Put in the number of invitations you can send, then add people one row each and group them into households. This free wedding guest list builder counts the seats and the envelopes as you go, tiers the list A, B and C, tells you when a family layer has gone out half-invited, and hands you a spreadsheet you can open in Google Sheets or Excel — or print for a parent with a pen.
An empty sheet. Add a household, name everyone on the invitation, and give each of them a circle and a tier.
This is how many people you can invite, not how many will come — turning one into the other is what the attendance-rate page does: to seat 100, invite 118 to 128.
Pick the circle a new name belongs to — it is what the consistency check reads.
0 people in 0 householdsEveryone in tiers A, B and C is counted here; 0 people are in the not-inviting pile and stays out of the file. Set a capacity to see where the line falls.
Nothing on the list yet. Add your first person, then give them a household — everyone on one invitation shares the same household label.
Everything here runs in your browser. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere — there is no account, no saved list and no cookie holding your guests (we count anonymous, bucketed usage of the tool itself, never a name, a number or a list size). That also means closing this tab loses the list, which is why the button says download.
Where the line falls
Downloads a CSV of everyone still on the list — tiers A, B and C, minus any tier you have switched off above. The not-inviting pile stays on this page.
Six steps, in the order the builder asks for them. The first one is the one everybody skips, and it is the reason a list ever fits.
The capacity field sits at the top of the builder and it is empty on purpose. Put in the number of invitations you can send — not the number of chairs. Those are different numbers, because some of your list will say no: to seat 100 people you usually invite 118 to 128, and the attendance-rate page linked below works out the multiplier for your kind of list. A list built against a number is a series of small decisions; a list built without one is one enormous argument in March.
Every human being gets their own row, including children and including a partner whose name you know. What ties them together is the Household label — "Rosa & Julio Alvarez", "The Alvarez family" — which is the invitation rather than the person. Type it identically for everyone in it. Two people in one household are two seats and one envelope, and the tool counts both for you.
Eighteen circles are already loaded: immediate family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, first cousins, second cousins, your partner's relatives, parents' friends, wedding party, close friends, childhood friends, college friends, friends' partners, people who invited you, coworkers, your boss, neighbors, children, and the estranged pile. The circle is not decoration — it is what the consistency checker runs on, and it is the difference between a cut you can explain and a cut you have to justify person by person.
A is no wedding without them. B is you want them there. C is only if there is room. Anyone you have decided against goes in the not-inviting pile, which stays visible on the page and stays out of the downloaded file. Do all of A in five minutes, spend your evening on B, and never sort C into a ranking — the whole point of C is that it comes off in one piece.
Above the count, the tool tells you which layers you have split: "you are inviting 3 of 7 first cousins", "6 of 9 on a team of 9". That is arithmetic, not advice — it cannot tell you who to invite, but it can guarantee that no layer goes out half-invited by accident. A total that fits and a layer that is split is the worse of the two problems, and it is the one nobody catches by eye.
The download button gives you a CSV of everyone in tiers A, B and C. There is no account and no saved draft, so the file is the list — close this tab without downloading and you are starting again. Take the file the moment the count is close to right; you can always come back and rebuild it, but nobody ever enjoys doing that twice.
Two rules decide whether the guest list for a wedding still works in March: one row per person, and a household label typed the same way every time.
The single most common spreadsheet mistake is a row that says "Rosa & Julio Alvarez" in one cell. It looks tidier and it costs you everything downstream: you cannot count seats, you cannot sort by surname, you cannot write place cards from it, and no system will ever split it back into two people correctly. Give every human being a row of their own and let the household label do the joining.
A guest list sorted by surname scatters the Alvarez family across three screens and puts Sam Whitfield forty rows from their own partner. Sorted by household, every invitation is one contiguous block you can read in a second, and the count beside it is the number of seats that block costs. Keep the household label identical character for character across its rows — that string is the only thing tying them together.
Whole lists at 50, 120, 150 and 200 first, then the household shapes underneath them, then the tiering pass, the two consistency-check readouts, and the file itself in every format it downloads in. Copy one as plain text, or hit Personalize to open the builder with that scenario already loaded.
