What a Bonfire Night planner does (and why it beats guessing)

Planning your own Bonfire Night is mostly a pile of small guesses. How many fireworks make a decent show? Will two bags of kindling get the fire going? Are six jacket potatoes enough for seven people, or will somebody go without? A Bonfire Night planner swaps those guesses for numbers you can actually shop from.

This free Bonfire Night party planner is built for UK hosts. Tell it who's coming and what sort of evening you want, and it gives you a costed fireworks show, a food and drink list, a bonfire build, a timed schedule and a safety checklist. There's nothing to download and nothing to sign up for, and it works fine on a phone while you're standing in the supermarket.

It also answers the question most hosts ask first: how much is this going to cost? Think of it as a bonfire night budget calculator and a fireworks calculator for UK parties in one, with the legal limits checked in the background.

One thing to know before you start: the planner gives estimates. Shop prices vary, and your fireworks box will have its own safety distance printed on it. Where the law sets a hard number, the planner uses it. Where it's a judgement call, it says so.

How to use this Bonfire Night calculator, step by step

The whole thing takes about a minute. Here's what to do, and why each step matters.

1. Add your guests. Enter adults and children separately, using the plus and minus buttons or by typing a number. The split matters more than you'd expect. Adults drive the mulled wine and hot dogs, while children push up the sparklers, toffee apples and hot chocolate. You need at least one adult, and each box takes up to 500.
2. Pick your party type. Garden is a family evening in your own back garden. Neighbourhood is a bigger shared display for a close or a few streets' worth of friends, on private land and never in the road. Community is a large open-space event. This choice sets the length of the show, the firework category, how far people must stand back and how big the bonfire gets.
3. Choose a spend level. Budget, Standard or Premium. It changes the length of the show (about a quarter shorter on Budget, a quarter longer on Premium) and the price of every item, food included.
4. Set the night, start time and length. "5 Nov" applies the midnight curfew, and "Other" applies the usual 11 pm cut-off. Start times run from 4:00 pm to 8:30 pm in half-hour steps, and the slider covers one to six hours.
5. Press "Plan my Bonfire Night". A fuse burns across the button, a few rockets go up in the header, and your plan appears. The form folds away so the results have the room.
6. Work through the tabs. Fireworks, Food, Bonfire, Timing and Safety each get their own panel, explained below. Need to change something? Tap Edit, adjust your numbers and press "Update my plan".

Reset puts everything back to the starting values: four adults, three children, a Garden party at Standard spend, three hours from 6 pm on 5 November.

What each setting changes

Every input feeds specific parts of the plan. This table shows which, so you can see why a small tweak sometimes moves the total a lot.

Your results, tab by tab

The results screen has a summary strip across the top and five tabs underneath. Four coloured tiles sum up the plan: the total estimate (fireworks, food and bonfire together), the length of your show, the weight of bonfire logs, and the stand-back distance for spectators. The numbers count up as the plan loads, which is a bit of theatre, but they're exactly the figures you'll find in the tabs.

How many fireworks do I need?

For a garden party of seven people at Standard spend, the planner suggests 16 fireworks plus ten sparklers, which adds up to a show of just over six minutes.

You'll notice the number of fireworks doesn't depend on how many guests turn up. That's deliberate. A six-minute show is a six-minute show whether seven people watch it or seventeen. A bigger crowd changes the space you need and the risk you're taking on, not the show itself. Guest numbers do change the sparklers, the food and the wood.

How many fireworks do I need for a garden party?

Aim for five to eight minutes. That's the range the planner uses for garden parties, from 4 minutes 40 seconds at Budget to 7 minutes 26 seconds at Premium. Much shorter and it feels over before anyone has found their gloves. Much longer and a small garden fills with smoke while the bill climbs fast. The Standard garden mix is five cakes and barrages, six rockets, two fountains or wheels, two Roman candles and a finale.

The finale is only about an eighth of the show's running time, yet it takes £60 of the £204. That's why the Budget setting, with a £25 finale, saves so much without anyone noticing a gap in the sky. Whatever you pick, check the garden is big enough first: F2 fireworks need at least 8 m between the firing spot and your guests (more on that below).

How much does Bonfire Night cost? A real budget breakdown

For seven guests (four adults and three children) at a three-hour garden party, the planner's total comes to £300 at Standard spend, £171 on a Budget night and £510 at Premium. Fireworks take the biggest share every time.

Cost per guest drops as the party grows

Bigger parties cost more in total but less per head. The finale and the bonfire's starter pile are costs you pay once, so spreading them over more people brings the price per guest down. Food is the exception, because it scales almost one-for-one with the guest list.

You'll see an older figure quoted online: a 2017 survey by a short-term lender found that people hosting their own display expected to spend around £72 on fireworks. That's nearly a decade old, so treat it as history rather than a benchmark. A planned show with a proper finale and sparklers for everyone lands higher in our estimates (£207 for the Standard garden party), which is why the planner builds prices from item-by-item estimates instead.

