Guest list vs. actual number attending

Nothing wrong with that! After all you're paying for people to come by feeding/drinking them all! Do you really need to invite that person you don't see or hear from ever? We started with 120 n now have about 105. And realistically some of them will decline. Our RSVP is Oct 1 n we have about half right now. Don't sweat it....its your day n your budget!

Yes, you should cut. Don’t invite more than you can afford to host or fit in your venue.

I've thought about this myself. Cut the list to the amount where your comfortable and send invites 3 months out (traditionally its 2 months out) then when you start getting the "no" in the mail start sending a few more that you originally wanted to send to give them an opportunity to attend. It takes a bit more work because you have to really be on people and make a primary list and a secondary list.

I don't know, but this is what I was going to do when the time goes.

I'd expect less to come than what you invite. We invited 200 and had about 140 come and not even all those people stayed for the reception

We invited 292 and 210 rsvp'd that they're coming.. so it was a 28% decline, which is more than the average I guess.. ohhh well, 3 days!😍

I'm having heart palpitations for this very reason.

We sent out 81 invitations for roughly 160ish (up from 130!!) guests and we are hoping we get 90 or less back.

I feel like such a whiner saying that I hope we have less than we invited, but the list grew and grew and grew until it took on a life of its own...and I'd really like a smaller turnout so we can really enjoy our guests.

It's not that I dont want anyone to come - not at all - but I'd like a close crowd.

This depends on a lot of things. Are people mostly local or out of town? Does that number include actual people invited or giving single people plus ones? I wouldn’t invite more than you can afford but if your venue can hold the larger number and you can afford that many people you could risk it. There are many people that have close to 100% attendance though.

We were originally shooting for 120, which is the minimum for our venue. Once we sat down and actually started a list, ours too just seemed to get bigger and bigger. We ended up inviting about 185. We are hoping for a bunch of No's but so far we only have about 8 solid No's. The majority of our guests are out of state, so we will know by how many hotel rooms are being booked as well. We still have about a month until we need RSVPs back but our thinking is that some people saying No will not RSVP at all.

View Quoted Comment This is B listing and it’s incredibly rude. Your guests WILL find out and they WILL be hurt.

View Quoted Comment Yeah I would be a B list. But it's going to be people who I've never met but FH's mother wants to invite just because it's her friends or family who again, I've never met in our 6 years together. I think that no matter what, people will be offended or hurt whether you put them on a waiting list or just not invite them all together. I'm doing best for me.

We are planning on 125 guest, but invited 161. Although, our wedding is on a Friday at 5pm, so some won't be able to get off work. We are fine with 140 max..ourcwedding date is Nov. 9th. We just mailed out the invites Fri and we shoukd be getting responses in the next month fir a full head count. I have plans aside for the extra guest if that happens..

Our initial guest list was at 227. I had counted everyone’s children, even though we asked for no children under 12, but people are sometimes rude and don’t listen. Our final count is 164! Our people also suck, out of the 97 invites/rsvp cards that went out, I only got 39 back and had to call everyone else.

There’s no was to know this for sure. We invited 96 people and thought for sure that every single one of them would attend, but then our post office messed up somehow and half of the people didn’t get invitations. We ended up with a final guest count of 68 of which only 65 came.

View Quoted Comment We were in this same boat. We “guesstimated” 70 to actually rsvp yes and we are currently at 102 guests and still waiting on a handful of ppl. We were way off, oops! Lol

We wanted around 90-100 people, so we invited around 125, and we have about 96 people rsvp, not including some of our vendors so, we have our number 100. Some of those won’t stay, so we are good!

We invited 81 and 79 rsvp’ed yes and all 79 of them attended. Good luck!

We invited exactly 100 and 82 have RSVP'd yes. And hopefully we won't have any no-shows 😫

If your venue can only fit 125 or you can only afford 125, I'd cut the guest list down

We have made our list shorter but we have a “B list” so once we start getting the no’s we will send out the b listers quickly to try to get as close to the number we want.

Our venue minimum was 150, we invited 176 and have 135 attending. We had a ton of people either not be able to bring their SO or decline a plus one (at least 15). We had 10 out of towners decline the rest were local.

No one ever has 100% RSVP yes and 100% attendance. DW or having a lot of folks traveling out of state tends to have lower RSVP numbers. We invited 125 about and 76 RSVP but we were at 72 day of. Some folks backed out at the last few days. We had a semi DW (we don't live there, but a lot of my family does). My friend had a in-town wedding, invited 250, had 225 RSVP yes and 6 no shows the day of. So her final count was 219. I've heard the overall normal decline/no show rate is about 20% (doesn't apply to everyone, but it seems to be about average). So I think you could safely invite 130-135 if the venue has a max of 125.