Running staffing for a county fair is like choreographing a three-week parade that never stops moving: gates open early, headliners go on at night, animals need feeding before sunrise, and midway lights stay blazing until close. If you get the people plan right, everything else feels smoother—guests smile more, vendors sell more, safety incidents stay low, and the fair earns the community goodwill it needs to return even stronger next year.
This guide distills practical staffing lessons from one of the nation’s most complex and beloved fairs—the LA County Fair at Fairplex in Pomona. It draws on public information about attendance trends, hiring practices, and the event’s evolving footprint, then translates those realities into an operations-ready staffing playbook you can adapt to your own large-scale fair.
Quick context: The LA County Fair drew roughly 787,843 guests in 2024 (an 8% bump over 2023) across a 16-day run, reinforcing its status among the largest U.S. county fairs. It returned May 2–26, 2025 for its 103rd anniversary, with expanded attractions and nightly concerts. Those volumes and hours shape everything about staffing: recruiting velocity, training cadence, crowd management, and guest services.
Table of Contents
Start With the Fair’s Operating Reality
Every staffing plan should begin with a brutally honest picture of what you’re fielding—scale, hours, and risk points.
Attendance & dwell time.
Expect prolonged peaks on weekends and concert nights; LA County Fair includes a major carnival with 40+ rides and large-draw entertainment that concentrates arrivals and compresses labor at gates, parking, and crowd control. Build staffing curves that follow show schedules and midway throughput, with surge headcount 60–120 minutes before and after headline acts.
Site complexity.
Fairplex spans ~500 acres and hosts hundreds of events annually—logistics are sophisticated even before you add the fair. Map labor not only by zone (gates, midway, livestock, food halls, arenas) but also by circulation nodes (ticketing queues, tram stops, choke points between attractions). Plan for travel time between posts; a five-minute late relief can cascade across a zone.
Season & schedule.
LA County Fair shifted to a May calendar in recent years. Daytime heat can still affect staff endurance; spring evenings can be chilly (2024 was dubbed the “coolest” fair), which changes uniform needs and guest behavior. Weather-aware scheduling keeps morale up and risk down.
Design a Lean, Clear Org Chart
Gaps in supervision sink fairs more often than raw headcount shortages. Borrow this structure and size it to your scale:
- Command Center (24/7 during fair run): Staffing director, safety lead, security vendor lead, dispatch, HR/employee relations, and scheduling analyst.
- Zone Captains (one per major footprint: Gates & Admissions, Parking/Transportation, Midway & Rides, Food & Beverage Halls, Livestock & Agricultural Education, Concerts/Arenas, Family/Discovery zones).
- Function Leads (training, accreditation/badging, payroll/timekeeping, radio communications).
- Vendor Liaisons (commercial vendors, food vendors, carnival operator, and external security partner).
At a large fair, you’ll also coordinate tightly with a third-party event security firm. LA County Fair publicly partners with Allied Universal for event staff/security, parking attendants, and parking sellers—roles that cover bag checks, access control, traffic direction, and guest service. Even with a vendor, treat security posts like your own: shared SOPs, shared radios, shared metrics.
Workforce Mix: Right People, Right Posts
Core categories you’ll staff:
- Admissions & Guest Services: Ticket scanning, ADA assistance, stroller/wheelchair rentals, information booths, lost & found, guest recovery.
- Parking & Transportation: Sellers, attendants, traffic flaggers, shuttle drivers/dispatch, rideshare zones.
- Security & Crowd Management: Bag check, magnetometers, stage barricades, back-of-house access control, overnight patrol. (Often vendor-supplied; integrate fully.)
- Midway Operations: Coordination with the carnival operator; ride inspection escorts; queue management for marquee rides; E-stop awareness.
- Food & Beverage Halls: Line control, seating turnover, compost/recycling stations, back-of-house corridors.
- Agriculture & Livestock: Barn attendants, educational docents, biosecurity runners, 4-H/FFA liaison.
- Entertainment & Nightly Concerts: Gate checks, ticketing overlays (most concert tickets include fair admission at LA County), crowd flow, egress waves at 7:30 p.m. showtimes and after.
- Facilities/Utilities: Restroom stewards, custodial floaters, water refill stations, waste streams, setup/strike.
- Overlay/Pop-Ups: Special exhibits, skate rinks, art studios, culinary demos—each with their own queue and safety profile.
Staffing ratios to consider (starting points, then calibrate):
- Admissions: 1 scanner per 300–400 peak-hour entries (adjust for ticket type mix and bag checks).
