Free Event Waiver Form
Free event waiver form in Word, plus who the release must name, why race entry forms fail, volunteer immunity statutes and the state law behind it.
What is in the form
The download is a complete, editable event participation waiver and release in Word format. It opens with a capitalised warning, names the parties, and then runs through these numbered sections. The shared clauses are the same across every Waiver.com template, so a business using several forms keeps one consistent voice.
- The Event. I am signing this agreement so that I may take part in the Event, which the Organizer is holding at [Venue Name and Address] on [Event Date] from approximately [Start Time] to [End Time].
- Released Parties for This Event. I understand that the Event is put on by the Organizer with the help of other people and companies, and I agree that the Released Parties defined in the release below also include: the owner, operator and manager of the venue, [Venue Owner or Operator]; the Event's sponsors, [Sponsor Names]; any timing, medical, security, catering, equipment or transport company working at the Event; the sanctioning body, if any; and every officer, employee, volunteer and agent of each of them..
- Event Conditions, Schedule Changes and Cancellation. I understand that the Organizer may change the course, format, start time or rules of the Event, shorten or pause it, or cancel it at any time because of weather, safety, permits, attendance or other reasons, and that in the case of a cancellation my remedy is limited to whatever the Organizer's published refund or transfer policy provides.
- Acknowledgment and Assumption of Risk. I understand that the Event involves inherent risks, dangers and hazards that cannot be eliminated regardless of the care taken to avoid injury.
- Release of Liability. In consideration of being permitted to take part in the Event, I, for myself and on behalf of my heirs, executors, administrators, assigns and next of kin, RELEASE, WAIVE AND DISCHARGE [Business Name], its owners, officers, employees, agents, volunteers, contractors, insurers, landlords and affiliated entities (together, the "Released Parties") from all claims, demands, losses and liability for bodily injury, illness, death or property damage arising out of or related to my participation, WHETHER CAUSED BY THE ORDINARY NEGLIGENCE OF THE RELEASED PARTIES OR OTHERWISE, to the fullest extent permitted by law..
- Indemnification. I agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Released Parties from any loss, liability, damage or cost, including reasonable attorneys' fees, that they may incur because of a claim brought by a third party arising out of my conduct during the Event, or because of any breach of the promises I make in this document..
- Rules, Instructions and Fitness to Participate. I agree to follow all posted rules, safety briefings and staff instructions.
- Electronic Signatures and Records. I agree that this document may be signed electronically and that an electronic signature, and an electronic copy of the signed document, have the same legal effect as a handwritten signature and a paper original.
- Severability. If any part of this document is found to be invalid or unenforceable, that part will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest of the document will remain in full force and effect..
- Governing Law and Venue. This document is governed by the laws of the State of [State], without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.
- Entire Agreement. I have read this entire document, I understand it, and I am signing it voluntarily.
- Parent or Guardian Consent (for a participant under 18). I am the parent or legal guardian of the minor participant named below and I have the legal authority to sign for them.
- Participant information and signatures. 8 information fields, a signature block for the participant and a separate block for a parent or legal guardian.
An event waiver is the release someone signs to take part in something that happens once: a road race on a closed course, a tournament weekend, a charity ride, a company field day, a festival with an inflatable assault course in the corner of a field. It is a different document from the participation waiver a gym or a climbing wall uses every day, and an organiser who reuses the everyday form usually ends up releasing the wrong parties from the wrong risks on the wrong day. This page sets out what an event release has to carry, where these forms come apart, and which state pages to read for the law that decides whether it works at all.
This page is general information and not legal advice. An event pulls in more separate contracts than an ordinary trading day, so have an attorney licensed where the event is held read the form and the permit conditions together before you send anything out.
What a single date adds to the document
A gym's form describes a place and a set of activities that will still be there next month. An event form has to describe something that exists for six hours on one Saturday, and that changes what it needs to say.
Give it a date, a start and a finish time and the address of the site, because a court reads a release against the event it names and nothing wider. Give it the course or the programme: which sessions, which laps, which parts of the site are open and which are fenced off. Say what happens if the weather moves the start, shortens the course or takes the whole thing off, and say what the entry fee does in that case, because a refund argument and an injury claim can arrive from the same person in the same week. If you are carrying people to the site in vans, on a shuttle or in a boat, that journey is part of the day and the form should state whether it sits inside the release or outside it. If there is a practice session, a check-in the night before, a prize ceremony or a party afterwards, name those too or accept that they fall outside the document.
