# of guests vs # people in wedding party

You don't have to have a wedding party at all, no matter how many guests you have. (And in general, smaller wedding parties mean less expense and less drama.) On the other end, for a small wedding you don't want a huge wedding party that leads to almost no one in the seats.

For example, we had a wedding with just a dozen people, and two of them were in the wedding party. Some people have a chuppah (Jewish wedding canopy) that has one person (chuppah bearer) at each corner to hold up the pole on that corner. We decided to have our chuppah free-standing. Otherwise, having the two of us, two people in the wedding party, four chuppah bearers, and the rabbi up front would have meant that more people were standing up front than sitting in the seats.

I'm also going to disagree with @annakay. FH and I have friends from school, work, university/college, high school etc. Our small-ish guest list doesn't mean we don't have many people we hang out with ... lol. It just means we decided to only invite the people we are CLOSEST too, instead of all our family and all our friends. And that smaller guest list means we can treat them extra well and show them one heck of a time.

We are having a maid of honour and a best man, no BMs or GMs. Best decision we've made thus far.

I read once somewhere that you should have one BM for every 50 people, which I think is a dumb rule to live by. if you have 200 guests but not 4 extremely CLOSE and trustworthy people you'd want in your bridal party, screw that shit!

oddly though, we're inviting 150 and I do have three BMs... only 3 people I'd want by my side that day!

There's no hard and fast rule. We had 15 guests, and just under half of them participated in our ceremony in some fashion (four chuppah bearers who each read one of the seven blessings, and two other people read two more of the blessings) -- but we didn't require anyone to wear anything special or get hair/makeup professionally done, so the only cost that increased was the rehearsal dinner.

Eh, we have a modest wedding guests wise and a large bridal party, but we wouldn't have it any other way. I have 6 BMs, he has 8 GMs and we're having around. 110 guests. It's your wedding, do what you want!

We had about 125 guests, one MOH and one Best Man. No stress with the wedding party!

We had about 125 guests, one MOH and one Best Man. No stress with the wedding party!

There is some out-dated etiquette on this, but it doesn't matter. Like others have said it's nice to have some proportionality, like maybe don't have 20 people in the bridal party and only 30 guests in the seats

We have about 250-300 guests (invited anyways) and 6 bm and 6 gm.. it's huge, but those are the people I want to surround myself with.

Like Jennifer, we're having a small wedding with no bridal party because we don't want to levy extra expenses on our friends and family. Those we would choose to be in our bridal party are already spending quite a bit to travel to California from the east coast with their families and probably will gift us a gift (knowing them) although we told them we don't need anything. Also, because FH and I are only inviting our very nearest and dearest, we kinda feel like all of our guests are standing up for us.

However, I know that's not the case for a lot of brides. So I say, do whatever feels right and don't worry about what it looks like to others or what you think you're "supposed" to do.

No bridal party with potentially 100 guests, but I'd like that number closer to 70.

Wedding of about 30 guests how big should the wedding party be?