Who pays for the wedding?

Tra­di­tion­ally the bride’s par­ents foot the bill for a wed­ding. But as with many tra­di­tions (dowries and no sex before mar­riage spring to mind!) this isn’t really rel­e­vant or appro­pri­ate in our times.

Talk­ing about who pays for the wed­ding can be a tricky issue.

Par­ents pay­ing for weddings

Your par­ents will have been look­ing for­ward to your wed­ding day since the mid­wife announced, “it’s a girl!” and they may have saved up a lit­tle to pay for your big day. But with soar­ing wed­ding costs (even back in 2003 the aver­age wed­ding cost £14k, com­pared to £20k now) they could be in for a big sur­prise and it’s a hell of a lot of money to ask for.

Your par­ents might pre­fer to pay for one part of your wedding

Most par­ents will offer to help pay for some part of your wed­ding. This could be the food and drink, the venue hire, the sta­tionery (a pop­u­lar one as par­ents are still often ‘hosts’ of the wed­ding with their names on the invites) or the wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy. This is fan­tas­tic but you may need to com­pro­mise more in the areas they’re pay­ing for.

For exam­ple, if you’ve dreamed of get­ting mar­ried at the local stately home, and your par­ents want to pay for the venue hire but don’t have enough to cover such a big venue, you’ll have to plan how to approach the con­ver­sa­tion. Should you pay a part of the venue bill to get your dream loca­tion, or com­pro­mise so your par­ents can afford to hire some­where? It’s not a ques­tion I can answer: everyone’s answer will be different.

Tips for decid­ing who pays for what on your wed­ding day

Before any­thing else, sit down with your fiancé and work out your wed­ding bud­get. Don’t assume your par­ents will pay for any­thing at this stage.

Approach your par­ents very care­fully, have a gen­eral chat about the wed­ding and how you’d like them to be involved in the plan­ning gen­er­ally, with­out ask­ing for money. Per­haps sug­gest your mum could help choose your invi­ta­tions, or they could both come and look around venues with you. If they’re hop­ing to make a finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion a chat like this will give them the oppor­tu­nity to broach the sub­ject with you.

Involve your par­ents through­out the plan­ning process. If your par­ents are pay­ing for the pho­tog­ra­phy, let them meet the pho­tog­ra­pher with you and ask their own ques­tions if they want to! Or just look at the photographer’s web­site together and tell them all about the albums you’re going to get with the pack­age you’ve chosen.