Then name everyone the release is meant to protect, which is the part most event forms get wrong.
Who exactly is released
A release protects the parties it names. That reads as obvious until you count the legal entities standing on a field on event morning.
There is the organiser, often a company or a club that owns nothing at the site. There is the venue, frequently a separate operating company. Behind the venue there may be a landowner with no other involvement: a farmer, a family trust, a school district, a port authority. There are sponsors, whose name is on the bib and whose branded tent is a structure people walk into. There is a timing company, a medical crew, a security contractor, a caterer, a stage or inflatable hire firm. There are volunteers, who are individuals and not employees of anybody. And there is usually a city, county or parks department that issued the permit and attached conditions to it.
When the form releases the organiser and stops, every other party on that list is exposed. So, indirectly, is the organiser, because the venue agreement and the permit almost always require the organiser to indemnify the venue, the landowner and the authority. The claim arrives through the indemnity instead of through the release, and the release is no defence to it. Sponsors find the same thing from the other direction: their name is on the event material, so their name is in the complaint, and they look to the organiser to carry it.
Hiett v. Lake Barcroft Community Association, 244 Va. 191 (1992), shows the shape of an event claim even though the release in it failed for a different reason. The entry form for a community triathlon released the organisers and the sponsors, and the entrant was injured within seconds of entering the water at the start of the swim leg.
The fix is a written list rather than a phrase. Name the organiser, the venue operator, the landowner, each sponsor, the timing, medical and security contractors, the sanctioning body if there is one, and the officers, employees, volunteers and agents of each of them. Check the list against the venue contract and the permit before you publish the form, and check it again if a sponsor joins late. The event participation waiver outline has that block drafted with placeholders to fill in.
Where event releases come apart
Buried in the logistics. An entry form that runs through parking, packet pickup, bag drop and start waves, then drops one release sentence into the middle of it, is asking a court to treat that sentence as a knowing waiver. Colorado's court of appeals refused to do that in Wycoff v. Grace Community Church (Colo. App. 2010), where a parent signed a one-page registration form for a three-day youth event. The form named the event but never described the activities or the risks, so the decision it recorded could not have been an informed one.
Text nobody saw. Online registration makes it easy to collect a tick without showing anyone the words. If the release sits behind a link, or scrolls inside a small box, or appears only after payment, the record you keep has to prove which version of the text was on the screen and that the entrant moved through it. That evidence is the main reason to sign online rather than on paper.
One signature for a group. A captain, a coach, a tour leader or the parent who booked the minibus cannot release the claims of other adults. Each adult entrant signs for themselves. A form that lets one person type in a roster of names produces a list, not a set of releases.
The wrong place or the wrong time. Injuries at events cluster at the edges: in the car park, at the shuttle stop, in the queue at registration, on the walk back to the field an hour after the finish. A release written around the word event invites the argument that none of that was the event.
Conduct nobody can release. No state enforces a release of gross negligence, recklessness or intentional misconduct. A marshal sent to stand in live traffic, a course left unswept after a warning, a missing medical plan the permit required: those are the facts that carry a case past the release, and no drafting fixes them.
Charity events, volunteers and the immunity statutes
A volunteer is not a participant, and the participant waiver is the wrong document for them. A volunteer agreement covers a different set of facts: the role, the training, the limits on what they may do, whether they will drive, and what happens if they are hurt while marshalling. Ask volunteers to sign that, and ask them for a participant waiver only if they are also taking part.
Statutes already stand behind volunteers. The federal Volunteer Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. 14501 and following, shields an individual volunteer of a nonprofit or governmental entity from liability for harm caused while acting within the scope of their responsibilities, provided they held any licence or certification the role required. It does not reach willful or criminal misconduct, gross negligence, reckless misconduct or conscious, flagrant indifference to safety, and it does not reach the operation of a motor vehicle, vessel or aircraft for which the state requires a licence or insurance. The section says in terms that nothing in it affects the liability of the nonprofit organisation or governmental entity itself.
States layer their own versions on top. Colorado's Volunteer Service Act, section 13-21-115.5, gives immunity to a volunteer who qualifies under the federal act, withholds it for willful and wanton conduct, caps any motor vehicle recovery at the applicable insurance limits, and leaves the organisation exposed except in the narrow case of an entity formed solely to facilitate volunteer health care. That is the pattern to expect: the people are protected, the organisation is not. Statutes of this kind vary in detail from state to state, so read your own rather than assuming the Colorado shape, and if your charity event runs on volunteers, treat the insurance as the real protection and the paperwork as the record.
