How to build a wedding guest list without falling out
6 min read
The guest list is where the budget and the family meet, and it decides more about the day than the flowers ever will. Here is a way through it that keeps both intact.
Start from the two hard numbers
A guest list has two ceilings: what the venue holds and what the catering costs. Work out the cost per head, multiply by the number you have in mind, and look at the total before you write a single name. That number moves the conversation from feelings to arithmetic.
Every guest costs more than their plate: a chair, a drink, an invitation, a share of the room. Budget per head, not per meal.
Draft in three tiers, not one list
Tier one is the people whose absence would change the day: immediate family, the friends you speak to weekly. Tier two is the wider circle you would love to have. Tier three is everyone you feel you ought to invite.
Invite tier one and two, hold tier three, and release from it as declines come in. This is not cynical, it is how every venue coordinator plans a room, and it means nobody sits home because you guessed high in January.
Expect a tenth to twenty per cent to decline
For a local wedding, plan on around ten per cent of invitations declining. For a destination wedding, twenty to thirty is normal, sometimes more when it means flights and a hotel.
Do not book catering for the number you invited. Book for the number who replied, and keep the RSVP deadline early enough that the number is real before the venue needs it.
Plus ones, decided once
Pick a rule and apply it to everyone: partners of a year or more, or everyone in a couple regardless, or no plus ones at all outside the wedding party. Any rule survives scrutiny; exceptions do not.
Address invitations to the people invited, by name. It answers the plus-one question before it is asked, and it makes the seating plan possible later.
Children, and the conversation about them
Deciding is easier than announcing. If children are not invited, name the guests on the invitation and answer questions directly when they come. Consider whether you can offer something instead: a room with a sitter, or an earlier finish for the families.
If children are invited, count them by age when you collect RSVPs. Caterers price them differently and venues seat them differently.
Keep the list somewhere that counts itself
A guest list is a living document: people are added, people decline, a couple splits up in March. A spreadsheet handles the names but not the answers, and the answers are where the work is.
Whatever you use, the list, the replies, the meals and the seating should be the same object. That is exactly what MyEventOS does, and it is the reason the seating plan can be built without a second spreadsheet.
Collect the answers while you are at it
MyEventOS turns the invitation, the RSVP and the guest list into one link, and counts the replies as they land. Free to design, free to send, and the first ten replies are included.
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