Wedding Budget Calculator

Most wedding budgets fall apart because they start with a number someone else picked. This calculator works the other way round: tell it how many people you are feeding, where, and how formal the day is, and it builds a category-by-category budget from those three facts. Every figure is editable, and nothing leaves your browser.

Free · No signup · Works offline · Your data stays in your browser

How to use it

Enter your guest count. This drives nearly everything else — catering, bar, rentals, invitations and favours all scale per head.
Choose your region. US, UK, EU, Canada and Australia carry noticeably different baselines, especially for venue and catering.
Pick a style tier — Simple, Standard or Luxe. This adjusts the per-guest rate rather than the split between categories.
Read the 14-category breakdown. Each row shows a recommended amount with a ±15% range around it.
Override anything you have a real quote for. Typed figures replace the estimate and the totals recalculate immediately.
Add line items as you book, and tick them off as deposits and balances are paid.
Export to CSV when you want the numbers in a spreadsheet, or print a clean summary to share.

Where the recommended numbers come from

The calculator starts from a per-guest cost, because that is how most wedding spending actually behaves. A Standard US wedding runs roughly $450 per guest all-in; the Simple tier lands nearer $250 and Luxe nearer $800. Those rates are drawn from 2024–2025 cost surveys across the five supported regions, then split across 14 categories using proportions that hold up reasonably well at every budget level.

The split matters more than the total. Venue and catering together take 45–55% of almost every wedding budget, regardless of size. Photography takes 10–12%. Flowers, music, attire and stationery each take single digits. When a couple tells us their budget "doesn't work", it is almost always because one of those proportions has quietly doubled — usually flowers or attire — and nothing else was reduced to pay for it.

The costs that catch people out

Four line items account for most budget overruns, and none of them appear on a typical vendor quote:

Service charge and gratuity. Venue and catering contracts frequently add 20–25% on top of the quoted food-and-beverage figure. On a $20,000 catering bill that is $4,000–5,000 you did not plan for. Always ask whether a quote is inclusive.
Rentals the venue does not include. Chairs, linens, glassware, a dance floor, heaters, generators, restrooms. A bare-land or backyard wedding can add $3,000–8,000 in rentals that a hotel package would have covered.
Overtime. Photographers, bands and venues bill by the hour past the contracted end. An extra hour of coverage plus an extra hour of venue time is a common $1,000–2,000 surprise.
Alterations and postage. Dress alterations run $300–800 and are almost never quoted with the dress. Invitation postage on a square or thick envelope costs roughly double a standard stamp, times your household count.

Keep 3–5% of the total unallocated as contingency. If you finish the planning without touching it, that money becomes the honeymoon.

How to cut a budget without it showing

Not all savings are equally visible. Guests notice, in roughly this order: how long they waited, whether they were fed and watered, whether they could hear, and whether they had somewhere to sit. Almost nothing else registers.

So the cuts that work are the ones that never enter a guest's field of view. Move the date to a Friday or a Sunday and most venues drop 20–30%. Get married outside peak season. Trim the guest list — every removed head takes catering, bar, rentals, stationery and a favour with it, which is why guest count is the first field in this calculator. Serve wine, beer and one signature cocktail instead of a full bar. Use in-season flowers, and put your flower budget into the few arrangements people actually stand next to.

The cuts that hurt are the ones guests feel directly: too little food, a bar that closes early, a photographer booked for too few hours to reach the dancing, or a venue with no wet-weather plan.

Tracking the money once you start booking

A budget is a forecast until the first deposit clears; after that it is a ledger. Add each vendor as a line item under its category, record the deposit and the balance, and note the balance due date — most are due 14–30 days before the wedding, which produces a large cluster of payments in the final month that surprises couples who have not mapped it.

The tool keeps planned, paid and remaining separate so you can see all three at once. Your entries save automatically to this browser. There is no account and no server copy, so if you clear your browser data or switch device, export a CSV first.

Frequently asked questions

How accurate are the recommended amounts?

They are built from 2024–2025 industry cost surveys across the US, UK, EU, Canada and Australia, and they are a starting frame rather than a quote. Real costs vary enormously by city, season, day of the week and vendor. Expect a major-city wedding to run well above the regional baseline and a small-town or backyard wedding to run well below it. Replace each estimate with a real quote as soon as you have one.

Does the calculator save my figures?

Yes, automatically, in this browser only. There is no account and no server-side database, so nothing is transmitted anywhere. The trade-off is that clearing your browser data or moving to another device loses the work — export a CSV to keep a copy.

Can I plan more than one event?

Yes. You can keep separate budgets side by side — a main wedding plus a rehearsal dinner or a welcome party, for example — and switch between them without the figures mixing.

Should the engagement ring be in the wedding budget?

Usually not. Rings are typically bought before planning starts and tracked separately. Wedding bands, on the other hand, belong in the budget — they are commonly forgotten and run a few hundred to a couple of thousand for the pair.

What if my quote is wildly different from the recommendation?

Trust the quote. The recommendation is a per-guest average and cannot know that your venue includes catering, or that a family member is doing the flowers. Type the real figure in and the totals adjust around it.

Can I export to Excel or Google Sheets?

Yes. Export CSV downloads every category and line item as a standard CSV file, which opens directly in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.