Minors, group entries and school trips
Events draw children in groups, which is the hardest signing problem in this document. Whether a parent can release a child's own claim varies more than any other question in waiver law, and the state pages linked below give the position in each state. The minor waiver template and the guide on liability waivers for minors cover the mechanics: who counts as a guardian, what a school or club leader can and cannot sign, and why the guardian block earns its place even in states that will not enforce the release.
For a school trip or a club entry, work back from the roster. The school hands you a list of names; you need a guardian signature against each one, collected before the bus leaves, and a way to see at a glance who is missing. Wycoff is the warning: a permission slip that names the trip but not the activity or the risk is not a release, whatever it says at the bottom.
Running it on the day
Send the link with the entry confirmation, not with the reminder. Keep a roster the desk can read, showing signed or not signed against each name, with the record one click away, because staff who have to search an inbox will stop the queue. Put a QR code on the registration banner and on the back of the entry list so a walk-up can sign on a phone while queuing, and keep a tablet in kiosk mode for the person whose battery is dead or who needs help with the text.
Keep the version with the record. If you change the wording between early entry and race week, publish a new version rather than editing the old one, so an entrant who signed in March keeps the March text. Export the signed records after the event and file them with the permit, the risk assessment and the incident log, because those four documents get read together if anything goes wrong.
The state law that decides the answer
The wording is only half of it. Start at the liability waiver hub for the general rules and the state-by-state pages, then read the states where you actually hold events. Three of them change an organiser's answer outright.
New York voids the release rather than reading it. General Obligations Law section 5-326 makes any covenant or agreement exempting the owner or operator of a pool, gymnasium, place of amusement or recreation from liability for its own negligence void as against public policy, wherever that owner or operator receives a fee or other compensation for the use of the facilities. An event that charges entry and runs at a venue of that kind sits squarely inside it, and drafting cannot save it.
Virginia does not enforce pre-injury releases of personal injury claims at all. Hiett settled that for a triathlon, and the rule runs back to an 1890 decision. A Virginia event still uses the form, but as evidence that the entrant knew the risks and chose to start, not as a release.
Montana writes part of the wording for you. Section 28-2-702 voids contracts whose object is to exempt a person from responsibility for violation of law, whether willful or negligent, except as provided in section 27-1-753. That section lets a waiver taken before a sport or recreational opportunity reach ordinary negligence, but only if it states the known inherent risks and carries a prescribed warning in bold typeface telling the signer they may be waiving their legal right to a jury trial. It also keeps claims based on the design, manufacture, provision or maintenance of sport, recreational or safety equipment outside the limitation, and says a complying waiver may still be challenged on any other legal ground.
Read the page for every state you travel to, not only the one your organisation is registered in. An event that moves around the country is signing under a different rule each weekend.
Sample wording
These clauses are quoted from the downloadable template. Square brackets are placeholders; replace them with your business, your activity and your state, then read the state page for everywhere you operate.
Acknowledgment and Assumption of Risk
I understand that the Event involves inherent risks, dangers and hazards that cannot be eliminated regardless of the care taken to avoid injury. These risks include, without limitation: falls, trips and collisions on a course, field, floor or stage; contact with other participants, spectators, staff, equipment or structures; crowded start, finish and spectator areas; temporary structures, inflatables and rented equipment; weather, heat, cold, lightning and poor footing at an outdoor venue; overexertion, dehydration and exhaustion during competition; travel to, from and around the venue; and the actions or negligence of other participants and volunteers. I understand that these risks may result in property damage, bodily injury, illness, permanent disability, paralysis or death.
I confirm that I am voluntarily choosing to take part with full knowledge of these risks. I ASSUME ALL RISKS OF PARTICIPATION, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, INCLUDING RISKS ARISING FROM THE ORDINARY NEGLIGENCE OF THE RELEASED PARTIES, to the fullest extent permitted by the law of the governing state named below.
Release of Liability
In consideration of being permitted to take part in the Event, I, for myself and on behalf of my heirs, executors, administrators, assigns and next of kin, RELEASE, WAIVE AND DISCHARGE [Business Name], its owners, officers, employees, agents, volunteers, contractors, insurers, landlords and affiliated entities (together, the "Released Parties") from all claims, demands, losses and liability for bodily injury, illness, death or property damage arising out of or related to my participation, WHETHER CAUSED BY THE ORDINARY NEGLIGENCE OF THE RELEASED PARTIES OR OTHERWISE, to the fullest extent permitted by law.
