Laura and her partner got engaged on Christmas Day last year. The couple, in their 30s and living in London, hope to marry this December.

Theatre producer Laura — who has a decade’s worth of experience planning events and whose name we’ve changed — found a venue for her wedding in the south-east of the UK whose prices she initially thought were reasonable. But then she found out that she was required to use one of their five approved caterers.

After asking all five for a quote for 80 guests, Laura couldn’t believe how much they charged for food and staffing costs. “For canapés, two courses — a starter and main, which were both sharing platters — one of the quotes I got was just shy of £18,000,” she tells FT Money, showing us the email. There were other oddities too: the celebrant the venue suggested quoted £1,500, double the price of a nearby registrar Laura found herself.

“You just get taken for a ride,” she says.

£25,625Average cost of a UK wedding in 2025

Getting married is meant to be a celebration full of love and joy and friends and family. For many couples, it is the most important day of their lives — but it is also the most expensive.

The average UK wedding will cost £25,625 this year, roughly two-thirds of the median annual salary, according to online portal compareweddinginsurance.org.uk. Many couples who marry are under additional financial strain during that period — saving for other big expenses such as buying a house — with as many as two-thirds turning to gifts from family and friends to help pay for their nuptials.

One couple the FT spoke to — who have a budget of £30,000 for 115 guests — said that even their venue manager wasn’t aware how much add-ons such as photographers and hair and make-up artists cost these days.

“He runs the venue, but even he wasn’t aware of how expensive some of the vendors can be,” the groom explains.

So how did the happiest day of your life become so expensive? And is it solely down to vendors increasing prices when they hear the word “wedding” — or are other factors at play?

I asked myself these questions last year while planning my own wedding. As the first among my close friends and siblings to tie the knot, I had little previous exposure to the costs. But as I began to put a budget together and research the average amount spent on a wedding, my panic mounted. How could one day cost so much?

I am not alone. More than half of couples overshoot their budgets when they get married, according to wedding planning website Hitched. But I couldn’t pinpoint why it cost so much. Once I had selected all the vendors, I looked through the list and tried to work out which one was ripping me off — but I struggled.

Part of the problem is the asymmetric information. Like most people I had never organised a party for 100-odd guests, complete with flowers, a professionally cooked, sit-down meal, booze, a ceilidh band, people to serve things, open bottles, tidy away broken glass and stop people from weeing in the flowerbeds. I had no idea what a fair price for any of these might be.

But if instead this was an extravagant 50th, or a work do, would it really have cost as much?

According to Alex Head, founder of catering company Social Pantry, you cannot really compare a wedding with a corporate event. “There’s so much personalisation that goes into weddings, and that’s where costs can come in behind the scenes,” she says.

Hiring a wedding planner may help you navigate these uncertain waters — and many couples swear by them — but that’s another expense to add to the list.

The vendors I spoke with for this article all described the amount of effort they put into a wedding before the actual day. Caterers mentioned high overheads, including premises for the food to be prepared, transport costs and the price of setting up a temporary kitchen if needed at the venue.

Photographers said they spend weeks editing thousands of photos down to a few hundreds that are sent to the couple; hair and make-up artists say they routinely have to cost plans for brides who don’t end up picking them, not to mention the costs of advertising.

“Like a lot of self-employed people our time goes into creating the business,” say Emma Kingsman and Lauren Spence, co-founders of bridal beauty company Spence & Oliver. “It’s easy to think we start [on the day] at 6am and leave at 1pm and that’s it.”

Specific events have also pushed up prices recently. “In the past few years the world has been through huge shift,” says Zoe Burke, editor at Hitched. “We’ve had Covid where businesses couldn’t make any money for a really long time, the war in Ukraine [has] impacted the wedding dress industry as a lot of wedding dress production is done there. Brexit has been particularly challenging for florists,” she adds.

Then there’s the added pressure to get everything just right. “I get the same question all the time: ‘Oh, have you had any bridezillas?’” says Lori Walker, a make-up artist who works across the Lothians and Borders in Scotland. “Well, no, I haven’t . . . But the expectations [are high]. It’s like preparing for Christmas, you don’t get a do-over. If you mess it up, it’s messed up.”

Weddings haven’t always been this extravagant. As recently as two decades ago, they would last half a day, with the couples leaving for their honeymoon that evening. Guests can now expect an event that can sometimes take place over an entire three-day bank holiday weekend, with dinners, games, brunches and pool parties.

Preparations, too, have snowballed. A hen or stag do in the 1980s would usually be dinner with a group of select friends. Now they can be multi-day events crammed with activities, often overseas and at vast expense.

