Average Wedding Cost: What 3,239 US Vendors Actually Charge (2026)
We read the price lists of 3,239 US wedding vendors instead of asking couples what they remembered spending. The median venue starts at $6,000 and the median photographer at $2,000 — but the spread matters more than the middle.
Almost every number you have read about what weddings cost comes from the same kind of source: a survey that asks couples, after the fact, what they spent. The Knot's study is the best known. Those surveys are useful, and they are also answering a slightly different question than the one most people are asking.
A couple planning a wedding does not want to know what the average couple remembered spending last year. They want to know what the next florist is going to quote them.
So we measured that instead. This is the first edition of the Everly Wedding Price Index, built from the prices 3,239 US wedding vendors publish on their own websites.
What we mean by a price
Every figure here is an entry price: where a vendor lists several packages, we take the lowest. It is the cheapest way in the door, not what a couple ends up paying once they have added a second shooter, an extra hour, and the good linens.
That makes these numbers deliberately lower than survey-reported spend, and not directly comparable to it. If you want the number to put in a budget spreadsheet, take the median here as a floor and expect the real figure to land somewhere between the median and the 75th percentile.
We report medians and quartiles, never means. A handful of six-figure venues would drag an average somewhere no real couple shops.
The index
The full table, with the 90th percentile added for the top of the market:
| Category | n | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venue | 432 | $3,000 | $6,000 | $12,000 | $21,000 |
| Videography | 196 | $1,538 | $2,500 | $3,799 | $5,250 |
| Planner | 344 | $1,100 | $2,400 | $5,000 | $9,638 |
| Photography | 1,126 | $1,200 | $2,000 | $3,538 | $5,500 |
| Florist | 298 | $500 | $2,000 | $4,000 | $5,754 |
| DJ | 93 | $1,149 | $1,600 | $2,505 | $3,500 |
| Band | 213 | $800 | $1,300 | $2,299 | $3,440 |
| Rentals | 86 | $300 | $500 | $1,000 | $1,500 |
| Hair | 112 | $173 | $400 | $540 | $900 |
| Cake | 57 | $150 | $350 | $600 | $1,179 |
| Officiant | 152 | $198 | $300 | $475 | $845 |
| Makeup | 180 | $150 | $290 | $600 | $1,000 |
Catering is reported separately, and here is why
Catering is the one category we will not put in the table above, because the numbers in it are not measuring the same thing.
| Pricing model | n | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Custom quote | 146 | $775 |
| Per person | 54 | $25 |
| Flat | 39 | $70 |
| Per event | 25 | $1,500 |
A $25 median and a $1,500 median sit in the same column, and both are correct: one is a plate, the other is a party. Any publication that reports a single average catering figure without splitting on the pricing model is averaging per-head rates against whole-event fees. We would rather show you the seam than paper over it.
For planning purposes, the per-person figure is the one to use: $25 a head at the median, which is $2,500 for a hundred guests before service charge or gratuity.
What a wedding costs, added up
Adding medians together does not give you a median wedding. No single couple hires the median vendor in every category, so the sum below is a construct, not an observed figure. It is useful as a reference point and misleading as a prediction.
With that said, the arithmetic is worth doing. Take the median in each category plus $25 a head for a hundred guests:
- Venue $6,000, catering $2,500, photography $2,000, videography $2,500
- Planner $2,400, florist $2,000, DJ $1,600
- Rentals $500, hair $400, cake $350, officiant $300, makeup $290
That comes to roughly $20,800 — for a wedding where every single supplier is at their entry price and none of them is above the middle of their market.
Strip it to the five things a wedding cannot happen without — venue, catering, photography, an officiant, and music — and the floor is about $12,400.
Neither of those is the number you will spend. They are the number below which the market does not go.
The spread matters more than the middle
The most useful column in our data is not the median. It is the distance between the 25th and 75th percentiles, because that measures how much the price varies between one vendor and the next for a broadly similar job.
A DJ quote near $1,600 is close to the market, and a second quote will tell you little you did not already know. A florist quote near $2,000 tells you almost nothing about what the next florist will say, because florists at the same apparent tier list anywhere from $500 to $4,000.
That converts straight into how you spend your time: get three or four florist quotes and one DJ quote. The hours you spend comparison-shopping should follow the spread, not the sticker price. We have written that up in full separately.
Geography moves the number more than anything else
The national median is a fiction that no one anywhere pays. Photography, our deepest category at 1,126 priced vendors, ranges across states like this:
New York at $4,000 against Texas at $1,500 is a 2.7x gap — larger than the gap between any two categories at the same tier.
California sitting at $1,900, below Tennessee and Ohio, is the result we trust least in this table. It is more likely a reflection of which Californian photographers we have priced than a statement about the Californian market — our LA and San Francisco samples skew toward high-volume studios that publish entry rates, while the state's luxury end tends to quote privately and is therefore invisible to us. Treat it as a floor, not a market rate.
What this misses
Three limits, stated plainly, because a number without its caveats is worse than no number.
Vendors who publish prices are not a random sample. Publishing a starting price is itself a market position — it tends to be what you do when you are competing on access rather than exclusivity. The vendors who say "enquire for pricing" are, on the whole, dearer. Every figure here is therefore biased downward, and the bias is largest at the top of each market.
Coverage is uneven. Texas has 192 priced photographers in our data; Michigan has 16. Both clear our n≥15 threshold and both are printed, but they are not equally strong readings. Sample sizes are shown beside every figure so you can weigh them yourself.
An entry price is not a final invoice. Service charges, gratuity, travel, overtime and the upgrades that every package is designed to sell you are not in these numbers. Budget the median as the beginning of a conversation.
Method
One row per vendor per category, carrying the lowest basePrice across all its
listed packages. US vendors only, matched to a state and city. Cells below 15
vendors are suppressed rather than rounded. Catering is reported by pricing
model and excluded from cross-category comparison, for the reasons above.
The index is rebuilt each quarter from the same query, so successive editions are comparable to each other.
Citing this
These figures are free to reproduce with attribution and a link, under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Everly, "The Everly Wedding Price Index", August 2026.
If you need a cut we have not published — a particular metro, a category crosstab, a different percentile — ask us. We would much rather you quoted the right number than estimated one.
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