How Much Should We Spend on our Wedding Day?

It’s a hard question to nail down if you’ve been on any of the various websites giving you an idea of how much you should spend for each category.

According to Wedding Wire, the average wedding cost in 2019 was about $38,000 and that’s a lot of money!

Honestly however, through a lot or research, we found that couples are spending closer to $25,000 for the wedding, but that’s still a lot of cash to fork out.

Carole and I sometimes get asked this ourselves and we took the liberty to create a wedding budget calculator tool.

You simply put in how much you are wanting to spend on the entire wedding and the calculator will do the rest for you.

We want you to use this as the VERY first step in the wedding process, before you start diving into the nitty-gritty of planning, meeting with various vendors and the like.

A wedding budget will be your guide to knowing how much or little you need to spend for the wedding day.

While our online tool is just a starting guide, it’s a great way to start off with knowing approximately how much you’ll need to spend in order to have that great wedding!

What do Couples Tend to Spend on the Wedding?

You’ll find all sorts of answer when it comes to what couples spend and there is not right way or wrong way to go about it either.

In fact, of the more than 500 weddings we’ve covered in our career, there is a “sweet spot” if you will where couples tend to be the happiest when spending money on the wedding and that’s right in the $25,000 range.

We’ve covered awesome backyard weddings for under a few thousand bucks and we’ve done $140,000+ Jewish weddings and even a couple of celebrities too, but the most enjoyable ones are the ones where they spend on the guest experience.

That being a venue, catering, DJ, food and the overall experience for couples throughout the day.

We recently did an article entitles “How Much is Everyone Spending on their Wedding?” and in that article we talked about what couples tend to spend on wedding photography.

While wedding photography is usually the 3rd most expensive line item, the national average price is $2,397.

You’ll find that the average cost is right in line with what most couples pay overall for their wedding day.

We DO encourage you to use ranges when you’re seeking wedding vendors.

Why?

For a couple reasons, first, it allows you to truly mask how much you want to spend when you’re shopping around and ask online.

For example, instead of saying that you’re looking for a wedding photographer under $1,800 for example, say it in a way that allows vendors that fall into that range to be included. Say it like “seeking a wedding photographer in the $1,650 to $1,900 range”.

Second, including those that are slightly more expensive may benefit you when talking with those vendors to begin with.

We encourage you to start an spreadsheet with what the pricing includes to see on paper what they have to offer and visually compare.