Average Cost of a Wedding

By Brandon Cornett
© 2011 All rights reserved

Welcome to The Average Cost of Things, where we help you put prices into perspective. On this page, we will talk about wedding expenses and what you can do to control them.

Pinning down the average cost of a wedding was quite a challenge for us. There are two reasons for this. First of all, most of the products and services we average on this website are easy to define. A new roof, for example, is a straightforward and tangible thing. But a wedding is something else entirely -- it's an experience. And there is no limit to how extravagant that experience can be. Thus, there is no cap on wedding expenses. It's limited only by the buyer's budget and desires.

Secondly, there's not very much data on wedding costs and related expenses. There is no oversight or regulation of the wedding industry, as with other industries. So there's a lack of reporting. As a result, most of the information we used for this article was anecdotal in nature (people talking about their own weddings), rather than statistical. The few "statistics" we did find seemed to have been conjoured out of thin air to serve some company's goals. Who needs those?

Still, we did out best. And here's what we found.

Shelling Out for a Wedding

According to a CNN article from February 2009 ("Love in the time of recession"), the average cost of a wedding dropped by nearly $6,000. This is not surprising when you consider the state of the economy in 2009. The article went on to state that the average amount spent in 2008 was $21,814, down from $27,490 the year before.

Our article was published in November 2009, so there wasn't much "data" on wedding costs for that year. But it's safe to say people will be spending even less on the big day, in light of soaring unemployment rates and the still-shaky economy.

According to one website we found (costofwedding.com), the average American couple spends $20,398 on their total wedding costs. But this number should be taken with a grain of salt, because it did not seem to be based on anything beyond the writer's whims.

This brings up another good point. Anybody can say anything online, because there is no editorial-review process. So you should be forever skeptical when you conduct this kind of wedding research. You should also consider the source. If the price figures come from an organization that makes money from weddings, then you can throw those figures out the window. How can such a source be unbiased on the subject? They can't. By inflating the average cost of a wedding in your mind, they can get you to spend more: "Gosh, I don't want to have a below-average wedding, so I need to spend more than X number of dollars." In marketing lingo, this is called a false paradigm. They set the bar where they want it, based on sketchy "data" and surveys, and then they get people to spend more money on the big day.

You Control the Costs

Here's the bottom line. A wedding can be as affordable or as expensive as you want to make it. The more important thing is that it's meaningful and memorable to you, not to everyone else. Many people have an idealized version of a wedding, so they end up spending a lot of money to bring that vision to live. If you want to control the cost of your wedding, then you need to control your expectations.

The companies who rely on wedding expenditures (cake makers, dress makers and the like) want you to equate cost with quality. They want you to believe that the only way to have a meaningful wedding is by spending a ton of money. If they can get you to believe that, then you'll be willing to overpay for everything, in the pursuit of some false ideal. But this is the subject of another article entirely. Our primary purpose was to convey the average cost of a wedding, and that mission has been accomplished. The end.