Rehearsal dinner invitations, and eight wordings to copy
· Written by the Wedvite founders
A rehearsal dinner invitation names its host, says what the evening is, gives the date, the time and the place, and asks for a reply. Invite the wedding party, the immediate families and the officiant — and nobody who is not already invited to the wedding. It goes out after the wedding invitation, to a much shorter list.
Everyone who has to be at the rehearsal, plus the people closest to the two of you. The range usually quoted is ten to forty — conventional planning guidance rather than a measured figure — and the list is built from roles rather than from affection, which is what makes it possible to draw at all.
The wedding party, with their partners — everybody who walks, stands or speaks: bridesmaids, groomsmen, ushers, readers, the best man and the maid of honour. Their partners come too — a person who has been at the rehearsal for two hours does not then send their spouse home.
The immediate families of both of you — parents, stepparents, siblings and their partners, and grandparents. This is the core of the table and the reason the evening tends to matter more than its guest count suggests: for many of these people it is the only unhurried hour they will get with you all weekend.
The officiant — and their partner. They are running the rehearsal, so they are already there, and the invitation is ordinary courtesy. Some decline as a matter of habit; ask anyway.
Children in the wedding party, and their parents — a flower girl or page boy comes with the adult responsible for them, which quietly adds two or three places you might not have counted.
Anyone with a job on the day — a friend doing the music, a cousin reading, an aunt handling the guest book. If they are rehearsing, they are eating.
And the one rule with no exception:every person invited to the rehearsal dinner must already be invited to the wedding. The dinner is held in honour of a wedding, so inviting someone to it while leaving them off the day itself asks them to celebrate an event they are not welcome at. It does not run the other way — the great majority of wedding guests are not at the dinner, and nobody expects to be.
What is optional is everything outside those roles. Out-of-town guests are the usual argument, and you are not obliged to include them; where a large part of the list has flown, the answer is normally to hold a welcome dinner instead of a rehearsal dinner and invite everybody who travelled, which is example six below. Grow the list one relationship at a time and it stops being a rehearsal dinner and becomes a second reception with a second bill — and if your list is drifting that way on purpose, an engagement party invitation is the event that is actually built for a wide guest list.
Who hosts the rehearsal dinner, and whose name goes on the invitation?
Traditionally the groom’s parents. It is a convention rather than a rule, and it comes from the era when the bride’s family paid for the wedding and the other side took the night before — which is also why it stops making much sense the moment the couple are paying for their own wedding. Four arrangements are all completely ordinary now: the groom’s parents host, both families split it, the couple host, or a relative or close friend gives the dinner.
Whichever it is, the invitation is written from the host. Their name takes the first line, the couple are named as the reason for the evening, and replies go to the host rather than to the couple. That is not decoration: guests read the host line as a statement of who is paying, so the names on the invitation and the names on the bill should be the same names. Two families splitting it get one shared host line rather than two stacked ones — and examples one, two, three and seven below are those four arrangements written out, one host line each.
Two practical notes that save an awkward conversation. First, the host is not necessarily the person who books, writes or sends — couples routinely build and send the invitation for a dinner their parents are paying for, and it still reads “Mr and Mrs Whitmore request the pleasure of your company”. Second, where several people are contributing and each wants naming, each name goes on its own line rather than being joined with “and”; that is the same host-line convention the wedding invitation follows, and wedding invitation wording works through the harder versions of it.
Eight rehearsal dinner invitation wordings you can copy
Each one is complete for the situation it is labelled with: copy it, change the names, the date, the time and the place, and it is ready to send. Examples one, two, three and seven are the four host arrangements written out — the groom’s parents, the couple, the two families together, and somebody outside both families. Four is the same evening in a casual register, five is the version for guests who come to the rehearsal as well as the dinner, six is the destination welcome dinner, and eight is what the evening looks like as a line on your wedding website rather than as an invitation of its own. All eight sit on one weekend — the dinner on Friday 11 June, the wedding on Saturday the twelfth — so you can read them against each other. All names are invented and every telephone number is from a reserved range.
1. Traditional · hosted by the groom’s parents
The formal version, for a wedding whose own invitation is formal too.