- Bag Check/Mags: 1 screener per 200–250 guests per hour per lane at family fairs; 1 lane per 1,000–1,500 peak-hour entries.
- Parking Sellers: 1 per 150–200 transactions/hour; attendants about 1 per 75–100 spaces in active turnover zones.
- Guest Services Booths: One fully staffed booth per 10,000–15,000 concurrent attendance, with roaming ambassadors at 1 per 5,000.
- Concert Barricades: 1 security steward per 100–150 attendees in GA standing zones; add pit teams and medics as separate units.
These benchmarks should be validated with your own ingress timing studies and carnival throughput logs.
Recruiting at Scale (60–120 Days Out)
Large fairs require a sprint: you’ll hire hundreds of seasonal team members in weeks. Mirror the LA County Fair playbook:
- Centralized Job Fairs. Fairplex hosted a dedicated Job Fair on March 15, 2025 for the May run. Replicate the cadence: one big fair 6–10 weeks out plus rolling open interviews. Invite security and parking partners to co-locate, so applicants can land either a fair role or a vendor role in one trip.
- Role-specific pipelines. Security vendors often run their own hiring blitzes with clearly advertised pay differentials (e.g., $16.50/hour without a California guard card and $17.50/hour with one). Signal these details early to set expectations and accelerate credentialing.
- Community partners. Engage local colleges, ROTC programs, workforce boards (Orange County and LA County workforce solutions often boost fair hiring announcements), and veteran organizations—mirroring Allied Universal’s veteran-friendly messaging.
- Availability-first screening. Ask applicants to submit availability windows before interviews. Prioritize candidates who can cover late nights/weekends and back-to-back shifts within legal limits.
Offer letters within 48 hours of interviews. Seasonal workers shop offers; speed wins.
Pay, Perks, and Retention
Seasonal staff churn is your enemy; reduce friction:
- Transparent pay ladders tied to credentials (e.g., guard card), critical posts (concert barricade), and shift premiums (close, weekend). Benchmark against local postings to stay competitive; LA County Fair’s security postings make wage floors public.
- Weekly pay (standard for many event vendors) and instant wage access options if possible.
- Commute support: Free parking, shuttle passes, or rideshare codes for late egress.
- Meals & breaks: Feed people on doubles, always. If you can’t subsidize meals, arrange vendor vouchers or a “crew café” with fixed-price combos.
- Back-to-back scheduling logic: Never more than 6 consecutive days; cap doubles; enforce 10-hour turnarounds for safety.
- Recognition culture: Daily “line-up kudos,” supervisor shout-outs, and a “Golden Radio” award for problem-solving.
Training: Build Muscle Memory Fast
Think of training as three escalating layers:
Layer 1 — Core Orientation (2–3 hours):
- Fair values and guest-first philosophy.
- Anti-harassment, DEI, and ADA sensitivity.
- Timekeeping, pay, uniform, and parking logistics.
- Radios, call signs, and escalation ladder.
- Emergency basics (stop, secure, summon; E-stops are for ride ops but every staffer understands the language).
Layer 2 — Role/Zone Practicum (2–4 hours):
- Practice scanning/ticket issue resolution; simulate barcodes that fail.
- Bag check drills and magnetometer etiquette (privacy, pace, prohibited items scripts).
- Parking flagging patterns and hand signals in a live lot.
- Queue setup: stanchion geometry matters; walk the layout.
- Concert egress mapping: Where do waves go? Who holds at choke points?
Layer 3 — Live Rehearsal (2–3 hours during soft open/preview):
- Staff the real posts with a skeleton crew and supervisors shadowing; capture bottlenecks.
- Practice hand-offs at shift change—it’s where mistakes multiply.
If using a security vendor, integrate their SOPs and legal standards (e.g., bag checks, access control) into your core training so guest experience feels seamless. Allied Universal, for example, highlights duties like bag checks, access control, and “enforcing policies and procedures for the safety of guests”—make sure your internal playbooks match the tone and steps their teams use on the ground.
Scheduling & Rostering: Treat It Like Air Traffic Control
a) Build by curve, not by average.
Use 15-minute arrival forecasts keyed to concert start times (7:30 p.m. at LA County Fair) and major parade/show blocks. Stage swing teams you can deploy to gates seeing higher bag-check dwell times or to midway queues when a viral food item spikes demand.
b) Two layers of redundancy.
For every 30 frontline workers, schedule one relief floater who can cover extended breaks, medical pulls, or redeployments. For each zone captain, assign a deputy.
c) Treat radios as a schedule.
