How much does the average wedding cost? Well, it very much depends on who you ask, but one thing is for sure: it’s eye-watering. And it’s nowhere near what your parents were likely shelling out. Grace Isabella takes a deep dive into the true cost of weddings today
Throughout my young life, I dreamed of a Big White Wedding™ as so many little girls do. The forest ceremony, the ballgown, the floral arrangements – it’s all been neatly sorted and filed away on a Pinterest board over the past fourteen years. The groom was a distinctly less relevant, though still essential, part of the aesthetic.
Flash forward to now: I have both the impending engagement and the tendency towards obsession required to forge an eleven-tab wedding planning spreadsheet, designed to investigate how financially feasible this veiled fantasy really is.
How much does a wedding cost, you ask? I give you any builder’s favourite adage: How long is a piece of string?
The Average Wedding Cost
There are no official statistics on the average cost of a wedding. The ones we do have differ wildly:
- The Knot’s annual study puts the 2025 average at about $33,000 USD ($57,000 NZD).
- Some local sources claim $35,000-$45,000 NZD; others, less than $25,000 NZD.
- New Zealand wedding planner Susannah Reid estimated the 2025 average at around $87,600, up from $63,600 in 2024 and $58,800 in 2023.
Wedding statistics have well-known flaws. They tend to report mean values, not medians (which would come closer to the most common amount people are spending), so registry ceremonies and six-figure events all get averaged together without adjusting for guest numbers. Big spenders will skew results; tiny weddings are often missed entirely.
Moreover, wedding-industry outlets have a vested interest in normalising higher spend, and couples using planners tend to be bigger spenders anyway.
And of course, weddings are hyper-local events, so prices can vary drastically – even between towns a few hours apart.
Through my own digging, I found that a 120-person, 2026 North Island wedding at a modest, all-inclusive venue – with no pre-wedding events, and fairly pared-back trimmings – came to about $50,000.
That much for one day?
Venue, food, and alcohol typically make up half the budget, and feeding a crowd is expensive, whatever the occasion. When every other component seems to cost a few thousand, a wedding adds up fast.
Hyperinflation
Back in 2017, a journalist recreated the costs of her parents’ 1974 wedding. They had 300 guests, an enormous cake, and a fancy cocktail hour, all for about $2000 USD at the time – roughly $10,000 when adjusted for inflation. To host a similar event in 2017 would actually cost $47,286 USD – a whopping 370% increase.
Anyone on Reddit that claims they spent $15k on their wedding in 1995, therefore everyone should be able to, has got no idea.
Several things can be true at once:
- A whisper of the word “wedding” immediately inflates the price tag.
- Hyperinflation is rampant; from one season to the next, expect to pay hundreds more for the same service.
- And yet, vendors aren’t exactly raking it in.
Inflation and supply-chain events impact them, too. As Tik Tok creator @hannah.nutritioncoach points out, weddings are simply expensive to produce, and you rarely see wedding florists or photographers living in luxury.
Wedding services are in demand, and there’s far higher client expectations, personalisation, and time pressure on a wedding compared to other events. The industry is dominated by small, mostly women-led (a rarity) businesses navigating rising expenses. That nuance is worth noting.
Financial Transparency
At their core, weddings aren’t purely romantic events. They’re a cultural compulsion; a ritual performance of wealth signalling and social mobility.
The Western white wedding is essentially “an institution of the well-off”; they imply pre-existing wealth.
If you don’t have familial financial support, it actually helps to know how others fund these events so you’re not comparing apples to heirloom pears. According to The Knot:
- 50% of couples have family cover most costs,
- 36.8% get partial help,
- Only 13.2% pay in entirety.
So it’s fair to say, almost everyone who has a nice wedding has at least some family money.
Finances are so shrouded in taboo that many couples dive into engagements assuming a wedding can’t possibly cost more than 10-20k. This underpreparedness can send couples into a debt-shame spiral in pursuit of that oh-so-well-marketed “perfect day.” A 2024 US survey found 56% of respondents went into debt to afford their wedding, and about a third later regretted it.
The wedding-industrial complex markets this day as the pinnacle of a woman’s life. That pressure grants us carte blanche to overspend; the deeper we get into planning, the more “essentials” appear.
A Final Note
The numbers make one thing clear: a wedding isn’t just a romantic milestone, but a financial one. No matter what you choose, spend more time on the relationship than on planning the wedding, and you’ll come out richer for it.