CAPACITY 120 · A FINISHED LIST Tier A — 42 people · 24 invitations Tier B — 71 people · 44 invitations Tier C — 18 people · 11 invitations Not inviting — 26 people, kept on the sheet and left out of the file Invited total: 131 people in 79 households Over by 11. Take Tier C off whole and you are at 113, with room for the two households you are still arguing about. Circle check: no split layers.
CAPACITY 50 · WHO IS STILL IN AT FIFTY Immediate family — 14 people · 6 invitations Grandparents — 3 people · 2 invitations Wedding party and their partners — 10 people · 5 invitations Close friends — 16 people · 8 invitations First cousins — whole circle out Coworkers — whole circle out Invited total: 43 people in 21 households 7 spare. At this size the spare seats buy you one more circle, not seven more favors — pick the circle before anyone asks.
CAPACITY 150 · THE LIST AS IT ARRIVES Invited total: 214 people in 108 households ⚠ Over by 64 Take the coworkers layer off whole: −18 people → 196. Still over by 46. Take second cousins off whole: −12 people → 184. Over by 34. Take the rest of Tier C off whole: −38 people → 146. Under, with 4 spare. — Three whole-layer decisions and the list fits. The version of this that takes four evenings is the one where you argue about 64 individual names. Open this list in the builder above and the same three cuts are three clicks.
CAPACITY 200 · TWO BIG FAMILIES Your side — 96 people · 54 invitations Their side — 71 people · 43 invitations Friends, both of you — 38 people · 22 invitations Invited total: 205 people in 119 households Over by 5. — Both sides ran the same rule: first cousins in, second cousins out, partners named where we knew them. The totals came out 25 people apart and neither family can point at a rule that was applied to only one of them.
ONE HOUSEHOLD, TWO ROWS First Name: Rosa · Last Name: Alvarez · Household: Rosa & Julio Alvarez · Plus Ones: 0 First Name: Julio · Last Name: Alvarez · Household: Rosa & Julio Alvarez · Plus Ones: 0 — Two rows, two people in the count, one invitation. The rows are what make two place cards; the identical household label is what makes one envelope. Type the label the same way both times or they will not sort together.
A NAMED PARTNER, NOT AN ANONYMOUS SEAT Nico · Alvarez · Household: Nico Alvarez & Sam Whitfield · Plus Ones: 0 Sam · Whitfield · Household: Nico Alvarez & Sam Whitfield · Plus Ones: 0 Compare with the same guest written the other way: Nico · Alvarez · Household: Nico Alvarez · Plus Ones: 1 — Both cost two seats. Only the first version knows Sam's name, and only the first version can put Sam's name on anything. Name the partner whenever you know it; use the Plus Ones column when you genuinely do not.
A FAMILY — FOUR ROWS, ONE INVITATION Marcus · Alvarez · Household: The Alvarez family · Plus Ones: 0 Ines · Alvarez · Household: The Alvarez family · Plus Ones: 0 Elena · Alvarez · Household: The Alvarez family · Plus Ones: 0 · age 9 Tomas · Alvarez · Household: The Alvarez family · Plus Ones: 0 · age 6 — Four seats, one invitation, one decision. If the wedding is child-free, Elena and Tomas come off because a policy applied to every household came off — never as a note added to this one household.
ONE ROW, ONE PLUS ONE Camila · Reyes · Household: Camila Reyes · Plus Ones: 1 Héctor · Reyes · Household: Héctor Reyes · Plus Ones: 0 — Camila is engaged and Héctor is single, so one gets a seat for a partner and one does not. That is a standard being applied, not a judgment: married, engaged or living together, every friend on the list, no exceptions made at eleven at night. Two rows, two invitations, three seats.
TIER A — NO WEDDING WITHOUT THEM Parents and step-parents · 6 people · 4 invitations Siblings and their partners · 7 people · 4 invitations Grandparents · 3 people · 2 invitations Wedding party and their partners · 12 people · 6 invitations — 28 people, 16 invitations. Do this tier first and do it fast; it is the only tier nobody argues about. If Tier A alone is over your number, the problem is the room and no amount of cutting further down will fix it.