Mr and Mrs David Whitmore
request the pleasure of your company
at the rehearsal dinner
in honour of
Eleanor Hayes and Thomas Whitmore
on Friday, the eleventh of June
at half past six o’clock
The Garden Room at Bellamy House
14 Cathedral Close, Winchester
Kindly reply by the twenty-second of May
to Margaret Whitmore, 07700 900 118
The host’s names come first because the host is the one inviting; “in honour of” then names the couple as the guests of honour rather than as hosts, and that single phrase is what tells a guest who is paying. Change it to “in celebration of” if the formality feels heavy. Send the replies to the host and not to the couple — the couple already have more messages that week than they can read. If one parent is hosting alone, “Mrs Margaret Whitmore requests the pleasure of your company” is the same line with nothing else altered.
2. Couple-hosted
When the two of you are paying, you invite in your own voice — and “in honour of” disappears.
Eleanor and Thomas
warmly invite you to dinner
the evening before our wedding
Friday 11 June at half past six
The Garden Room, Bellamy House
14 Cathedral Close, Winchester
Wedding party, the rehearsal is at five o’clock
at St Lawrence’s Church, a five-minute walk away
Everyone else, please join us at half past six
Please reply to Eleanor by 22 May · 07700 900 204
You cannot be the guest of honour at your own dinner, so the honour line comes out and the invitation simply says what the evening is. This is also the wording that quietly solves a split rehearsal: the wedding party gets a call time, everybody else gets a dinner time, and one invitation carries both instead of two lists and a group chat. Name the walk between the two places — guests plan their evening around how long it takes to get anywhere.
3. Both families hosting together
For a bill split down the middle between the two families.
The Hayes and Whitmore families
invite you to dinner
on the eve of our children’s wedding
Eleanor and Thomas
Friday, the eleventh of June, at seven o’clock
Trattoria San Marco
9 Parchment Street, Winchester
Kindly reply by the twenty-second of May
to Susan on 07700 900 042
or Margaret on 07700 900 118
Two families paying get ONE host line, not two stacked ones, and naming the families rather than four individuals settles the question of whose name comes first before anybody has to ask it. Give both telephone numbers: a guest replies to the name they know, and splitting the replies across two households is exactly the problem a single reply-by date exists to prevent — agree in advance which of you keeps the list.
4. Casual
The same six things every invitation has to say, written the way you speak. Shorter, warmer, and just as complete.
Rehearsal dinner
Friday 11 June, 7pm
Rossi’s, 22 Jewry Street, Winchester
Eleanor & Thomas are getting married on Saturday —
come and eat with us the night before
Wedding party, come at half past five
for the run-through at the church
Come as you are
Tell Tom by 25 May so we can book the table
07700 900 311
Casual is a register, not a shorter list of facts: who, what, where, when, how to reply and what to wear are all still here. “Come as you are” is doing the most work on the card — without a dress line, half your guests will assume a rehearsal dinner is a formal occasion and arrive in the wrong clothes. Keep the reply going to a named person with a number on it; “let us know” produces replies in four places and a headcount you cannot give the restaurant.
5. The rehearsal and the dinner, for guests who come to both
Two events, two times, two addresses — for the party, the readers and anyone else with a job at the ceremony.
You are invited to the wedding rehearsal
and to the dinner that follows
for
Eleanor Hayes and Thomas Whitmore
Friday, the eleventh of June
Rehearsal at five o’clock
St Lawrence’s Church, The Square, Winchester
Dinner at seven o’clock
The Garden Room at Bellamy House
14 Cathedral Close — a five-minute walk from the church
Hosted by Mr and Mrs David Whitmore
Kindly reply by the twenty-second of May, 07700 900 118
Put the two events in the order they happen and give each its own address, even when they are minutes apart. Lead with the rehearsal rather than the dinner: the first time on an invitation is the one a guest remembers, and arriving late to a run-through costs everybody there twenty minutes. Say how people get from the church to the table — walking, cars leaving, or their own way — because that is the question you will otherwise be answering by text all week.
6. Destination wedding · welcome dinner
When everybody has travelled, the rehearsal dinner usually becomes a welcome dinner and the list opens up.
Welcome to Puglia
Eleanor and Thomas invite all of our guests
to a welcome dinner
on the evening before the wedding
Friday, the eleventh of June, from seven o’clock
Masseria Le Carrube, Ostuni
Dinner under the olive trees — it will be warm,
so dress lightly and bring flat shoes for the gravel
Cars leave the Hotel Monte Sarago at half past six
and return from eleven o’clock onwards
The wedding party’s rehearsal is at five o’clock
Please tell us by the first of May whether you can come,
so that we can set the tables
A guest who crossed a border for you should not spend their first evening alone in a hotel, which is why the destination version invites everyone who has flown rather than the rehearsal list. Two things change with it. It has to travel with the wedding invitation, or before it, because the guest is booking flights and nights around the whole weekend and not around one dinner. And it has to say how people physically get there — the transport lines are not decoration at a venue nobody has driven to. Keep the rehearsal itself as one line for the wedding party instead of sending a second invitation.
