When I started as a SIGPLAN elected Member-at-Large and was given the position of Treasurer, we were coming off the COVID times, and the conferences were just returning to full in-person attendance with venues booked in more tumultuous prior years. I live far away from the typical US or EU-based SIGPLAN conferences, and flight and registration costs are and will always be a huge concern for me, my students, and my colleagues. Especially given the limited funding for programming languages in Australia. In this short blog post, I will try to summarise what is involved financially in running SIGPLAN and simply present the situation for the future Executive Committee (EC) members, Steering Committees (SC) of the major conferences, and us, the PL researcher community, to know what to expect and what we can do about it.

SIGPLAN is an ACM Special Interest Group and was effectively created to help manage the conferences that existed in the Programming Languages research communities from the 1970s and 1980s, which have evolved with the times.

The four major annual conferences are: POPL (around January), PLDI (around June), ICFP (around September), and SPLASH/OOPSLA (around October). The current rough attendee numbers are in the 400-700 range for each of these, with the largest conference varying based on interest over the years. A recent move to the PACMPL journal means that having a paper in the main technical track of any of these four conferences does not require you to attend the conference and present your paper. With SIGPLAN agreeing to help pay the Article Processing Charge (APC) for anyone who needs financial help and is not covered by ACM Open, no one is priced out of having their paper published properly in the main Programming Languages publication venues, and we hope it will stay this way forever.

The SIGPLAN budget is a simple arithmetic sum of the income from the registrations collected at these four conferences, with a small amount of sponsorship from the companies that choose to donate, and a very tiny amount of SIGPLAN dues (around $25 per member) paid when you renew your ACM membership if you choose to also join SIGPLAN. Sponsorship amounts to around 10% of our budget or less, significantly below that of almost every other SIG in Computer Science, whose topics are more popular with industry to support. Many of the sponsors we have had over the past few decades have withdrawn (e.g., the Student Research Competition lost its award sponsor in 2022 after 20 years of support and has not yet found a replacement), as other areas take precedence over PL. As a very rough summary: we get around $500K USD per conference, times four, so our annual budget is $2M USD. The ACM requires each SIG to maintain at least 50% of its annual budget in “reserve”, so our balance cannot fall below $1M (approximately) at any given time during the year, or we will not be allowed to continue as a SIG, or ACM will have to take on the financial management. ACM also assesses an overhead, currently 16%, on everything our conferences spend, which means a conference that shows a surplus on paper can still return very little to SIGPLAN once the overhead is taken out.

Our balance has fluctuated over the past several decades, ranging from $1.5M to $3M, with most conferences running at a profit until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. We then had a series of unfortunate events, causing most conferences to run at a loss (ranging from $20K USD to $140K USD per conference) for nearly 5 years. This was the situation when I came in, in the middle of 2024, and as the EC in early 2025, we decided to do something about it, as we could not sustain $300K losses per year without addressing the causes in the long term. Or, as our President, Andrew Myers, put it at PLDI 2026: “turning all the knobs” to try to save money.

Specifically, we agreed to set consistent registration fees across all four major conferences, with the “core per day registration cost for ACM members, non students, early bird” at $300 USD per day (plus any GST or VAT on top) as our goal. So the 3-day conference registration becomes $900 USD (plus tax). We then offset the student registration fee with a 20% discount, so $240 USD per day starting with ICFP 2026. We tried to set student registration at cost after experiencing most of our losses due to more students coming, with each new student costing us in food and other expenses, which have gone up significantly due to inflation. We realise that our initial reaction over the course of 2025 and 2026 made the student fees a bit too close to the full registration fee, but we gradually brought them down as we accounted for other expenses. From now on, we hope to maintain this $300 USD per day cost target with 20% off for students (and, respectively, 20% late penalty, etc.) as our core goal and increase it slowly to match the worldwide inflation while maintaining the break-even point across all our conferences, as some happen to take place in cheaper and some in more expensive places. For context: at 400-700 attendees and a break-even target, running one of our conferences costs roughly $1,000 USD per attendee, so even a full early-bird registration does not quite cover the cost.

Other strategies we employed included optimising and minimising free registrations (we wrote policies on this on our site), ensuring that only the required number of student volunteers is engaged, and working closely with our AV volunteer team. Combined with more careful review of every budget submitted to TMRF by the SIGPLAN Treasurer, we managed to avoid any losses over the past 3 conference instances and have begun increasing our spending to better support our community. This is where I get to the main point: why SIGPLAN doesn’t want to lose money on running conferences, given our rough $2M-per-year budget.

Every year, we spend:

• $100K USD supporting PLMW;
• $100K on SIGPLAN Professional Activities Committee (PAC) travel funding, which anyone wishing to attend our conferences can apply for (we use a prioritised list to fund as many people as we can);
• ~$60K supporting PL summer schools worldwide (OPLSS, SPLV, PLISS, PLS Summer School, etc.);
• ~$20K on the various SIGPLAN Awards, which include cash prizes;
• and whatever APCs and other charges arise, to keep the publication and reading of PL work free for everyone in our community.

Even the cost of the AV team’s travel to the venues (up to $80K USD per year in travel, accommodation, equipment shipping, and free registrations across the four conferences), and the other benefits of SIGPLAN conferences compared to other communities, have to come from our conference income, which almost exclusively means what attendees pay. I deliberately do not go into the conferences’ own running expenses here, such as why we hold them at hotels rather than university campuses or convention centres (venue, catering, and AV together typically run to $300K USD per conference). Catering, which hotels charge per person per day, is usually the largest single line in these budgets, well ahead of the room hire itself. Even co-locating two conferences, as ICFP and SPLASH did in 2025, shares some fixed costs but does not change this per-attendee arithmetic. That is exactly what the ongoing “Future of SIGPLAN Conferences” workshop, with representatives from every conference steering committee, is examining, and I return to it at the end.

Despite all of this, we feel comfortable enough to put aside a further amount on top of the $300K annual expense described above for PLMW/PAC/Schools/Awards for specifically targeted student presenter travel grants, so that every student presenting a first-author paper for the first time at a SIGPLAN venue is more or less guaranteed a standard PAC award (currently $1500 USD, out of which student registration has to be paid). The arithmetic is the whole story: around $2M in annual income is needed to cover the conferences themselves, the $300K in community support, and these new travel grants, while keeping our balance above the $1M reserve required by ACM. That is the entire financial goal of SIGPLAN.

Please continue to support SIGPLAN and post any further suggestions below! If you have strong feelings about how we can run these events better, I strongly encourage you to pick the conference you feel most affiliated with and email its Steering Committee chair with your suggestions, to be passed on to the “Future of SIGPLAN Conferences” workshop, where every SC is represented.

Bio: Alex Potanin is an Associate Professor at the Australian National University and serves as SIGPLAN Treasurer (2024–2027).

Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the SIGPLAN blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGPLAN or its parent organization, ACM.