Wedding Table Plan

Top Tips for Arrang­ing Your Wed­ding Table Plan

So the invi­ta­tions have been sent out and the RSVPs have come back and it’s now time to work on the dreaded table plan and fig­ure out who’s going to sit where.  Whether it’s sort­ing out your sin­gle friends, chil­dren or what to do with the dreaded exes, here are some top tips for sort­ing out your wed­ding seating.

The top table is the usu­ally the easy part – the Bride and Groom sit in the mid­dle flanked by both sets of par­ents and finally the Chief Brides­maid and Best Man.  The tra­di­tional lay­out is:

Chief Brides­maid – Groom’s Father – Bride’s Mother – Groom – Bride – Bride’s Father – Groom’s Mother – Best Man

How­ever, if either par­ents are divorced and re-married this could com­pli­cate things and you may need an alter­na­tive layout. 

If you seat fam­ily mem­bers and groups of friends and col­leagues together on the other tables, you may find you’ve already got most of your table plan done!  There are always a few harder guests to place though and we would rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing advice: 

Sin­gle friends — Where to sit your sin­gle friends can cause a dilemma. You might be tempted to try your hand at a bit of match­mak­ing and sit them all at the same table. This is gen­er­ally not a good idea though. They’re bound to see through this and won’t thank you for the embarrassment! 

Chil­dren — Always seat younger chil­dren with their par­ents if you can. Ide­ally pro­vide some lit­tle gifts like crayons/colouring books on their table that’ll keep them occu­pied. Slightly older chil­dren might find it fun to have a kid’s table of their own, but you’ll need to use your judge­ment on whether they will behave. 

Exes — If they’ve been invited to your wed­ding, unless they’re still really close, you prob­a­bly want to seat ex-partners of the Bride and Groom as far from the top table as you can! For ex-partners of other guests, just use your com­mon sense. If they’re still get­ting on then it’s prob­a­bly fine to seat them at the same table. Oth­er­wise, seat them elsewhere.

Elderly guests — Seat elderly guests away from any music/speakers. How­ever, if you’re hav­ing speeches and not using a microphone/PA seat them where they’re going to be able to hear! 

Work­ing out who’s going to sit where at your wed­ding doesn’t have to be a headache!  Start as early as you can, even before the RSVPs are back if you like as you don’t want to be stress­ing about seat­ing the week before the big day!  There’s even wed­ding table plan­ning soft­ware avail­able online, such as at Toptableplanner.com, that can help you. You can place your guests and tables on screen and then eas­ily re-arrange them until you’ve cre­ated the ideal lay­out.  You can print out your fin­ished plan your­self, or cre­ate a PDF that you can email to your stationer.