Ways to bring the bill down

• Start at Budget. Four minutes forty seconds is still a proper show for a back garden.
• Make the food yourself. Jacket potatoes, hot dogs and hot chocolate are cheap. Mulled wine is the biggest single food cost, £14 of the £40 at Standard.
• Share with neighbours. One bigger display between several households costs less per head than three small ones, provided the space is large enough for the fireworks you pick.

Fireworks safety distance in the UK: F1 to F4 explained

Every consumer firework sold in the UK carries a category on its label, and each category has a legal minimum safety distance. The planner uses 8 m for garden (F2) fireworks and 15 m for the F3 category used in bigger displays.

Those are minimums. The regulations only allow a shorter distance where it's appropriate, and plenty of display-size F3 products print a bigger number on the box, with 25 m common. The figure on the packaging is the one to follow. That's why the Fireworks tab says so in plain words, and why the Safety tab tells you to rope off the viewing area at the distance printed on each box. All consumer fireworks are also capped at 120 dB at their safety distance.

How far away should fireworks be from houses?

There's no single national figure for houses. The legal distances are about keeping spectators back, and the label tells you the distance for that particular firework. In practice, treat the label distance as the minimum clear gap in every direction: spectators, buildings, trees, fences and overhead cables. Set up the firing area downwind of your audience so smoke and debris drift away from them, and keep it well clear of the bonfire. The bonfire has its own gap, because UK fire services advise at least 18 m from buildings, trees and fences. The planner shows that on its Bonfire tab.

What time can you legally set off fireworks on Bonfire Night?

Until midnight on 5 November. On every other night the cut-off is 11 pm, and fireworks can't be set off again until 7 am. Bonfire Night 2026 falls on a Thursday, so the midnight limit applies on Thursday 5 November.

The Timing tab checks your show against the right cut-off. Choose 5 Nov and it uses midnight. Choose Other and it uses 11 pm, even on New Year's Eve or Diwali when the law allows until 1 am. That's the cautious choice, and you can always finish later than the planner assumes. Thursday is a school and work night, so a nine o'clock finish and a quick word with the neighbours is kinder than using every minute of the allowance.

How much wood do I need for a bonfire?

For a three-hour garden party, plan on about 51 kg of dry logs, which is roughly six 10 kg nets. Bigger parties need a bigger starter pile and more topping up: about 115 kg for a neighbourhood evening and 270 kg for a community one.

The planner works it out in two parts, a starter pile and then a rate per hour to keep the fire going. Garden parties start at 15 kg and add 12 kg an hour. Neighbourhood parties start at 40 kg and add 25 kg an hour. Community parties start at 120 kg and add 50 kg an hour. Kindling is about 8% of the log weight, rounded up to 3 kg bags, plus one to three boxes of firelighters depending on size.

Building it safely

• Choose a spot at least 18 m from buildings, trees, fences, hedges and overhead cables. This is standard UK fire-service advice.
• Keep the pile low. The planner caps it at 1.5 m for a garden party, 2 m for a neighbourhood one and 3 m for a community one.
• Make sure guests stand back. Councils commonly advise at least 5 m for a garden fire, and the planner widens that to 10 m and 15 m for bigger piles.
• Burn dry, untreated wood only. No aerosols, paint tins, tyres, foam furniture or batteries.
• Light it with firelighters, never petrol, paraffin or any other flammable liquid.
• Build it on the day, or check the pile for hedgehogs before you light it. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society recommends exactly that.
• Keep a bucket of water or a hose within reach, never leave the fire unattended, and douse it properly at the end.

Bonfire Night food ideas for a crowd (with quantities)

The planner's food list is built around seven classics: jacket potatoes, hot dogs, toffee apples, parkin, toasted marshmallows, mulled wine and hot chocolate. It's a traditional menu that's cheap, easy to make in batches and hard to get wrong.

Behind those numbers sit a handful of simple rules of thumb, shown below. They're the same ones the planner prints under See working.

Potatoes, hot dogs and hot chocolate are also multiplied by a length factor of 0.7 plus 0.1 for every hour, so a three-hour party uses exactly 1.0 and a six-hour one uses 1.3. Everything is rounded up, because running short is worse than having a spare toffee apple.

Making it work for a crowd

• Bake the potatoes in the oven, wrap them in foil and keep them hot in a cool box. You'll serve forty without anyone standing over embers.
• Do the sausages in batches on a grill or in a slow cooker with onions, so the first and last hot dog are equally warm.
• Put hot chocolate and soup in flasks or a big pan on the hob, well away from the firework area.
• Offer a non-alcoholic mulled option such as warm spiced apple juice for children and drivers. The person lighting the fireworks should stay off the wine altogether.
• Parkin is a sticky ginger and oatmeal cake traditionally eaten around Bonfire Night in the north of England. It keeps well and can be made days ahead.
• Tell guests what's in things. A quick label for nuts, gluten and dairy saves an awkward moment.