TIER B — YOU WANT THEM THERE First cousins, both sides · 15 people · 11 invitations Aunts and uncles, both sides · 14 people · 7 invitations Close friends · 18 people · 10 invitations College friends · 12 people · 7 invitations — 59 people, 35 invitations. This is the tier that decides whether the list fits, and the one worth spending an evening on. A is fixed; C is the first thing you will take off; B is the actual decision.
TIER C — ONLY IF THERE IS ROOM Parents' friends · 12 people · 6 invitations Neighbors · 6 people · 3 invitations Second cousins · 9 people · 6 invitations Coworkers beyond the immediate team · 8 people · 6 invitations — 35 people, 21 invitations. Give the tier its honest name while you are building it: this is the pile that comes off first, whole, in one decision. Sorting it into a ranking is how one decision becomes four evenings.
⚠ CIRCLE CHECK — FIRST COUSINS On the list: Diego Alvarez, Paloma Alvarez, Nico Alvarez Not on the list: Camila Reyes, Héctor Reyes, Lucia Reyes, Mateo Reyes You are inviting 3 of 7 in this layer. — Invite the layer or cut the layer. The checker has no opinion about your cousins; it just makes sure the four who are out are not the only people who notice the split.
⚠ CIRCLE CHECK — COWORKERS Team of nine. Six on the list, three off. You are inviting 6 of 9 in this layer. — More invited than excluded, which is the version that gets discussed on the Monday. Two clean answers exist: the whole team, or only the two you would have a drink with if you both quit tomorrow. Six of nine is not one of them.
wedding-guest-list.csv — the file exactly as it downloads First Name,Last Name,Household,Plus Ones Rosa,Alvarez,Rosa & Julio Alvarez,0 Julio,Alvarez,Rosa & Julio Alvarez,0 Camila,Reyes,Camila Reyes,1 Nico,Alvarez,Nico Alvarez & Sam Whitfield,0 Sam,Whitfield,Nico Alvarez & Sam Whitfield,0 Bea,Whitfield,Bea Whitfield,1 — Four columns and no others: no phone column, no address column, nothing that changes after the invitations go out. Tiers A, B and C are in the file; the not-inviting pile stays on this page.
PASTED INTO GOOGLE SHEETS, OR OPENED IN EXCEL A B C D 1 First Name Last Name Household Plus Ones 2 Rosa Alvarez Rosa & Julio Alvarez 0 3 Julio Alvarez Rosa & Julio Alvarez 0 4 Camila Reyes Camila Reyes 1 — Sort by column C and every household lands together, which is the order the list should live in from here on. Add whatever columns you like to the right; the four on the left are the ones anything else can read.
THE PRINT LAYOUT — grouped by household, one page ROSA & JULIO ALVAREZ ............ 2 · Tier A · Immediate family BEA WHITFIELD + guest ........... 2 · Tier B · Aunts and uncles CAMILA REYES + guest ............ 2 · Tier B · First cousins NICO ALVAREZ & SAM WHITFIELD .... 2 · Tier B · First cousins THE ALVAREZ FAMILY .............. 4 · Tier C · Parents' friends — 5 invitations, 12 seats. Print it, or save it as a PDF, and hand it to a parent with a pen in their hand. People argue with paper far more usefully than they argue with a spreadsheet.
One file, four columns, and every format anybody actually asks for. Nothing is saved on this page, so the download is the list.
Four columns, exactly: First Name, Last Name, Household, Plus Ones. It downloads as wedding-guest-list.csv and opens in Google Sheets, Excel, Numbers, Apple Contacts and every wedding platform that reads a spreadsheet. Only tiers A, B and C are in it — the people you have decided against stay on this page, so nobody in that pile can be messaged by mistake.
If you would rather not download anything, copy the list and paste it straight into a blank Google Sheet — the columns land in A to D and the header row comes with it. Freeze row 1, sort by column C, and every household sits together. This is the free wedding guest list template most people are actually looking for; the difference is that yours arrives already counted, already tiered and already checked for split layers.
