How big is your wedding?

50 more or less invited... FH only invited 3

We had about 60.

We are inviting 190 guest hoping for 175- 180. My mother wants us to have 215... not happening lol

We are doing a DW and have invited 19 adults and 5 children. I’m working with the photographer to see if he can stream the wedding since we both have grandmas over ninety. We are keeping it very small.

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We have to also send out some courtesy invites as well. @MrsC2B did any of your courtesy invites show or reply?

80 family and friends

View Quoted Comment @Julie, none of the courtesy invites could make it, but they were overjoyed to receive our invites. Three of them didn’t even acknowledge or reply to our phone calls when we tried to follow up with them. Needless to say, we are no longer in touch with these last three.

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@MrsC2B You got really lucky none came and it was a few acknowledged your gesture and reached back out. Did you anyone like just an announcement you were getting married or was the courtesy invite? Like for example I’m not close to this an and have seen her a handful of times since we live in different states and I know she’s older on a set income and can’t afford it and not even sure she can travel, should I still send her a courtesy to help keep the peace or something else that kinda just says hey we are getting married (although not sure what that would be) maybe save the date because we are working with photographer to stream wedding since grandmas are over ninety and can’t come. I don’t know this stuff. This is my first wedding to be in and marriage Our wedding will also be a destination wedding so in this instance she’d need to fly from OH to FL. Any advice would be excellent.

@Julie, kudos to you for thinking this through. Number of guests is the biggest deciding factor for the budget and it is also important to make sure all guests are comfortable, so it is great that you are getting as much info as possible.

If I remember correctly, I had a dozen people on the courtesy list- 6 couples. We sent them a proper invite and I also reached out to them personally to let them know. Two main things to remember while sending such invites:
1. You don’t want people to think that you are inviting them just because you believe that they won’t show up. I only invited those people I was supe close to and I reached out even to those who I knew couldn’t make it because of distance, family commitments and health issues. It was my way of showing my love and appreciation for them.

2. Make sure you have room in your budget in case these people did show up. At the time we sent our invites, we had a budget of $200pp and we knew that even if all the courtsey invites RSVPd yes, we would still be able to invlude them easily and make their stay comfortable (all these people had to travel from west coast to east if they wanted to come).


This might not be directly related to the topic, but I just wanted to add- we knew we could safely spend $20,000 on our wedding (excluding honeymoon but including literally everything else). We started looking for what we could achieve in $10k, and based our guest list off of that. Ultimately, we came out at $14k (50 guests showed up) and everyone told us our wedding was awesome. Right now we ar ecstatic that we came in under our original 20k budget, but we could have been in trouble if we had not tried to plan for a $10k wedding.


So when making your guest list, please, please keep in mind that courtesy invites may RSVP yes (they may feel touched and may not want to decline) and each guest adds a few hundred to the overall cost.

We are inviting 285, which sounds large but our groomsman is also getting married this year and I think they are inviting close to 500 because both have large extended families.

First wedding: 125 people (1994) this time we invited 50, we had a total of 42 in attendance.

We both have large family's and each of us have more friends than we can count in our lives that we work with and spend time with lol so our invite list is 350 counting kids and im playing 200 or less except lol. This is the perk of being a city employee for 27yrs and a loyal employee of 20yrs too

We're inviting about 60.

Yes that is large, to me at least,

When discussing the size of the wedding with my fiance we agreed on a small wedding so I assumed 50 total people okay cool, no his definition of small is at least 100. so everyone has a different scale on whats small, med, large, ect.

We had about 60 people at our wedding.

We'll be around 160. It's larger than I had hoped for, but doable for us. I feel like 120 is most typical.

That is quite large. our guest list capped at 100, once we went through multiple edits of the guest list to cut costs, and just weed out those we havent seen or talked to in years. but if that's how many people you have close to you that you want on your wedding day, then its not a problem.

We invited 138 (but some of the invites are for families not individuals). 200 is definitely a large scale wedding, but pretty common. I worked in weddings for a year and a lot of them had 150-180 guests.

300 people

We are inviting 300 guests, and think we are going to end up over that amount.. geesshhh