Wedding Budget Calculator

A wedding budget is a fixed-total allocation problem: decide the total first, then divide it, rather than pricing each element and discovering the total afterwards. Doing it the second way is how budgets overrun, because every individual decision looks affordable in isolation.

Venue and catering typically dominate, frequently taking around half the total, and they are usually priced per head. That makes the guest list the single most powerful lever available — reducing headcount cuts the largest cost category proportionally, in a way that trimming smaller line items cannot match. Any serious attempt to reduce a wedding budget starts there rather than with the flowers.

Build in a contingency of around five to ten percent before allocating anything. Overruns are close to universal, and the common sources are predictable: guest list creep, service charges and gratuities on catering, delivery and setup fees, alterations, overtime, and the several small items nobody budgets individually. A contingency line converts those from a crisis into a plan.

Read contracts for what is excluded rather than included. Service charges, corkage, cake cutting fees, and vendor meals are routinely additional and routinely unanticipated. Deposits are frequently non-refundable, which matters if dates move.

Finally, weigh the opportunity cost explicitly. The same money represents a house deposit, an emergency fund, or debt cleared, and borrowing to fund a wedding means starting a marriage servicing that debt. That is a legitimate choice to make deliberately — it is a poor one to arrive at by accident because the budget was never set. Everything runs in your browser — no login, no upload, and no figure you enter leaves the page.