Excel opens the same CSV directly. Save it as .xlsx afterwards if you want formatting and formulas, and keep the four original columns leftmost so the file still imports cleanly later. One thing worth knowing before you start typing over it: Excel will happily let you break the household grouping by editing a label in one row and not the other, and no spreadsheet will warn you.
The print layout groups the list by household with the tier and circle beside each one, and it is designed for one job: handing it to a parent with a pen. Print it, or use your browser's Save as PDF to keep a copy. If someone specifically wants a Word document, print to PDF and open that — but paper genuinely works better here, because the person you are handing it to is going to want to write on it.
No phone numbers, no addresses, no RSVP column, no meal choices, no table numbers. Every one of those changes after the invitations go out, and a column whose value changes does not belong in a file you built once in an afternoon. Names, households, plus-ones — the things that were true the day you decided — are what a guest list is for.
Facts that were true the day you decided, and nothing whose value changes after the invitations go out.
First name, last name, household, relationship circle, tier — plus a plus-ones number where a partner exists whose name you do not know yet. That is the whole schema, and every one of those five is a fact about a decision you have already made. If you can fill them in, your list is finished; if you cannot, what you have is a pile of names rather than a guest list.
Phone numbers, postal addresses, RSVP status, meal choice, gift received, table number, whether the save-the-date bounced. Every one of these is a moving value, and a spreadsheet full of moving values goes stale within a week of the invitations landing. Get the names right here, then move the file somewhere that tracks the changing half for you.
Deleting them is how the same conversation gets had four times in six weeks. Leave them in the not-inviting pile with their circle attached, so you can see at a glance that the layer is cut whole rather than half. They are on the page, they are counted nowhere, and they are not in the downloaded file — which means nobody in that pile can be sent anything by accident.
A boundary around a whole circle, a call about one named person and a policy over the entire list are three different decisions, and a spreadsheet does not know the difference. Six fields do the knowing for you: here is what each one governs, and what breaks when the decision goes in the wrong column.
The whole list · The list as a whole. A file with no number above it grows until the room says stop, and then the cutting happens in March against printed stationery instead of in October against an empty column. Every other field on this page is filled in underneath that figure.
A whole layer · Every household in the circle. A spreadsheet will happily hold six cousins in and four out, and nothing in it objects. Tagging the circle is what lets the check downstream tell you the layer went out half-invited, which is the one error nobody spots by reading their own file.
The whole list · The list as a whole. Deleting rows to get under the number destroys the evidence of what you cut, so the same names come back for a second argument a month later. A tier switched off leaves the rows in place, out of the count and out of the file.
A whole layer · Every household in the circle. Typed household by household it becomes a ranking of your friends' relationships, recorded in a file somebody else will eventually read. Pick the standard once — married, engaged or living together is the common one — and let the column apply it.
One person · One named individual. Deleted instead of parked, a decision about one person is indistinguishable from a rule about their whole layer, and you cannot tell which it was six weeks later. Parked, it stays out of the count and out of the export, and it is answered once.
An allocation · Each contributor's bucket. With no allocation written down, every name a contributor adds reads as a cut somewhere else in the file. Given a fixed count of rows, the same request becomes arithmetic they can do themselves before they send it to you.
The capacity field at the top of the builder takes a number from somewhere else: the wedding attendance rate turns the room you have booked into the number of invitations you should send — to seat 100 people, invite 118 to 128 — and that answer is exactly what this field wants. Who belongs on the list in the first place is worked through circle by circle on who to invite to your wedding, where a half-invited family layer is the subject of the extended-family page and the list that will not fit is the subject of cutting it down. Past the composition decision, everything is somebody else's page: how many partners get a seat is covered by the plus-one rules, whether children are on the list at all runs into adults-only invitation wording, a layer you cut that might come back later is timed on second-wave invitations, and once the names are final, collecting everyone's details is the next job — this builder never asks for a phone number or an address. One boundary worth naming: the wedding planning spreadsheet is a checklist of tasks and a budget, not a guest list. Keep them in two files. The rest of the free tools pick up where this one stops: the RSVP deadline calculator dates the reply-by, the alcohol calculator prices the bar for the headcount you just built, the wedding day timeline generator runs the day itself, the invitation wording generator writes what these households receive, and the hashtag generator and the vow generator handle the two things nobody can hand you a template for. All free, all in the browser.
