Chicago Trade Show Booth & LED Display Rentals

McCormick Place's Exhibitor Bill of Rights lets your own full-time employees set up a booth of any size, using their own ladders, hand tools, cordless and power tools. For an exhibitor who travels with staff, that is the single biggest cost difference between Chicago and everywhere else.

It is the exact inverse of Las Vegas, where you may place posters, lightboxes and backwalls but no power tools and no ladders. A booth designed for a crew to assemble in Chicago may need ordered labor in the same aisle in Nevada.

Confirm against your own show's exhibitor service manual. The venue sets the jurisdictions; show management sets what an exhibitor may do, and it varies show to show in the same hall. Full detail in the McCormick Place labor and drayage guide.

What that means for renting from us. If your team is already travelling to Chicago, you can rent the LED and install it yourselves — our posters and lightboxes are built to be assembled by hand and ship in rolling flight cases. You are paying for the hardware, not for a crew you are legally allowed to replace.

These are not estimates. We pulled every stand from each show's own published floor plan and derived the booth class from the coordinates — a stand with one open side is an inline with a roughly 8ft back wall and no hanging sign; four open sides is an island with full height.

IMTS is the most inline-dominated floor we have measured anywhere — nearly three quarters of exhibitors are not permitted a hanging sign, and islands account for only 35% of the hall. A machine-tool show is long inline runs of heavy equipment, not open islands.

This is the part worth knowing before you budget, and it is the opposite of what most exhibitors assume. AHR Expo ran at the Las Vegas Convention Center in 2026 and moves to McCormick Place for 2027. We measured both editions the same way:

Same show, different city, and the floor is almost identical. Meanwhile inside that same McCormick building, PACK EXPO puts 22% of its floor in islands and IMTS 35%, against AHR's 68%. So the thing that decides whether you are surrounded by tall islands is your industry, not the hall and not the city.

Practical read: do not budget Chicago as though it will look like the last Chicago show you did. Budget it as though it will look like the last show in your industry — because on the numbers, it will.

Where that leaves your booth. If you are one of the 56–73% at these shows who cannot hang a sign, height has to come off the floor. That is what LED towers, freestanding posters and lightboxes are for — they read from across an aisle without touching the ceiling. At IMTS in particular, where the hall is long inline runs, a lit vertical is often the only thing distinguishing one 10x20 from the next.

Being straight with you: our warehouse is in Las Vegas, so Chicago is not the four-hour truck run that Los Angeles is. It is roughly 1,750 miles and a real over-the-road shipment. That changes the schedule, not the outcome, and it is worth planning properly rather than discovering late.

• One consolidated shipment. Drayage minimums are charged per shipment, so a single palletised load beats several loose boxes. Three 150lb boxes bill as 600lbs, not 450. The drayage arithmetic is the same in any hall — only the rate changes, and yours is printed in your exhibitor manual.
• Advance warehouse, not showsite. For a shipment coming this far, the advance warehouse is usually the cheaper and far calmer option — it removes the risk of a truck sitting in a marshalling yard on your install day.
• Confirm your building first. McCormick is North and South plus Lakeside and West, and they are a long way apart. Routing freight to the wrong one costs a day.
• Everything cases. Our LED ships in rolling flight cases, which keeps it clear of special-handling surcharges and makes it quick to move on the floor.

Same equipment and the same published rates as Las Vegas. Chicago has real published pricing: several exhibit houses estimate the show's costs in detail — floor space per square foot, drayage per hundredweight, electrical by amperage — and some publish a fixed all-in package price for a turnkey booth. What we publish is a different shape: per-item rates for equipment we own and install ourselves, with the buy price alongside the day rate, so you can see where a package total comes from and run the rent-versus-buy arithmetic. Here is our rate card, per item.

Setup and teardown is listed separately so you can see it — and in Chicago it is the line you may not need, because the Bill of Rights lets your own staff do that work. Booth all-in runs roughly $3,000–$9,000 for a 10x10 up to $60,000–$150,000+ for a 30x30 island, excluding the floor space you buy from the show. The full cost breakdown applies city to city; only the labor rules above change.

How can a Las Vegas company do my booth in Chicago?

We design and build your booth at our Las Vegas shop, ship it to Chicago, and coordinate install and dismantle with McCormick Place's labor. One team manages design, freight and on-site setup — you just show up and present.

What's the labor situation at McCormick Place?

McCormick runs THREE union jurisdictions (Teamsters freight, IBEW electrical, IATSE rigging) with I&D often $75–$140+/hr, and the highest drayage in the country. Our job is to design for fewer labor hours and walk you through the order forms — see our labor guide.

Can you ship a booth to Chicago in time for my show?

Yes — we build to your show date and ship to Chicago with time to install. Rental and modular kits move fastest; full custom needs more lead time. Tell us your date and we'll confirm the timeline.