7. Hosted by a relative or a family friend
When the dinner is given by somebody outside the two families — an aunt, a godparent, the couple’s oldest friends.
Caroline and Peter Danvers
request the pleasure of your company
at dinner on the evening before the wedding of
Eleanor Hayes and Thomas Whitmore
Friday, the eleventh of June, at seven o’clock
at their home
Little Brook House, Compton, Winchester
Kindly reply by the twenty-second of May
to Caroline on 07700 900 042
Whoever is giving the dinner takes the host line, and the couple are named as the reason for the evening. “At their home” is the line people leave off and then spend a week explaining: a private address needs the words as well as the postcode, because a guest reading “rehearsal dinner” and an address defaults to assuming a restaurant. Where several people are contributing and each wants to be named, each name goes on its own line rather than being joined with “and” — the same host-line rule the wedding invitation follows.
8. On the wedding website, as a line in the weekend schedule
What the dinner looks like when it has no invitation of its own.
The weekend · June 2027
Friday 11 June
5.00pm · Wedding rehearsal — the wedding party
7.00pm · Rehearsal dinner — by invitation
Bellamy House, 14 Cathedral Close
Saturday 12 June
2.00pm · Ceremony — St Lawrence’s Church
3.30pm · Drinks on the lawn
5.00pm · Dinner and dancing
Sunday 13 June
11.00am · Farewell brunch — everyone welcome
The Old Vine, Great Minster Street
Everything marked “by invitation” has been sent
separately — if you have not had one, you are not
missing anything you were meant to receive
“By invitation” is the whole trick, and the closing line is the half of it people forget. Together they let a hundred guests read that the evening exists without any of them working out whether they were supposed to be included — which is the four messages this schedule otherwise generates. Use it when the dinner list is obviously the wedding party; if the list is mixed, send the dinner its own invitation instead, because no guest should have to deduce their own status from a timetable.
When do you send rehearsal dinner invitations?
About a month before the dinner, and always after the wedding invitations have gone. The order matters more than the exact number of weeks: a guest who receives the rehearsal dinner invitation first reasonably concludes that their wedding invitation was lost in the post, and you will spend an evening reassuring people. Send the wedding suite, wait until it has landed, then send the dinner.
The wedding invitation’s own window is a separate calculation and when to send wedding invitations works it out from your date, including the longer lead a destination wedding needs. Two adjustments belong to the dinner rather than to that page. A welcome dinner at a destination wedding travels withthe wedding invitation or ahead of it, because your guests are booking flights and hotel nights around the whole weekend and cannot decide on Friday evening after the tickets are bought. And if the dinner is a surprise to nobody — a wedding party who have known the plan for months — the invitation is still worth sending, in writing, with a time and an address on it, because that is what stops three of them arriving at the church at seven.
Give the dinner its own reply-by date, a week or two before the evening. Restaurants ask for the final number and often the menu choices before you would otherwise have chased anybody, and a private dining room booked for eighteen that seats twenty-six is a conversation you want to have in advance. These are conventional planning norms rather than measured figures — your venue’s own deadline beats all of them, so ask for it first and work backwards from that.
How formal should a rehearsal dinner invitation be?
One notch below the wedding, and never above it. That is the whole of the etiquette, and it has a practical reason: guests read the two invitations side by side, so if the dinner arrives more elaborate, more formal or simply more expensive-looking than the invitation for the wedding day, it reads as though the dinner is the main event. A black-tie wedding takes a formal dinner invitation in the same family of design; a garden wedding with a warm, plain invitation takes a warmer, plainer one.
In practice the step down is four small choices. The host line relaxes from “request the pleasure of your company” to “invite you to dinner” or “come and eat with us”. The date and time stop being spelled out in words and become figures — “Friday 11 June at 7pm” rather than “Friday, the eleventh of June, at seven o’clock”. The dress line becomes explicit, because guests cannot guess this one and half of them will over-dress if you leave it off. And the design keeps the wedding’s palette and typeface while dropping a layer of its formality, so the two look related rather than identical. If you want the formal register written out in full — the spelling, the capitalisation, the titles, the spelled-out numerals — the formal wording conventions cover it in more detail than a dinner invitation usually needs. Example one below sits at the formal end of that range and example four at the casual end — the same six things a dinner invitation has to say, in two registers.
