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Wedding Budget Calculator Guide
This splits your total budget across the usual categories using standard percentage allocations, and shows what you're really spending per guest.
| Category | Share |
|---|---|
| Venue & catering | 45% |
| Photography & video | 12% |
| Flowers & decor | 8% |
| Music & entertainment | 8% |
| Attire & beauty | 7% |
| Contingency | 7% |
| Rings | 5% |
| Stationery | 3% |
| Transport | 3% |
| Cake | 2% |
The Guest List Is the Budget
This is the thing worth understanding before anything else. Nearly half your budget is venue and catering, and that scales almost perfectly with headcount.
Cutting 20 guests off a 120-person list at $90 a head saves around $1,800 immediately — and usually more, because a smaller list opens up smaller venues. No amount of negotiating on flowers matches one honest pass at the guest list. If your budget doesn't work, the guest list is the lever, not the linens.
These Percentages Are a Starting Point
They're conventions, not rules, and they assume you want a fairly conventional wedding. Plenty of people should deliberately break them.
If the photos are what you'll still care about in twenty years, take from flowers and give to photography. If you want a party, fund the music and skip the stationery. The split is a way to start the argument, not settle it.
Keep the Contingency
The 7% contingency is the line everyone deletes first and regrets. Weddings reliably produce costs nobody budgeted: overtime for the venue, the extra table, alterations, the delivery fee, the tip you didn't know was expected.
If you spend the contingency, you had a normal wedding. If you never had one, you had an overspend.
What Gets Left Out
Standard splits usually ignore the honeymoon, the rehearsal dinner, gifts for the wedding party, marriage licence fees, and — the big one — tips and service charges. Service charges of 18–25% on catering are common and are not the same thing as a tip, which people discover late and expensively. Read the contract before you fix your numbers.
Costs Vary Enormously by Place
This calculator splits your budget rather than telling you what a wedding costs, because there's no honest single answer to that. A per-guest figure that's generous in one region is impossible in another, and the same venue costs wildly different amounts in June and November. Get real quotes, then use this to see whether your plan fits your number.
Related: savings goal calculator, percentage calculator, tip calculator.
These results are estimates for education and planning, not financial advice. Actual returns, rates, and terms vary — check with a qualified professional before making decisions.
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