Guest Counts

Your guest count is what you want to consider for the venue. We had about 5% not show up for our wedding. Our guest count was 75 with 4 vendors and final count on the bill was 72. Some others were invited knowing whom didn't reply/call back to fill in the seats.

Don't invite beyond your venue's capacity. If your venue seats 200, it would be unwise to invite 250 thinking 50 people will probably say no. If they say yes, you'll be in a pickle.

As for guest counts, whatever capacity that's listed under the fire code includes all bodies. So if the fire code capacity for your hall is 200, that's including all the staff that needs to walk in and out of the space. If it's a covid restriction, typically they include external vendors. So if for covid reasons your 200 seat venue can only have 25% capacity, your 50 people must include vendors like the photographer and the DJ but not the staff working for the venue.

Typically in normal times, you should expect 10% to be no shows at the wedding itself. With covid, you might get some more fidgety people deciding last minute that they won't come. It is what it is but I would plan for everyone on your guest list to be in attendance just in case.

Since we had our wedding during covid, we were pretty sure that the 10 people invited would make it so definitely less stress was involved on that front haha. But I would definitely plan to have everyone that you invite to attend and take that into consideration when looking at venues. At the end of the day, having more space than you need is better than having less space than you need. As for how many would typically come, that really depends. Are you inviting a lot of people that would need to make travel arrangements to be there? Will it be a mix of people that you're really close to but also more just acquaintances? It's really hard to judge that kind of thing.

As for counting vendors as guests, that'll also depend on your venue. If you want a day of coordinator, are they apart of the venue's team or do you have to outsource them? If you're outsourcing them then they would be counted as a guest. But typically, the vendors that should definitely be counted as guests are the photographer and their assistants, videographer, and DJ.