The explosion of wedding mania can be seen in the growth of the wedding planning checklist provided by Bride’s magazine. In 1959, the magazine recommended that couples set aside two months to prepare for their wedding, providing them with a checklist of 22 tasks to complete. This rose in the 1990s to 12 months of planning and a 44-point checklist, according to professors Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Peck in their 2003 paper “Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding”. Wedding planning website Hitched currently has a checklist of 59 tasks.

Much of the growth of the wedding industry in the 20th century was due to “industry efforts to commodify love and romance”, according to economics professors Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon in their 2014 study “Diamonds are Forever and Other Fairy Tales”.

Engagement rings are a good example of this. Diamonds in the early 1900s had far less intrinsic value than they do today. But De Beers’ “Diamonds are Forever” advertising campaign in the 1940s changed all that and, thereafter, the idea that men should spend three months’ salary on an engagement ring flourished.

Anxiety over the rising cost of weddings is at least as old. In 1969, the US Look magazine ran a cover feature called “The Wedding Racket”, on the financial pitfalls of getting hitched, featuring humorous illustrations by Edward Gorey, the artist, writer and costume designer.

Wedding excess in the US is even more pronounced than in the UK, with its roll-call of extra rituals that have become de rigueur, such as gift showers and rehearsal dinners. Two Britons living in the US who spoke to FT Money said they had recently been to weddings that cost upwards of $250,000. “The venues are stupidly expensive and food is overpriced,” one said. 

There was still something niggling at me as I went through the process of arranging my nuptials, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time — a strange pressure underlying all my choices. I now realise that was a creeping feeling that mine and my partner’s wedding would set the tone, and even longevity, of our marriage.

I should not have been surprised by this. “Industry advertising has fuelled the norm that spending large amounts of money on the wedding is a signal of commitment or is helpful for a marriage to be successful,” wrote Francis-Tan and Mialon. “The general message is that wedding spending and marriage duration are positively correlated.”

In short, if there is indeed a wedding “racket”, it seems that many people planning a wedding internalise it.

Social media has added rocket fuel to this, as an increased awareness of “what’s out there” has driven expectations higher. “People want something interactive, it’s rare to have a full three-course, sit-down menu,” Social Pantry’s Head says, giving the example of a chef assembling and icing a wedding cake in front of guests. “We are often asked to re-create something couples have seen on Instagram.”

Sentiment often outweighs practically, says Louisa Moule, head of sales at London-based caterer Rocket Food. “Social media-fuelled expectations encourage couples to choose extravagant menus without always considering the financial impact,” she adds.

A good example of this is the impact on web traffic after reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian tied the knot in May 2022. After the ceremony she wore a custom Dolce & Gabbana gothic-style dress. Searches on Pinterest, a popular platform for mood board creation, for “gothic wedding dress” doubled the next day.

As it is such a cottage industry, it is hard to generalise across all wedding vendors. While many attempt to charge prices they think are reasonable, some have stories of murky pricing and overcharging — which even those with experience of organising large events can struggle with.

“This is a one-off thing that you’ll never do again, so you actually don’t know what you’re doing,” says Laura. “Vendors have all the power.”

But questioning pricing and bartering can be successful.

One bride-to-be told the FT she negotiated down a wedding planner’s costs by hundreds of pounds after requesting a breakdown of what exactly they were paying for. “We asked if there was a lower tier of service, but she said it was all tailored to the couple . . . we just said this was too much for our budget.” They saved £500.

Others forgo traditions to save money. One groom we spoke to, who is getting married this summer, found a venue in Portugal for much less than the London venues he and his fiancée were looking at. The quality of the food and drink is higher, he says, and he and his new wife will go straight to their honeymoon.

“Adding in the faff of everyone having to come to London and then the expense of them staying in a London hotel, it made sense to ask them to go to Portugal instead — no more faff than London, cheaper hotels, and a much nicer place,” he reasons.

Lowering expectations can help, too, as can trying to ignore the idea that a couple’s wedding is representative of their relationship. “Why blow so much effort on a single day, with all the stresses, tantrums, and demanding relatives,” says FT reader Simon Osborne, whose own wedding included afternoon tea for 80 people. “It was over in two hours,” he adds.

Couples could look to Francis-Tan and Mialon’s conclusion for inspiration if they are planning a small wedding. “Overall, our findings provide little evidence to support the validity of the wedding industry’s message connecting expensive weddings with positive marital outcomes.”

There is another option that will save the most money . . . don’t get married. The proportion of UK adults who have never married or been in a civil partnership has increased every decade since 1991, rising to 38 per cent in 2021, according to ONS figures based on the last census.

Laura still plans to go ahead with her venue in December — and has negotiated one of the vendors down to £9,000 for the food (half the original quote). But it still stings, she says.

“I find it so hard to swallow as it’s [just] one day.”