Wedding budget calculator
Most calculators hand you the same percentage table everyone else gets. This one allocates your money across the 9 line items guests actually remember and caps the 23 they never notice. Free, no email needed to see your numbers.
See where your money should go.
A working slice of the model. Change anything — it recalculates as you type.
Not ready? Get the full 32-line breakdown by email
Every one of the 23 capped items with its individual ceiling, plus the printable version — sent to you, built on the numbers above.
“I ran my numbers here at 11pm and bought it before midnight. It was the first time the budget felt doable.”
Allocated $52,000 across 9 items. Largest: Food, $11,500. Cap on everything else: $4,150.
- Food$11,500
- Venue — the bones of the room$10,750
- Photography$5,400
- Bar — quality and openness$4,500
- Focal florals$3,900
- Music & entertainment$3,900
- Attire$3,400
- Lighting$2,950
- Paper & typography$1,450
$371 per guest, all in.
How to split a wedding budget
The mistake almost everyone makes is funding every category evenly. Guests do not experience a wedding evenly. Ask someone about a wedding two years later and they will tell you about the room, the food, the bar and whether the party was good. They will not mention the favours, the chair covers or the seating-chart display.
So the split above is weighted by what registers. Venue and food take the largest share because they are what people are standing in and eating. Lighting gets a real allocation because it is the cheapest way to make a room look expensive. Everything invisible shares one hard cap.
The default allocation
| Category | Share | On $50,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Venue — the bones of the room | 22% | $11,000 |
| Food | 18% | $9,000 |
| Photography | 11% | $5,500 |
| Bar — quality and openness | 9% | $4,500 |
| Focal florals | 8% | $4,000 |
| Music & entertainment | 8% | $4,000 |
| Attire | 7% | $3,500 |
| Lighting | 6% | $3,000 |
| Paper & typography | 3% | $1,500 |
| Everything else — 23 items, capped | 8% | $4,000 |
Cost per guest is the fastest lever
Divide everything by headcount, venue included. A $50,000 wedding for 130 guests is about $385 a head. That number moves faster than any category cut: removing twenty guests usually saves more than eliminating an entire line item, because catering, bar, rentals, stationery and favours all scale per person.