What weddings actually cost
Original price research built from what wedding vendors publish, not from what couples remember spending. Free to cite, with the method in the open.
Who Pays for the Wedding? The Tradition, and What It Costs in 2026
The traditional American split assigns about 84% of a wedding’s measurable cost to one family. We priced each line of the etiquette against 3,239 real vendor listings to show what the old rules actually ask of people now.
Wedding Photographer Cost by State and City (2026 Data)
Median wedding photographer prices across 17 states and 22 US cities, from 1,126 photographers who publish their rates. New York runs $4,000; Texas runs $1,500. Charlottesville beats Manhattan.
Which Wedding Vendors Are Worth Shopping Around For (And Which Are Not)
Florists at the same tier list prices eight times apart. DJs list two times apart. We measured price dispersion across 3,239 US wedding vendors to work out where a third quote earns its afternoon.
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.
Every figure comes from prices wedding vendors publish themselves. Where a vendor lists several packages we take the lowest, so the number is the cheapest way in the door rather than what a couple ends up paying. That makes these figures deliberately lower than survey-reported spend, and not directly comparable to it.
We report the median and the quartiles, never the mean — a handful of six-figure venues would drag an average somewhere no real couple shops. Any cell built on fewer than 15 vendors is suppressed rather than rounded, and sample sizes are printed beside every figure.
Two limits worth stating plainly. Vendors who publish prices are not a random sample of all vendors; those who quote privately are probably dearer, which biases these figures down. And our coverage is uneven across the country, so a state with 20 vendors is a weaker reading than one with 500 even though both clear the threshold.
Everly, “The Everly Wedding Price Index”, everly.so/blog/wedding-economist
Figures and charts may be reproduced with attribution and a link (CC BY 4.0). Journalists wanting a cut we have not published — a particular metro, category or crosstab — can ask; we would rather you quoted the right number than estimated one.