A 120-guest wedding runs about $30,100 lean, $40,475 standard and $57,150 elevated at national pricing — $251 to $476 a guest. Set your own count and region below.
Figures as of August 2026
Most budget tools open by asking for the one number you have not decided yet — the total. This one starts where planning actually starts, with how many people you are feeding, and prices that headcount in your part of the country. Twelve categories, the percentage each one takes, a cost-per-guest figure, and no sign-up.
Set the guest count, pick a region and a service level, and all twelve lines rebuild instantly. Nothing sits behind an email address, and the 8% buffer starts switched off so you see the raw number first.
Change anything — the allocation rebuilds as you go.
Every card below is the calculator's own output at the settings named on it. Copy one to paste into your planning notes, or run it to load those settings into the tool.
120 guests · National · standard service Venue & rentals $9,600 24% Catering & bar $11,950 30% Photography & video $3,900 10% Attire & alterations $2,900 7% Flowers & decor $3,075 8% Music & entertainment $2,375 6% Stationery & postage $1,675 4% Rings $1,800 4% Hair & beauty $900 2% Transport & parking $950 2% Favors & gifts $1,350 3% Total $40,475 · $337 per guest
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run this120 guests · National · three service levels Lean $30,100 · $251 per guest Standard $40,475 · $337 per guest Elevated $57,150 · $476 per guest Identical guest list. The $27,050 spread is how you serve dinner, stock the bar and style the room — not how many people you invited. Runs at lean; flip the service level to see the other two.
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run this120 guests · standard service · by region Midwest $36,350 · $303 per guest South $37,625 · $314 per guest Mountain West $39,700 · $331 per guest National $40,475 · $337 per guest West Coast $47,750 · $398 per guest Northeast $49,400 · $412 per guest
Source: Regional price parities, the basis for the regional multipliers — U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2025
Run this120 guests · National · standard service Average cost per guest $337 What ONE more guest actually costs $172 Ten more guests +$1,720 Ten fewer guests −$1,720 Fixed block that never moves $19,850 The average and the marginal cost are different numbers, and only the second one is a decision.
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run this140 guests · National · standard service Split the way the calculator's traditional preset does: One family $33,350 venue, catering, flowers, photography, stationery The other family $3,425 music, transport You two $7,125 attire, rings, beauty, favors Total $43,900 · $314 per guest That split is a tradition, not a rule — the dropdowns let you assign every line to whoever is really paying.
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run this120 guests · National · food and drink only Buffet, no bar $52.70 a head $7,825 Buffet, beer & wine $74.70 a head $10,475 Buffet, open bar $86.70 a head $11,900 Plated, open bar $105.30 a head $14,125 Plated, premium bar $123.30 a head $16,300 Dollars only. For how many bottles that buys, the alcohol calculator does quantities.
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run this120 guests = 65 mailing households Printed suite, postage both ways $1,675 Invitation printed, everything else by text $972 The whole lot by text, one $87 plan $87 Budget with paper $40,475 Budget with text $38,887 Stationery is priced per household, never per guest — 120 people is nowhere near 120 suites.
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run this120 guests · National · standard service These load switched off. Tick the first five: Running total $40,475 + Catering service charge (20%) $2,390 + Sales tax on food and rentals (7%) $2,835 + Customary vendor tips (3.5%) $1,415 + Vendor meals $340 + One hour of vendor overtime $600 You are now $7,580 over · $48,055 None of these appear on a vendor's headline price.
Source: Text My Wedding budget model, reviewed August 2026 — Text My Wedding, 2026
Run thisAnyone can hand you a pie chart of national percentages. The useful part is that these percentages come out of your headcount and your region, and that the tool tells you which inputs move the total and by how much. Ordered biggest lever first.
Venue and catering together take about 53% of a standard budget. Photography, attire and flowers take another 24%. The last six lines share about 23% between them — which is why cutting favors never rescues a budget.
Lean versus elevated on the same 120-guest list is a $27,050 swing. How dinner is served, how the bar is stocked and how much of the room is styled outweighs every other input on this page combined.
The identical wedding is about $36,350 in the Midwest and about $49,400 in the Northeast. The regional multipliers come from BEA regional price parities, not from guesswork.
Only the variable half of the budget moves. At 120 guests roughly $19,850 is fixed whatever happens, so cutting twenty people saves about $3,440 rather than a sixth of the total.