This release does not apply to claims arising from gross negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct, or to any other claim that cannot be released under the law of the governing state named below.
Parent or Guardian Consent (for a participant under 18)
I am the parent or legal guardian of the minor participant named below and I have the legal authority to sign for them. I have read this document, I have explained the risks of the Event to the minor in terms they understand, and I consent to their participation.
To the fullest extent permitted by the law of the governing state, I make every acknowledgment, release, waiver and promise in this document on behalf of the minor and on my own behalf, and I agree to indemnify the Released Parties against any claim brought by or on behalf of the minor to the extent the law allows. I understand that some states limit or do not allow a parent to release a minor's claims, and that in those states the minor's own claims may not be affected by my signature.
I authorize [Business Name] to obtain emergency medical treatment for the minor if I cannot be reached, and I agree to pay for that treatment.
Event Participation Waiver and Release, ready to edit.
An editable Word document with every section above, bracketed placeholders, signature blocks for the participant and for a parent or guardian, and a note reminding you to have a local attorney review it. Free, no email required.
Word (.docx), about 1300 words. This is a general template, not legal advice.Event waiver questions
How is an event waiver different from a normal participation waiver?
A participation waiver describes a place and a set of activities that will still be there next month. An event waiver describes something that exists for a few hours on one date, so it has to fix the date, the times, the site, the course or programme, what happens if the weather changes the schedule, what the entry fee does if the event is cancelled, and whether travel to and from the site is inside the release. It also has to name a much longer list of released parties, because an event usually involves several separate companies and a permit.
Who should an event waiver release?
Everyone who could be sued for the same incident and who has a contract with you. That normally means the organiser, the venue operator, the landowner, each sponsor, the timing, medical, security, catering and equipment contractors, the sanctioning body if there is one, and the officers, employees, volunteers and agents of each of them. A release only protects the parties it names, so list them rather than relying on a general phrase, and check the list against your venue agreement and your permit conditions.
Can a team captain or group leader sign for everyone in the group?
No. An adult can only release their own claims. A captain, coach, tour leader or the person who paid for a group entry cannot waive the rights of the other adults, and a roster with one signature at the bottom of it is a list of names rather than a set of releases. Each adult entrant needs their own signed record. A parent or legal guardian signs for their own child, and whether that binds the child depends on the state.
Do volunteers need to sign the participant waiver?
Only if they are also taking part in the activity. A volunteer is not a participant and the participant form is the wrong document for them. A volunteer agreement covers the role, the training, the limits on what they may do, whether they will drive, and what happens if they are injured while marshalling. The federal Volunteer Protection Act and state volunteer immunity statutes already protect the individual volunteer in many situations, but they do not protect the organisation that put the event on.
Does an event waiver cover an injury in the car park?
Only if the document says so. Injuries at events cluster at the edges, in the car park, at the shuttle stop, in the registration queue and on the walk back after the finish, and a release written around the word event invites the argument that none of that was the event. Define the site, define the window from arrival to departure, and name the areas you control, including parking, check-in, warm-up and any award or social session that forms part of the day.
When should entrants sign, at registration or on arrival?
Send the signing link with the entry confirmation, because that is the moment people are paying attention, and every signature collected then is one the desk does not chase on the day. Keep a roster staff can read at a glance, signed or not signed, and put a QR code at the registration point so a late entry can sign on a phone in the queue. Keep a tablet in kiosk mode for anyone whose phone is flat or who needs help with the text.
Sources and further reading
Primary and official sources consulted for this page. Statutes and opinions are linked to the legislature, the court or a case-law database; check the current text before relying on it.
- Volunteer Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. 14503
- Colorado Volunteer Service Act, C.R.S. 13-21-115.5
- N.Y. General Obligations Law 5-326
- Mont. Code Ann. 27-1-753, limitation on liability in sport or recreational opportunity
- Mont. Code Ann. 28-2-702, contracts that violate policy of law
- Hiett v. Lake Barcroft Community Ass'n, 244 Va. 191 (1992)
- Wycoff v. Grace Community Church of the Assemblies of God (Colo. App. 2010)
Get it signed before the day starts.
Paste your attorney-approved wording into the builder, publish a version, and collect signatures by link, QR code or kiosk with a time-stamped audit trail and the exact text each person saw.