Map channel assignments to posts; at a glance, you should know if Gate B is at “two scanners, one screener, one lead” by which radios are live. Keep extra charged batteries in labeled bins at each zone base.
d) Respect legal limits.
California break compliance is real: 10-minute paid rest every 4 hours; 30-minute unpaid meal before the 5th hour; second meal on long shifts. Build a break matrix and give it to supervisors so compliance isn’t optional.
Crowd Management: Ingress, Egress, and Everything Between
Big fairs are crowd-flow machines. Three principles:
1) Ingress friction belongs outside the gate.
Place wayfinding, will-call, troubleshooting, and bag-size education in the pre-gate zone so scanners can focus on scanning. In LA County Fair’s model, security handles bag checks and access control—position those lanes to keep ticket lanes moving forward in parallel, not series.
2) Egress is an event, not an afterthought.
Concert nights create 30–40 minute crush egress windows. Stage “wave marshals” at pinch points, reset stanchions for outbound flow, and add mobile lights and PA carts to guide people to shuttles/rideshare. Concerts at LA County Fair include fair admission, so some guests arrive late and leave late; tune egress staffing past posted closing.
3) Eyes on the middle.
Midway congestion isn’t just about ride lines—it’s the triangle of food hit, photo moment, and marquee ride. Use roving teams with stanchions-on-wheels to pop up short-term queues, and empower them to re-stripe pedestrian lanes with chalk/duct where vendors or performers create eddies.
Guest Services That Actually Defuse Problems
Information booths as command outposts.
Staff with your best troubleshooters—people who love solving puzzles. Give them: ticketing override authority (within bounds), a stash of universal meal/drink vouchers for guest recovery, lost child protocols, and a real-time map to reunite families. On heavy days, add language tags (Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog) on name badges; LA County is linguistically rich, and multilingual staff reduces escalations.
Lost & found and lost children.
Pre-write the scripts. Every team member should know the immediate “lock-in” protocol for a missing child (who calls it, who posts at gates, who checks restrooms). Keep a quiet room near Guest Services with water, snacks, and soft seating.
ADA assistance.
Train for mobility devices, show routes with least grade and fewest obstructions, and place seating oases in hot zones. Provide a separate ADA queue at bag check and scanning where feasible.
Vendor & Partner Integration
Large fairs live or die by partner alignment. LA County Fair actively recruits commercial vendors and food partners, offering booth packages with power, pipe and drape, and staff admission/parking passes—your staffing plan must recognize those entitlements and their choke points at load-in.
Load-in/Load-out staffing:
- Dock marshals to stage trucks and enforce time windows.
- Electric & safety walk-throughs before opening.
- Vendor credentialing that prints passes in <2 minutes (anything longer creates a day-one line of angry sellers).
- Waste/grease teams on AM/PM shifts—F&B vendors need predictable pickups.
Daily vendor support:
- A Vendor Help Desk with spare POS cables, surge strips, tape, gloves, and signage blanks.
- A runner team for emergency supplies so vendors aren’t deserting booths.
Revenue protection:
- Sampling rules, line-of-sight standards, booth frontage limits, and amplified sound windows—staff to enforce fairly and consistently.
Technology That Keeps the Crew Clicking
- Scheduling & timekeeping with mobile self-service: staff can swap shifts within rules; supervisors approve on the fly.
- Incident management app tied to radio call signs; every safety/security report produces a ticket with time, GPS, and photos.
- Ingress analytics (turnstile scan counts + mag lane throughput) so you can move screeners dynamically.
- Digital wayfinding for guests and staff, including a “last cleaned” time stamp for restrooms to reduce complaints.
- Payroll readiness for multiple employers (your staff, security vendor, carnival operator temp crews) so hours and breaks are logged under the correct entity.
Conclusion
The LA County Fair works because it blends big-city entertainment with hometown hospitality—skating rinks, culinary demos, and headliner concerts wrapped around barns, quilts, and Ferris wheels. That mix creates complex staffing challenges, but also gives you countless moments to delight a guest—helping a grandparent find shade, reuniting a kid with a lost backpack, or turning a long line into a five-minute smile with good signage and a friendly “you’re almost there.”
If you build a plan that honors both the scale (hundreds of thousands of people, multiple venues, nightly shows) and the spirit (patient, friendly, safe), your county fair can earn the same kind of community loyalty that keeps LA County Fair fans coming back year after year. And when your staff finishes the run a little tired but a lot proud, you’ll know you got the most important part right.
