Free wedding budget calculator

Nobody starts with an itemised budget. They start with one number and a guest list, and the split above is what turns the first into lines. Read those percentages as a planning convention, not a measured statistic: no survey produced them, and a different planner would hand you a different set. What is not a convention is the shape. Venue and catering is half the board. Move it and everything else moves with it; halve the cake line and you have saved one per cent of a wedding. So the first real decision is the guest count, because venue and catering is the only line that scales with it.

That is what the per-guest figure under the venue line is for. It divides the whole venue- and-catering allocation by the guest count you typed. Changing that count does not redraw the table — the split stays where it is — it re-cuts the venue line into a new per-head figure, which is the number to hold a caterer’s quote against. Compare carefully: a caterer quotes a price per head and the venue usually charges a hire fee on top, so the honest comparison is their per-head price plus the hire fee divided by your guests. If that comes to more than the figure here, you are short on the largest line, and the list is the only lever that touches it. On the numbers this page opens with — thirty thousand across a hundred names — twenty fewer guests is worth more at that per-head figure than the cake, transport, stationery and rings lines put together. The hire fee does not shrink with the list, so the real saving is smaller than that — but it still lands where the money is.

As soon as you have a real quote, type it into the right-hand column. That line stops floating and the ones still open re-divide whatever is left, in the same proportions as before, so the column keeps adding up to your total. Do it as the quotes arrive — the booked venue, the photographer’s day rate, the florist’s minimum spend — and the breakdown stops being a template and becomes your budget. The lines still on their default share are then a readout of what is left to play with.

Keep the contingency. It is the line couples delete first and the only one certain to be spent: overtime behind the bar, corkage, a supplier who quoted for a smaller room, flowers that arrive short. It is not padding — it is what stops every other line moving in the last week.

Stationery ties with transport and cake for the smallest line here, and it is the easiest of the three to underestimate, because printed invitations are priced per guest. The card, the envelope and the postage repeat for every name, then repeat again for save the dates and the paper on the day. A digital invitation is priced flat, so the line becomes a fixed number whatever the guest count. The button in the stationery row puts our own price into the line and rebalances the rest around it, which is the quickest way to see what a per-guest line and a fixed line do differently to the same total.

What this cannot do: it holds no regional averages and no supplier prices, so it will not tell you whether your total is realistic where you are getting married. Only local quotes answer that. It saves nothing either, so screenshot the version you want to keep before you close the tab.