Every one of these is a five-minute fix while you are building the list, and a genuinely miserable one after the invitations are addressed.
A file with nothing in the capacity box grows past the room it was built for, whatever that room holds, because no column in a spreadsheet ever stops you adding one more. Put a number in first even if it is a guess: a guess you revise costs one edit, and an open-ended file costs a cut made name by name, in March, with an audience.
"Rosa & Julio Alvarez" in a single cell is the mistake that quietly breaks every later step: the count, the sort, the place cards and the import. Two rows and a shared household label give you exactly the same envelope with none of the damage.
"The Alvarez family" and "Alvarez family" are two households as far as any spreadsheet is concerned, and the split will not be visible until you sort. Copy the label down rather than retyping it, and check the household count against the number of envelopes you expect to address.
Chasing contact details for people you have not decided about yet is the most reliable way to waste a weekend. Finish the composition, download the file, and collect the details for the households that survived — there are tools for that half, and this is not one of them.
A spreadsheet with six colors in it is a list nobody else can read, including you in four weeks. Three tiers, one column, written down in words: A, B, C. The point of a tier is that a whole one can come off in a single decision, and a color never quite does.
Once they are gone you cannot see whether the layer was cut whole, and the conversation about them starts again from scratch every time someone brings them up. Keep them, marked not inviting, out of the count and out of the file.
Start with a number, not a name: work out how many invitations you can send, then build up to it. Write one row per person, group people into households so a couple is two rows and one invitation, tag each household with a relationship circle — cousins, coworkers, close friends — and give every household a tier: A for no wedding without them, B for you want them there, C for only if there is room. Then check that no circle went out half-invited, and cut whole tiers or whole circles rather than individual names.
How to organize a wedding guest list, in one rule: sort it by household rather than by surname, and keep the columns down to the facts that do not change: first name, last name, household, relationship circle, tier and a plus-ones count. Everything else — phone numbers, addresses, RSVPs, meals, table numbers — changes after the invitations go out, so it belongs somewhere that can update it rather than in the file where you decided who was invited. Keep the people you are not inviting on the sheet, marked as such, so you can see whether each layer was cut whole.
Six things while you are deciding: first name, last name, the household the invitation is addressed to, the relationship circle, the tier, and how many unnamed plus-ones the household gets. Names should be spelled the way they will appear on an invitation, and household labels should be typed identically across every row of that household — that string is the only thing holding the invitation together when the file is sorted or imported.
Yes. The download is a plain CSV with four columns — First Name, Last Name, Household, Plus Ones — which opens directly in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, and you can also copy the list and paste it straight into a blank sheet without downloading anything. Sort by the Household column and every invitation sits together. Add whatever extra columns you want to the right; keeping the original four leftmost is what keeps the file readable by everything else later.
Yes — there is a print layout that groups the list by household with the tier and circle beside each one, and your browser's print dialog will save it as a PDF instead if you prefer. Paper is genuinely the better format for the one job this list has left, which is handing it to a parent to check. If someone needs a Word document, save the PDF and open it there.
No, deliberately — and this is the only answer to all four. This page decides who is on the list and hands you the file: it counts seats against your capacity, flags a half-invited layer, tiers the list and exports it. What it does not do is live with the list afterwards, which is what guest list manager software is for — no accounts, no RSVP tracking, no per-guest history, no seating. That half genuinely needs somewhere the data can change, and Text My Wedding is where your list goes once the names are settled. Two tools, one file between them, and the boundary drawn where the columns stop being facts and start being updates.
Everything here runs in your browser. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere — there is no account, no saved list and no cookie holding your guests (we count anonymous, bucketed usage of the tool itself, never a name, a number or a list size). That also means closing this tab loses the list, which is why the button says download. Your guest list is the most sensitive thing on your planning list — it is other people's names, including the ones who will not be invited — and none of it is ours to keep.
Download the file, then import it into Text My Wedding — the same names carry the invitation, the RSVP and every reminder, and nobody retypes eighty households into a second tool.
