy includes crew.

Attendance is a different question — how many people came to your event — and staff are not attendees. Counting them inflates every figure you would report to a promoter or a sponsor.

The same distinction applies to how full a room looks. Measure fill against guests, or four crew in a room of four reads as a sell-out.

Why blocking check-in at capacity makes it worse

The intuitive design is to refuse check-in once the room hits its limit. It is intuitive and it is wrong, for a reason that only shows up in practice.

A geofence covers the pavement and the door, because it has to include the queue. So a venue holding 100 with 100 inside and 20 queuing has 120 people legitimately inside the boundary. Refusing the hundred-and-first does not stop them entering — the door does that, not the software. It just removes them from your own record while they walk in anyway.

The result: you finish the night believing 100 people came, when 120 did. A control that does not control anything, at the cost of corrupting the measurement.

Report the overage instead

Treat exceeding capacity as a signal, not an enforcement. A room over its stated size becomes something you can see while it is happening — which, for anyone whose job includes not having too many people in a building, is the entire point.

Two things this deliberately is not:

It is not entry control. Nothing here decides who comes in. That belongs to the door staff and the fire officer, and moving it into an app would be worse in every failure mode.
It is not a regulatory headcount. Occupancy is a sample of attendees running the app with location enabled. It is good enough to act on and not good enough to certify.

What to do when the signal fires

The value of knowing early is that the cheap interventions are still available:

Open a second entrance or exit route before the queue compounds.
Slow the door rather than stopping it — one out, one in.
Move people between spaces if you have more than one, which is only possible if you know which one is full.
Check whether the number is real: a spike that arrives faster than people physically can is usually a boundary problem, not a crowd one.

None of these are available at 2am from a report. All of them are available at 10pm from a number on a screen.

Last reviewed August 2026. If something here stops being true, it is a bug — tell us.