How much does it cost to get married?

I’d heard new parents say that the concept of time changes once you have children. It loses its elasticity; the unpredictability of a newborn means a single day is no longer yours to shape. Now I get it. Once we had our baby, schedules replaced spontaneity in an instant. 

Try organising a wedding as new parents. It’s all the same stress – on no sleep. Both working full time, we did the usual saving, planning and budgeting, but with a toddler writhing on our laps. What kept us going? Easy – our determination to have the time of our lives. This was our day for the taking. 

The best thing about getting married when you’re comfortably over 40 is that you really know what you want – and what you don’t want. Certain things were never on the table (absolutely no barns) and others were non-negotiable: the food had to be fantastic and the music had to be loud; the overall cost had to be kept to a minimum, but fun wasn’t to be compromised; the experience had to be rooted in the place we’d chosen to live and raise our family.

We questioned every element of a traditional wedding and the costs that often come with them – no classic car, four-tiered cake or matching bridesmaids dresses. And created a wedding where almost everything was done by someone we knew or a friend-of-a-friend.

You’d be surprised at all the skills your friends and family pick up as you get older. By the time we got married, we were extremely lucky to have garnered a very talented group of friends: DJs, photographers, florists, hairdressers, bakers, a drone pilot, a concert pianist, and a celebrant.

Not only did this keep the costs down, it also meant that a lot of the fine details were delegated to people that we really trusted.

The key? Don’t be afraid to ask. Everyone was delighted to contribute and play a part. And it was incredible to look around over the weekend to see the people we love, doing what they love – for us.

What we learned from two decades of weddings

Between us, we’ve been to countless weddings (we reckon more than 50) and our favourites have always been the ones where we actually get to spend some time with the bride and groom. So we did a legal ceremony a few weeks before with six friends as witnesses. And then a big family and friends knees-up, near where we live, over a weekend. 

This approach obviously added to the overall cost, not as much as you’d think though, and it was totally worth it. Especially as we had plenty of time to save up, thanks to the pandemic giving us a very long run up to the wedding.

Saving up for our DIY wedding

One of the tools we used to bump our savings was round ups, which we turned on in both our personal and joint Starling accounts. This meant that our bigger chunks of savings were topped up little and often with ‘spare change’ whenever we bought something.

We knew that most weddings cost around £20k, and that they could very quickly get more expensive than that, particularly in the UK. Having our wedding abroad would have lowered various costs for us, but made everything a lot more complicated and expensive for our guests – so that was out.

To tackle this mountain of a goal, we broke things down into smaller parts – with the help of Spaces (the tool that allows you to set money aside from your main Starling balance). I made one Space for music, one for food and one for the lunch we had with our witnesses after the legal ceremony.

Our wedding costs, line by line

The venue was the first thing we found and paid for, which included food offered by the hosts. We kissed a lot of frogs on our venue hunt, but in the end, it was a very easy decision. The owners grow a lot of produce themselves, which is incorporated into their menu, and they promised not to set an early curfew or outrageous volume limit.

So, how much did our wedding cost?

*Average costs published by Bridebook in 2025, based on a survey of 7,000 couples. 

And here’s what we spent on the actual getting-married part:

Other than the above, the additional costs were the wine (£4,000 for English sparkling, white, rosé and red burgundy), which was paid for by my dad, and arranging for someone to look after our daughter for most of the day (£100). We didn’t originally plan to have a cake – until our neighbour found out and made us one as our wedding gift.

So, the grand totals: £1,504 for the official ceremony day and £18,850 for our big weekend wedding – £20,354 all in. This is just shy of the 2024 average wedding cost published by Bridebook, which stands at £20,822.

It feels strange to put a number on those special, surreal days. Safe to say I’ve never regretted a penny. As for choosing to get married after having kids? It’s definitely got my vote – even after all the midnight laptop sessions spent whispering over spreadsheets. Dancing with my daughter to 80s hits was just priceless.