Plan Your Budget With This Sample Wedding Budget

Once you know your wedding budget, you can then determine how you to spend for everything. It would be great to create a wedding budget spreadsheet to help you breakdown your expenses.

While the average wedding cost varies for some reasons, the national average for a wedding budget falls around $28, 000, excluding the cost for engagement ring and honeymoon. In general, a sample wedding budget includes the following items and may be divided as such:

Attire 10%

Reception (Venue, Food and Cakes) 37%

Ceremony site rental 3%

Flowers and decorations 10%

Invitation and thank you cards 5%

Photography 10%

DJ/Musicians 10%

Wedding planner 10%

Gifts/Favors/Transportation 5%

Having a sample budget is particularly helpful when you want to decide where you can spend less money on so you may spend more on another item instead. This is also beneficial if you want to see how you can consolidate the budget for several categories and allocate the amount you’d save for another category. Like if you’d want to hold the ceremony and the reception at the same venue, then you can have a bigger budget for, say, your attire.

This breakdown may vary depending on your priorities. Just remember that when forming your budget, carefully decide how much you are going to spend for the wedding then determine how to divide the expenses.