How many wedding invitations to order

An invitation is addressed to a household, and a guest list is a list of people. Almost everybody who orders stationery for the first time confuses the two, orders one card per name, and pays for a pile of invitations that never get addressed. Count the front doors instead: one invitation for a couple, one for a family of five, one for a guest who lives alone. That single move is usually the difference between a hundred cards and sixty.

The tool above takes four counts. The first is your guest list as people — everyone you intend to invite, children included — and it is only there as a check. The next three are what actually get addressed: couples and families at one address, single guests invited on their own, and adults at a family address you want to invite by name. It adds those three, adds the spares, and prints the arithmetic line by line so you can see where each number came from rather than trusting a total.

The fourth field is where the etiquette lives. An adult over eighteen who still lives at home is invited in their own right, not as a child on their parents’ card, and a sibling you address as part of the family will assume the invitation was not really meant for them. The same goes for an adult child’s partner, for a lodger, and for a grandparent living with the family. A plus-one who lives at their own address is a separate household and belongs in the singles count; a plus-one you have already named as half of a couple does not.

Spares are a trade convention rather than a statistic, and the tool says so where you pick them. Roughly ten to fifteen per cent extra, or a flat handful on a short list, covers the three things that always happen: an address written wrong in ink, a keepsake for each set of parents and one for yourselves, and the guests you genuinely forgot. A short reorder at the end of a print run usually costs more per card than the original run did, which is why the trade treats spares as the cheap insurance in the whole process.

The guest-list field is the sanity check. The tool counts every couple and family as two people, the smallest a shared household can be, and tells you how many of your guests that accounts for. The remainder should be the children and extra adults at those same addresses. If it accounts for more people than you have guests, you have counted households twice.

None of this arithmetic disappears with a digital invitation — one link still goes to one household — but the risk does. There is no print run to over-order, no minimum, and no reorder when a cousin is added in March. Choose the last spares option and the count stops at the invitations you will actually address.