Determining your guest list is one of the most—if not the most—important tasks on your planning checklist. Your guest list will affect your venue, budget and so on (and cutting your list, if necessary, will likely be one of the most excruciating tasks you do while wedding planning). So, how do other couples’ guest list sizes stack up?
According to The Knot 2017 Real Weddings Study, the average guest list size is currently 136. (For context, that number is down from 141 in 2016—and down from an all-time high of 153 in 2007.)
Guest lists might be shrinking, but if you’re having an enormous black-tie bash with more than 300 of your closest family members and friends, you’re certainly not alone. You still make up for 2 percent of weddings in 2017, with guest lists featuring 200+ names falling closely behind (10 percent of weddings have between 200 and 300 guests).
And the same goes if you’re having a small, intimate affair: Weddings with 50 guests or less account for 11 percent (or roughly 1 in 10) weddings in 2017. That’s up from just 7 percent of weddings in 2016.
Of course, the vast majority of weddings will fall somewhere in the middle. Guests lists consisting of 51 to 150 names accounted for 57 percent of weddings in 2017 (that’s where our average falls), while weddings with 151 to 200 guests comes in with 19 percent of weddings.
And if you’re wondering how you’ll possibly decide what size wedding you’ll have with so many viable options, it might be determined by where you live. According to our study, guest list size varies by region—weddings taking place in West North Central states (aka Minnesota, the Dakotas and Nebraska) will have the largest guest lists with an average of 167 guests, while weddings taking place in the South Atlantic states (think Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas) will have the smallest weddings, with an average of 117 guests per wedding.
As far as we’re concerned, size doesn’t matter—as long as your guest list consists of all the people who matter most to you (and maybe a few stragglers from your mother-in-law’s book club).
