Who to Invite to Your Wedding: How to Build Your Guest List

The guest list is often the first real test of wedding planning. In an ideal world, everyone who matters to you would be there. In reality, budgets and venue capacities get in the way.

Emily and I went through this ourselves before our wedding, and these are the steps that helped us.

1. Create Your Wishlist

Start by each writing a list of everyone you’d love to be there, without editing. Family, friends, colleagues, the neighbour who’s known you since you were five. Get it all down.

2. Work Out How Many Guests You Can Have

Now find your real number. Look at:

• Venue capacity, for the ceremony, the wedding breakfast and the evening
• Catering cost per head. A venue might seat 200, but at £90 per person, does your budget stretch that far?
• The feel you want. Forty guests feels very different to a hundred and forty.

3. Build Your Provisional List

Go through both wishlists together. Anyone you’ve both put down goes straight onto the provisional list.

Family is usually the easiest place to start, followed by close friends, then wider friends and colleagues. Don’t be surprised if you’re still over your number at this point. Almost everyone is.

4. Refine Your List

This is where it gets hard. These questions helped us:

• Have we spoken to them in the last year? If not, would we expect an invitation to their wedding?
• Would our partner recognise them? If only one of you has ever met them, think twice.
• Are we inviting them out of guilt? Your wedding isn’t the place to repay old invitations.
• Would they be just as happy as an evening guest? Often, the answer is yes.

5. Agree Your Rules on Plus-Ones and Children

Decide these early and apply them consistently, as it makes difficult conversations easier. Common approaches are:

• Plus-ones only for guests who are married, engaged or living with a partner
• Children of close family only, or an adults-only day with children welcome in the evening

Whatever you choose, say it clearly on the invitation so nobody is left guessing.

6. Use Day and Evening Invitations

Evening guests are a lovely way to include more people without the cost of the wedding breakfast. Work colleagues, wider friends and neighbours often make perfect evening guests, and the party is usually the best bit anyway.

7. Keep a Reserve List

If you have room for a few more, keep a short reserve list. As “regrets” come in from your first invitations, you can invite from it. Send your first round early enough that later invitations don’t feel like an afterthought.

The Most Important Part

Remember who the day is for. Look around the room in your head: these are the people who’ll appear in your photos and in your memories of the day. When you look back through your album in twenty years, you’ll want to see faces you love.

Once your list is settled, my wedding seating plan guide will help you work out who sits where.