How to plan a wedding for $30,000

Planning on spending about $30,000 on your wedding? Using the free Easy Weddings Budget Calculator, we came up with the breakdown of each category of the spend for your wedding. Here’s how to plan a wedding for $30,000:

Dress, suit, and accessories

You’re looking at a dress budget of about $2,100, $600 for accessories and $300 to spend on your hair and makeup. Then you have about $300 left over for your partner.

Reception

You will have just under $13,000 to spend on your reception, including $9,000 for food and service and about $2,500 for drinks, and a hire fee of about $1,500.

Ceremony

If the ceremony location has a fee, you could safely allocate a few hundred dollars, but most couples save this by having their ceremony at the same location as their venue. You may still have to pay a small fee for the ceremony, but this shouldn’t be much. You will have about $1200 to spend on your marriage celebrant.

Rings

You will have about $600 in your budget for your wedding bands. Traditionally, wedding bands are simpler than engagement rings, and you don’t necessarily need to have both rings cost the same. You could allocate 70% of the ring budget to one of you and 30% to the other.

Photography and videography

You’ll have about $2,400 for photography and $1500 for video. To ensure you fit within the budget, you may need to have a time limited package or have the same vendor provide both as a package, which can be more affordable.

Decorations and wedding hire

You’ll have about $600 in your wedding budget to spend on decorations and $1,500 for flowers- which should be enough to get you all of the arrangements you are after.

Wedding entertainment

Your budget will allow about $1800 for music and entertainment at your wedding, which is enough to get a great DJ, band or wedding entertainer.

Stationery

You’ll have about $600 to spend on invitations and $150 to spend on other stationery, whether it be Save The Dates, thank you cards or something else.

Wedding gifts

You’ll have about $600 left to spend on gifts for each other, your bridal party and your parents and $450 for bomboniere.

Wedding cake or desserts

You’ll have about $900 to spend on an amazing wedding cake! Be sure to do a taste test- most cake makers can do this for you or send out some samples if you live remotely.

Wedding cars

You’ll have roughly $600 to spend your wedding day transport! Enquire with wedding car suppliers here.

Wedding night accommodation

On the wedding night, you will have a budget of about $450 left.

Is it possible to plan a wedding for $30,000?

So, after crunching the numbers, it’s definitely possible to plan a wedding for $30,000. In fact, last years average wedding budget according to our survey results were $30,985! So spending $30,000 is a really reasonable budget for your wedding day.