Measured against an open bar at 120 guests: a dry reception saves about $4,075, a premium bar adds about $2,175. Bar quantity is a separate question from bar cost.
Service charge, sales tax and customary tips add roughly $6,640 to a $40,475 wedding before anything goes wrong. That is what the 8% buffer toggle is for.
This wedding calculator stops at dollars, and three more free ones pick up where it leaves off. Once the bar budget is set, the free wedding alcohol calculator turns those dollars into bottles, cases and ice for the same guest count. The free wedding timeline generator builds the day-of schedule you can text straight to the wedding party. And the wedding planning timeline sequences the whole job month by month, in the order this funnel assumes — budget first, guest count second, venue and date third. All of them run in your browser, with nothing to install and no account to create.
Last updated 2026-08-10
Yes, and there is nothing to unlock. No account, no email address, no trial. It is a free wedding budget calculator that runs entirely in your browser, so you can re-run it twenty times while you argue about the guest list. If you are comparing options, the simplest test of the best wedding budget calculator for 2026 is whether it works without an account and whether it starts from your guest count rather than from a total you have not picked yet. A simple wedding budget beats a clever one every time: an easy wedding budget you will actually re-run when the guest list moves is worth more than a twelve-tab spreadsheet you abandon in March.
Treat any wedding cost estimator — or wedding budget estimator, which is the same tool under a different name — as a bracket rather than a quote. This one models roughly ±12% around each figure, because two caterers in the same city will quote $20 a plate apart. The constants behind it are calibrated against public data — BLS wage and price series, Census caterer revenue and BEA regional price parities — and the review date is printed on this page. Once you hold real quotes, replace the estimate with them.
It computes them from your headcount rather than reading them off a table. At 120 guests, national pricing and standard service that comes out as venue and rentals about 24%, catering and bar about 30%, photography and video 10%, attire 7%, flowers and decor 8%, music 6%, rings 4%, stationery 4%, favors 3%, transport 2% and beauty 2%. Those percentages shift with your headcount — the fixed lines like photography and attire take a bigger share of a 50-guest budget and a smaller share of a 250-guest one, which is exactly why a static percentage table misleads people. A wedding budget percentage calculator has to recompute the split from your headcount to be worth anything, and that is the difference between a real budget breakdown calculator and a pie chart somebody drew once.
Between about $250 and $480 a guest nationally, depending on service level — but the average per-guest figure is not the number to plan cuts with. One more guest costs about $172 at 120 guests, because roughly $19,850 of the budget is fixed no matter who shows up.
There is nothing to download. The page works the same on a phone as on a laptop, and because it does the arithmetic locally it keeps working with bad signal at a venue tour. Everything runs right in your browser — no account, no saved budget, and your guest count and dollar figures never leave this page. We do record anonymous, coarse usage: a size range rather than your number, and which options you picked, so we know the tool is working. There is no account to lose access to later.
Four things: start from your guest count instead of a total you have not chosen, show every category in dollars and as a percentage, separate the fixed block from the per-guest block so you can see what cutting the list is really worth, and stay simple and easy enough to re-run in ten seconds. A tool that only splits a number you typed into percentages has told you nothing you did not already know.
For 120 guests, plan on about $40,475 nationally at standard service, then adjust for region: subtract about 10% in the Midwest, add about 18% on the West Coast, add about 22% in the Northeast. Hold 8% of whatever you land on back for the service charge, the sales tax and the overtime hour — that is roughly $3,240 at this size, and it is not spending money.
Yes. Switch on the contributor split and assign each line to whoever is paying it, and you get a per-contributor total plus whatever is still unfunded. It ships with the traditional split preset because people search for it, not because it is a rule — who pays for what is a conversation, and the presets are only a starting point for it.
The whole budget hangs off one figure — how many people are actually coming — and that figure is a guess until people reply. Text My Wedding sends the invitation by text, collects the RSVPs and the mailing addresses, and chases the people who have not answered, so the number underneath your budget stops being a guess.
At 120 guests you are mailing about 65 households, and a printed suite with postage both ways is roughly $1,675 of this budget. Sending the same three mailings by text — and collecting the replies — is $87, once: one price for up to 1,200 messages, which is three each to about 400 guests.
