How much does a 100 person wedding cost, line by line

What suppliers publish, and what they do not

How to build your own hundred guest number

1. Split the budget into per-head and fixed. Catering, drinks and evening food scale with guests. Photography, music, the ceremony and the planner do not. Sorting the two is the whole exercise.
2. Cost the per-head lines at your real number. Take a published per-head figure, multiply by a hundred, and you have the largest single line on the budget in one step.
3. Add the fixed lines from published prices. Photography packages, DJ hours, celebrant fees and hire items are quoted as jobs. Use the published figures rather than a percentage of the total.
4. Add the things nobody counts. Deposits already paid, travel and overnight stays for suppliers, corkage, cutting fees, and the tips you intend to give.

The per-head half

Catering dominates at a hundred guests, and the published figures in this record show how wide the band is: a mobile caterer publishes a per-head range that starts well under twenty pounds, while a London caterer publishes a formal sit-down range that starts at fifty and rises from there. Multiplied by a hundred, the difference between those two decisions is larger than most couples' entire entertainment budget.

Drinks follow the same arithmetic and are easier to control, because you choose how much of the day is a paid bar. The alcohol quantity question is worth doing properly rather than guessing, since over-ordering is money left in a cellar and under-ordering is a guest queue at the bar.

The fixed half, and why it does not move

A photographer covering nine hours charges the same whether ninety people or a hundred and ten are in the pictures, and the published package ladders in this record are priced by hours rather than heads. The same is true of a celebrant, a DJ's hours and a marquee of a given size, up to the point where the size has to change.

This is why cutting the guest list saves so much more than cutting suppliers. Removing ten guests removes ten per-head charges from catering, drinks and evening food at once, and touches nothing else. Removing a photographer's album saves one line and costs you the album.

Questions organisers ask before they book

What is the biggest line on a hundred guest wedding?

Almost always catering, because it is the largest per-head figure multiplied by the largest number in the budget. It is also the line where the published range between supplier types is widest.

How much does each extra guest cost?

The sum of your per-head lines: the meal, the drinks and the evening food. Work that figure out once and you have a precise answer for every guest-list argument that follows.

Does a smaller wedding cost proportionally less?

No. The fixed half does not shrink, so the cost per guest rises as the wedding gets smaller. That is why very small weddings feel expensive per head and very large ones feel efficient right up until the venue has to change.

Should I use an average wedding cost figure?

Only as a sanity check. An average is a mixture of every wedding somebody surveyed, and yours is one wedding with a specific guest count in a specific place. Building the number from published per-head and per-job figures gets you far closer.

What this costs where you are marrying

• What a wedding costs in the UK, from published supplier prices