A Guide to it-sa for First-Time Exhibitors
it-sa Expo&Congress is Europe's largest IT security trade fair, and the 2026 edition runs 27–29 October at the Exhibition Centre Nuremberg. It has been held in Nuremberg since 2009 and 2026 is the seventeenth edition. The 2025 show reached 993 exhibitors across five halls and 28,267 trade visitors from 64 countries, up nine percent year on year.
The scope covers the full cybersecurity market: hardware, software, training and consulting, and security as a service — with cloud and mobile security, data and network security, critical infrastructure protection and industrial security as recurring themes. Note that although it shares a venue with SPS, it-sa is organised by NürnbergMesse rather than Mesago, so the exhibitor portal and the ordering deadlines are separate.
Who Exhibits at it-sa and What Visitors Want
The floor mixes established security vendors, distributors, managed service providers, consultancies and a large start-up presence. What unites them is that almost nobody has a physical product. That is unusual, and it is the single most important thing to understand before designing a stand here.
The visitor is a CISO, an IT security officer, a data protection officer or a systems administrator who will have to live with whatever gets bought. They arrive with a specific exposure in mind — a compliance deadline, an incident they are still recovering from, a gap they have been told to close. They are not browsing, and they are cautious about being overheard. The stand's job is to make it obvious within a few seconds what you protect and for whom, and then to give them somewhere private to explain their situation.
Stand Size: Choosing Between 9, 18, 24 and 48 Square Metres
Nine square metres is a legitimate first outing at it-sa, more so than at most shows, because a great many specialist vendors and start-ups exhibit at this size and visitors are used to it. You get a counter, a back wall and standing conversations. What you do not get is privacy, so treat it as a lead-capture position rather than a closing one.
Eighteen square metres adds a second counter and enough depth that a conversation at the back of the stand is not happening in the aisle. It suits consultancies and single-product vendors.
Twenty-four is where the stand changes character, because it is the first size that carries a genuinely screened meeting corner alongside an open front. For this audience that threshold matters more than it does anywhere else — it is the difference between collecting cards and having the conversation that leads to a procurement process.
At 48 m² you can run two enclosed rooms and still have an open briefing area, which matters if you are hosting scheduled sessions or supporting partners on your stand. From 80 m² upward a double-decker is worth pricing, since an upstairs room adds private capacity without consuming the ground floor that your open front needs.
What an it-sa Stand Costs by Size
Ranges below are all-in for design, fabrication, graphics, domestic freight, install and dismantle. They exclude the floor space rental you pay to NürnbergMesse and any orders placed with the venue.
- 9 m² modular: €4,100–€8,700
- 18 m² modular: €4,800–€10,100
- 24 m² custom with screened meeting corner: €11,500–€15,000
- 30 m² custom with fully enclosed meeting room: €15,000–€19,000
- 48 m² custom with two enclosed rooms: €19,000–€26,000
- 80 m² premium or double-decker: €34,000–€48,000
Common Mistakes, in Order of Frequency
The most common by a distance is designing an entirely open stand, then discovering across three days that nobody will say anything substantive standing in an aisle. The second is filling the back wall with a large logo where the protection statement should be — on a floor of 900 vendors, 'who we protect and from what' outperforms a brand mark every time. The third is treating a dashboard on a screen as a demonstration; by the second hall every dashboard looks the same. The fourth is leaving certifications in the brochure instead of on the wall. The fifth is planning the build without checking whether a colleague has a Congress slot on the Monday, which quietly changes the whole schedule. All five are design-stage decisions.
Getting Started
Send your stand size, your hall and stand number if NürnbergMesse has issued it, and tell us whether you need one screened meeting space or two. You get a 3D design and an itemised all-in quote, at no charge and with no obligation. If a smaller local builder is the better answer for a 9 m² shell, we will say so.
it-sa is annual and most exhibitors here also attend one or two other European events, so a reusable system frame is usually the better purchase — the structure stays in our Frankfurt warehouse and each show costs a graphics refresh rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
