How Much to Charge to Plan a Wedding
What to charge to plan a wedding comes from two numbers you can work out yourself. The first is the hours the wedding will really take, multiplied by an hourly floor that covers your living and your running costs. The second is whatever your usual fee model produces. Quote the higher of the two.
There is no honest going rate to copy instead. Fees vary with the market, the scope and how much of the work the planner actually does, so a number borrowed from another planner describes their business rather than yours. The method below works anywhere, and every figure in it comes from assumptions stated on the page.
Start with an hourly floor
An hourly floor is the lowest rate at which a booking is worth taking. It is not your price. It is the line a fee has to clear before the wedding pays for the life and the business behind it, and it is built from decisions about your own year rather than from anyone else's rates.
Here is how it works with one set of assumptions, taken in order.
- Choose a target income. Say the planner wants to earn $45,000 a year.
- Add the running costs. Insurance, software, a phone and mileage come to $7,200 a year, so the fees must bring in $52,200.
- Count the chargeable hours. At 45 working weeks and 20 chargeable hours a week, once quoting, marketing, bookkeeping and driving are taken out, that is 900 hours.
- Divide. $52,200 across 900 hours gives a floor of $58 an hour.
The target income in step one is a before-tax figure. A self-employed planner in the US also sets money aside for tax during the year, and the IRS page on estimated taxes explains how quarterly payments work. Some planners add that amount to step two so the floor covers it.
The chargeable hours line is the one most people get wrong. Assuming 35 chargeable hours a week gives 1,575 hours and a floor of about $33, and a planner pricing from it would work a full year and fall well short. Quoting, answering inquiries and chasing invoices are permanent, and they do not shrink as the business grows.
Count the hours a wedding actually takes
With a floor in hand, the next job is an honest estimate of hours. The wedding day is the smallest part of it. Most of the work happens over months, an hour at a time, in calls, emails and revisions that never feel like a block of work while they are happening.
Supplier work is the part that grows quietly. The Knot's 2026 Real Weddings Study found that couples hired an average of 13 vendors, and that 37% contacted more vendors than they had planned to while looking for options within budget. Every one of those contacts is time somebody spends.
The ledger below prices full planning for an illustrative wedding of 120 guests with a $30,000 budget, booked about a year out, at the $58 floor from above. The hours are assumptions for the example, not a benchmark, and the useful exercise is replacing each line with your own.
At 12 percent of the budget this wedding would pay $1,214 less than the floor, or about $43 an hour for the same 83 hours.
That comparison is the whole method in one card. If the planner's usual model had produced more than $4,814, the right quote would be the higher figure. Because it produced less, the planner has learned that this booking would lose money at the model's price, and learned it before saying yes.
The sourcing and meetings lines deserve a second look. Together they are 28 of the 83 hours, about a third, and they are the two a new planner is most likely to leave out of an estimate.
Real weddings bear the example out. Here at the Event Planning Institute, we've found that supplier sourcing and client calls take close to a third of the logged hours on the full-planning weddings our students have priced over the past two seasons.
Keeping a simple log of hours on the first few weddings is the quickest way to replace the example's assumptions with real numbers. A log kept in fifteen-minute blocks is enough, and after three weddings the pattern is usually clear.
Price each service level separately
Full planning is only one product. Many couples want less, and the mistake is treating partial planning or day-of coordination as a discount on full planning. They are different amounts of work, so each one is priced from its own hours at the same floor, as the table sets out for the same wedding.
| Service | What the planner does | Hours assumed | Floor fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full planning | Everything from the venue search to pack-down | 83 | $4,814 |
| Partial planning | Joins after the venue and main suppliers are booked | 45 | $2,610 |
| Day-of coordination | Takes over about six weeks out and runs the day | 26 | $1,508 |
The thing to notice is that day-of coordination is not a small fraction of full planning. In the example it takes nearly a third of the hours, because the planner inherits someone else's decisions and has a few weeks to find the gaps in them. Many planners set a minimum hours figure for it for exactly that reason.
Once the three fees exist, they belong on one page. The event planner price list template shows how to lay out packages so a couple can see what each one includes before they ask.
What pushes the hours up or down
Every wedding moves away from the example in some direction. The work is in spotting which way before quoting, because each of these factors changes the hours, and the hours are what the fee is built from.
- Guest count. Seating, catering numbers, transport and the run sheet all grow with the list, and so do the changes to it.
- Venue type. A hotel with an in-house team needs far less coordination than an empty barn where every chair, light and restroom is brought in.
- Number of locations. A ceremony in one place and a reception in another adds transport, timing and a second set of venue rules.
- Distance. Site visits and suppliers far from home add driving time, and a wedding a long way off may need an overnight stay.
- Length of the celebration. A welcome dinner, a two-day celebration or a morning-after brunch is extra planning and extra time on site.
These factors are also the best reason to quote after a discovery call rather than from a website form. A couple who mention a second location or a weekend of events have just added hours, and a planner who quoted from the guest count alone has already given those hours away.
Putting the fee in front of the couple
The fee lands better when it arrives with the plan. A quote that lists what the planner will do, by stage, reads as a description of the work. A single number on its own reads as a price to be negotiated down.
In practice a quote that holds its price tends to carry the same few parts.
- The service level, with the tasks it includes listed by stage.
- What it excludes, such as extra events, travel beyond a set distance or setting up décor the couple supplies.
- The total fee, and the hours estimate it rests on if the couple asks.
- A deposit on signing and instalments tied to dates, so the planner is never months of work ahead of the money.
The event pricing calculator runs the same hours check as the ledger above, so it is a quick way to test a quote before sending it. If the calculator and the quote disagree, the quote is the one to change.
Where the course goes further
Unit 3 of the Fundamentals Course covers this in full. It walks through counting the hours an event takes, setting an hourly floor, comparing flat, percentage, hourly and per-guest fees, and presenting a quote that reads as a plan. Unit 2 covers deposits, payment schedules and cancellation terms, and Unit 5 covers pricing a change once the plan is set.
For the wider picture of the work itself, the guide on how to become a wedding planner covers training, first clients and how wedding work differs from other events. The post comparing the four event planning fee models goes further into which model suits which kind of booking.
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