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.
There is a piece of wedding advice that everyone repeats and nobody has ever checked: get three quotes.
Three quotes for what, though? We looked at the listed prices of 3,239 US wedding vendors and the answer turns out to vary enormously by category. In some categories a third quote is worth about $1,500. In others it is worth about $100, which is less than the afternoon costs you.
The measurement
For each category we took the ratio of the 75th percentile price to the 25th percentile price. It is a plain measure of how far apart two vendors can be while apparently offering the same thing.
Economists have a name for this. George Stigler's 1961 paper on the economics of information pointed out that in markets where sellers' prices vary a lot, searching pays, and in markets where they cluster, it does not. Wedding vendors turn out to be a nearly perfect illustration.
Florists are the outlier by a distance. Across 298 US florists, the cheap quarter starts at $500 and the dear quarter at $4,000. Both describe themselves in similar language; both will send you a mood board.
DJs are the opposite. 93 priced DJs run from $1,149 at the 25th percentile to $2,505 at the 75th. If your first DJ quote is $1,600, you have already found the market.
What a third quote is actually worth
Dispersion is a ratio, which is tidy but hard to act on. So here it is in dollars.
If you collect three quotes in a category and take the cheapest, the typical outcome lands near the 25th percentile of that market. (More precisely: the median of the minimum of three independent draws sits at the 21st percentile, since that is where (1 − p)³ = 0.5. Our published 25th percentile is close enough to use.)
So the value of shopping around is roughly the distance from the median to the 25th percentile:
| Category | Median | 25th | Worth shopping? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venue | $6,000 | $3,000 | $3,000 — yes, always |
| Florist | $2,000 | $500 | $1,500 — yes, always |
| Planner | $2,400 | $1,100 | $1,300 — yes |
| Videography | $2,500 | $1,538 | $962 — worth two quotes |
| Photography | $2,000 | $1,200 | $800 — worth two quotes |
| Band | $1,300 | $800 | $500 — marginal |
| DJ | $1,600 | $1,149 | $451 — marginal |
| Hair | $400 | $173 | $227 — no |
| Cake | $350 | $150 | $200 — no |
| Rentals | $500 | $300 | $200 — no |
| Makeup | $290 | $150 | $140 — no |
| Officiant | $300 | $198 | $102 — no |
The top three categories account for $5,800 of the roughly $9,400 available across all twelve. Venue, florist, planner: that is where the afternoons go.
A rough rule that falls out of the table: shop hard where the median is above $2,000 and the dispersion is above 4x. That is venues, florists and planners. Everywhere else, one or two quotes and move on.
Why florists vary so much and DJs so little
The pattern is not random. It tracks how legible the product is.
A DJ's job is close to standardised. Five or six hours, a sound system, a microphone for the speeches. Couples can compare two DJs on almost the same terms, so DJs are forced to price against each other, and their prices converge. Videographers and officiants sit in the same bucket for the same reason — 2.47x and 2.4x respectively.
Flowers are the opposite. "Wedding flowers" can mean six bud vases or an installation that takes a team two days. Two florists quoting the same wedding may be pricing genuinely different work, and neither price is wrong. Because couples cannot compare like with like at a glance, there is little pressure pushing prices together, and the spread stays wide.
Venues have a third dynamic again: they are geographically captive. You cannot substitute a barn in Vermont for a loft in Brooklyn, so each venue competes with a handful of neighbours rather than a national market. Local monopoly keeps dispersion high.
Wide dispersion is not the same as overcharging. A $4,000 florist and a $500 florist are often doing different jobs, and the expensive one may be the correct choice. What the spread tells you is that the price alone carries very little information — which is precisely why you need more than one of them.
Dispersion is wider still inside a single state
The national figures understate the case, because they blend states with different price levels. Look inside one state and the spread is often larger, not smaller.
Texan florists run from $275 at the 25th percentile to $3,000 at the 75th — a ratio of nearly 11x, well above the national 8x. Californian florists run $500 to $3,500, a ratio of 7x.
| State | Florist p25 | Florist p75 | Dispersion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | $275 | $3,000 | 10.9x |
| California | $500 | $3,500 | 7.0x |
| New Jersey | $750 | $5,000 | 6.7x |
| Florida | $500 | $2,750 | 5.5x |
| New York | $1,500 | $5,000 | 3.3x |
New York is the tightest florist market in our data, which fits the story above: it is the market where couples compare the most and vendors price against each other hardest.
How to use this
Rank your vendor list by median price multiplied by dispersion, and work down it. In practice that means:
- Venue. Three or four, and get the full fee schedule — the entry price hides the most here.
- Florist. Three or four, and ask each to quote the same list of arrangements. Otherwise you are comparing prices for different jobs, which is the whole problem.
- Planner. Three, and be explicit about scope — full service against month-of is most of the 4.55x spread.
- Photographer and videographer. Two each.
- Everything else. One, unless you dislike it.
Following that order costs you maybe six extra conversations and, on our numbers, is worth somewhere around $5,000 to $6,000 on a typical stack.
Method
Entry price per vendor — the lowest listed base price across a vendor's packages — for 3,239 US vendors with published prices. Dispersion is the ratio of the 75th to the 25th percentile of that distribution within a category. Cells below 15 vendors are suppressed. Catering is excluded because it mixes per-head rates with whole-event fees; see the price index for the detail.
Vendors who publish prices are not a random sample — those who quote privately skew dearer — so these are conservative estimates of both level and spread.
Free to reproduce with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Everly, "The Everly Wedding Price Index", August 2026.
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