Should the rehearsal dinner have its own link, or a section on your wedding website?
Its own link, in almost every case, and a line on the website as well. The two are not alternatives — they answer different questions for different people, and the reason to separate them is the guest list. Your wedding website is open to every wedding guest; the dinner is for twenty of them. Put the dinner on the website alone and you have told a hundred people about an evening most of them are not invited to, which produces exactly the messages you were hoping to avoid.
A separate invitation also gives the dinner a separate reply list, and that is the part that does real work. The restaurant needs its own number, not a subset of the wedding count, and menu choices for eighteen people are not something you want to extract from a wedding RSVP built for a hundred and forty. A link you send only to the dinner list produces exactly one headcount, from exactly the right people, with the replies in one place — how an online RSVP collects a headcount is the same mechanism, pointed at a much shorter list.
Then put the evening on the website as a schedule line marked “by invitation”, with one sentence saying that anything so marked has been sent separately — example eight above is that block written out. Guests get the shape of the weekend, nobody has to work out their own status from a timetable, and your wedding website keeps doing its job for the whole list. The one case where a section is genuinely enough is the destination welcome dinner, where everybody on the wedding list is invited anyway, so the schedule is the invitation.
What a second invitation costs: $89 at list, once, for any number of guests, hosted through your wedding date and at least 90 days after — no per-guest fee, so a twenty-person dinner and a two-hundred-person wedding are priced the same, and the dinner’s replies arrive in their own list rather than mixed into the wedding’s.
Wedvite's list price is $89. Until Oct 31, this code brings it to $49, applied automatically at checkout:
FAQ
Rehearsal dinner invitation questions
Do rehearsal dinner guests have to be invited to the wedding?
Yes, and it is the one rule of this evening that has no exception. Every person at the rehearsal dinner must already be on the wedding list, because the dinner exists in honour of a wedding they would otherwise be watching from outside. It does not work in reverse: most wedding guests are not at the dinner, and no one expects to be. If you find yourself wanting to include somebody at the dinner who is not invited on the day, the honest options are to add them to the wedding or to see them separately — not to seat them at the rehearsal.
Who traditionally pays for the rehearsal dinner?
By convention the groom’s parents, which grew out of the era when the bride’s family paid for the wedding and the other side took the night before. Treat it as a starting point and not a rule: today the dinner is as often split between the two families, hosted by the couple, or given by a relative or close friend. Whoever pays is named as the host on the invitation, and whoever is named on the invitation is understood to be paying — which is precisely why the host line is worth getting right before anything is sent.
How long before the wedding do you send rehearsal dinner invitations?
Roughly a month ahead is the usual guidance, and the firmer rule is about order rather than weeks: the wedding invitations go out first, and the rehearsal dinner follows them. A guest who receives a dinner invitation before the wedding invitation reasonably assumes the wedding one went missing. Ask for replies a week or two before the dinner, because a restaurant wants a final number and the menu choices before you do.
Do you invite out-of-town guests to the rehearsal dinner?
You are not obliged to, and at a wedding where most guests are local, few couples do. It changes at a destination wedding, or when a large share of the list has flown and booked hotels: leaving those guests with an empty first evening is the reason the dinner so often becomes a welcome dinner and opens to everybody who travelled. That is a different event with a different name and a different budget — decide which of the two you are hosting before you write the invitation, because the wording says so plainly either way.
Should rehearsal dinner invitations match the wedding invitations?
They should relate to them and sit one step below. Guests read the two together, so a dinner invitation in the same palette and typeface as the wedding suite tells them the two evenings belong to one weekend. What it must not do is outdo the wedding: if the dinner arrives more formal, more elaborate or more expensive-looking than the invitation for the day itself, it reads as the main event. One notch down in formality, recognisably the same family of design.
Do you need a separate invitation if the rehearsal dinner is on your wedding website?
Usually yes, because the two do different jobs. A page every wedding guest can open is the wrong place to invite twenty of them, and a schedule that lists the dinner without saying who it is for produces a week of messages asking. The arrangement that works is both: the dinner gets its own invitation and its own reply list, and the website carries the weekend schedule with “by invitation” beside that line. The exception is the destination welcome dinner, where everybody on the wedding list is invited anyway and the schedule can simply say so.
Give the dinner its own invitation.
One link for the night before, $89 at list, unlimited guests — with its own reply list, its own menu choices and its own headcount for the restaurant.