A sample Bonfire Night timeline you can copy

This is exactly what the planner produces for four adults and three children at a Garden party on Standard spend, starting at 6 pm on 5 November and running three hours.

The logic is simple. The show lands roughly 55% of the way through the party, which keeps the food and fire first and the finale as the high point. It never starts before 5:30 pm, because the clocks go back on Sunday 25 October this year and the sky needs a while after sunset to go properly dark. Sparklers come twenty minutes before the show. If your start time and party length push the show past the curfew, the Timing tab slides it earlier and tells you it did.

Bonfire Night checklist

Tick things off as you go. This is the same list that sits in the planner's Safety tab, split into stages and with a few extras.

Frequently asked questions

Tap a question to see the answer.

How many fireworks do I need for a garden party?

For a typical garden party the planner suggests 16 fireworks plus sparklers, which makes a show of roughly 4 minutes 40 seconds at Budget, 6 minutes at Standard and 7 and a half minutes at Premium. Choose Garden as your party type, set your spend level and the planner works out the exact mix of cakes, rockets, fountains, Roman candles and finale.

How much does Bonfire Night cost?

For seven guests at a garden party the planner estimates £171 on a Budget night, £300 at Standard and £510 at Premium, covering fireworks, food and the bonfire. Bigger parties cost more overall but less per guest: about £22 a head for 35 guests and £14 a head for 140.

How much wood do I need for a bonfire?

A three-hour garden party needs about 51 kg of dry logs, around six 10 kg nets, plus two bags of kindling and a box of firelighters. A neighbourhood party needs about 115 kg and a community one about 270 kg for the same three hours.

What time can you legally set off fireworks on Bonfire Night?

Until midnight on 5 November. On other nights the cut-off is 11 pm, with New Year's Eve, Diwali and Chinese New Year running to 1 am. Fireworks can't be set off between the cut-off and 7 am.

How far away should fireworks be from houses?

There's no one legal figure for houses. Follow the safety distance printed on each firework (8 m is the legal minimum for F2 and 15 m for F3) and treat it as the clear gap in every direction, including buildings, trees and cables. Bonfires need at least 18 m from buildings.

What is the fireworks safety distance in the UK?

The legal minimums are 1 m for F1, 8 m for F2 and 15 m for F3 fireworks. Many display-size F3 products state a bigger distance, often 25 m, and that printed figure is the one you must follow. F4 fireworks are for professionals only.

Can children use sparklers?

Sparklers must carry a warning that they shouldn't be given to children under 5. For older children, use gloves, hold one sparkler at a time at arm's length, and drop finished ones into a bucket of water. Adult fireworks (F2 and F3) are for over 18s only.

When can I buy fireworks in the UK?

Registered sellers can sell to the public from 15 October to 10 November and from 26 to 31 December, plus 3 days before Diwali and Chinese New Year. At other times you can only buy from licensed shops.

Is this Bonfire Night planner free, and how accurate is it?

It's completely free. The legal limits come from GOV.UK and legislation.gov.uk, and the arithmetic has been tested across thousands of combinations. Prices are typical UK estimates, which is why the Fireworks tab shows a range as well as a single figure. Tap See working at any time to check every formula.

Can I use the planner for New Year's Eve or Diwali?

Yes. Choose "Other" under Party night. The planner will use the standard 11 pm cut-off, which is cautious, because the law allows until 1 am on those nights.

Is this fireworks calculator only for the UK?

It's built around UK law, UK pricing and UK traditions. The planner follows the rules for England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have extra rules of their own, and in Northern Ireland you need a licence to buy F2, F3 or F4 fireworks, so check with your local council first.

Is it safe to host my own fireworks display?

Attending a licensed public display is the safest way to enjoy fireworks. If you do host your own, follow the instructions and safety distance on every firework, appoint one sober adult to light them, and keep children well back. For crowds of 100 or more, a professional display is the better choice.

Can I add this calculator to my own website?

Yes. Scroll to the bottom of this page, copy the embed code and paste it into the HTML of your own page.

Sources and notes

• GOV.UK: Fireworks, the law for curfew times, age limits, sale dates and penalties.
• The Pyrotechnic Articles (Safety) Regulations 2015, Schedules 1 to 3 for firework categories, minimum safety distances, the 120 dB limit and the sparkler warning.

Prices, quantities and bonfire sizes are our own planning estimates, based on typical UK shop prices and common party-size guidance, not official figures. This page was last reviewed on 6 October 2026.

Add this Bonfire Night planner to your website

Run a school, a pub, a community group or a blog? You can show this planner on your own page for free. Copy the code below and paste it into the HTML of your page, or into an HTML or embed block in your site builder.

If your site builder asks, set the width to 100%. Increase the height number if you'd like more room on small screens.