The question every new planner asks, and the one nobody can honestly answer for you, is what to charge to plan a wedding. Fees vary enormously by market, by scope, and by how much of the work you are actually doing.

What does not vary is the method. Work the number out twice, and quote the higher of the two.

The first way: a share of the budget

The industry convention is to charge a percentage of the total event budget for full planning, with smaller percentages for partial planning and coordination. It scales sensibly, clients understand it, and it is easy to explain.

It has one real flaw worth knowing about before you adopt it. Your fee going up when your client spends more makes recommending the cheaper supplier quietly awkward, and clients notice that eventually even if they never say so.

The second way: your hours

Estimate the real hours honestly. Not the wedding day, the whole job: the discovery call, the site visits, the supplier research, the emails, the seating plan that changes four times, the final fortnight, the day itself, and pack-down.

Multiply by an hourly figure you could actually live on once insurance, software and unpaid admin are covered. That number is your floor.

Quote the higher one

If the percentage lands above your hours figure, quote the percentage. If it lands below, you have just discovered that this booking would cost you money to accept, and the useful thing is that you found out before saying yes rather than in the week after the wedding.

Most planners who leave this industry did not run bad weddings. They ran good ones for a fee that never covered the hours, and it took two seasons to notice.

What changes the number

  • Scope. Full planning, partial planning and on-the-day coordination are three different products, not three sizes of one.
  • Guest count, because seating, catering numbers and logistics all scale with it.
  • Venue. A blank space with no in-house team is far more work than a hotel that has done four hundred of these.
  • Distance, and whether you will be paying for a night nearby.

Put the fee in the proposal with what it covers beside it. A number found on page four reads as something you were hoping nobody would look for.