A quarter to a third of the seats, per set of parents — and once you know how many people the room holds, that is an exact number rather than an argument. At 120 seats the rule of thirds gives 40 to you, 40 to your parents and 40 to theirs. The 50-25-25 split gives you 60 and each family 30. The third rule in circulation caps your parents' friends — their friends, not their relatives — at 10% of the list, which is 12 of those 120 seats. Pick one, tell both families their number on the same day in the same words, and every request after that becomes their arithmetic instead of your refusal. Below are 14 worked splits and the scripts that go with them, plus a builder that locks each bucket so an over-filled one turns red rather than quietly eating your own seats.
Work down these in order and stop at the first one that fits your situation. Each answer is a rule you can name out loud, which matters more than the rule you pick — an unnamed split is renegotiated every two weeks.
Take half, and give each family a quarter. The 50-25-25 split. Your list is usually the biggest of the three and it should be, but a quarter of the room each is still a real allocation rather than a gesture — 30 seats at 120. In the builder this is the "Half to you" rule.
Weight it 40-40-20, and say so before anyone writes a name. Funding is allowed to move seats, but only if the weighting is announced up front rather than discovered later. Put the hosting family in the "your parents" row of the builder; at 150 seats they get 60, you get 60 and the other family gets 30. Twenty percent is still thirty people — say the number, not the percentage, when you tell them.
Rule of thirds — 40 seats each at 120. The default, and the easiest sentence to repeat: a third to you, a third to each side. It is also the fairest-sounding rule when neither family is hosting outright, which makes it the one least likely to be reopened.
Give both the same flat number and keep the remainder. A percentage split hands the smaller family seats it does not want and starves the larger one anyway. A flat number each — 20, 25, 30 — is the cleanest rule when family sizes are wildly different, because neither family is being measured against the other. The couple absorbs whatever is left.
Give them the number and hand the list back. Do not edit their list. Editing it makes every cut yours, and every cut you make is a name you will be asked about. Tell them the number, return the list, and ask for a version that fits it. That is the single highest-leverage sentence on this page.
All four rules take one input: the number of seats you are working with. If you know how many people the room holds but not how many invitations that means, the wedding attendance rate page turns one into the other, and its answer is exactly the capacity number this page's builder takes.
Three contributors — you two, your parents, their parents — and one number to divide between them. Each block below is what the builder prints for that capacity and that rule, remainders included. Copy the one you have chosen and send it to both families the same afternoon.
RULE OF THIRDS — 120 seats You two · 40 seats Your parents · 40 seats Their parents · 40 seats — A third each, and any seat left over by the rounding stays in your bucket on purpose: a family handed 41 and later told it is 40 is a conversation nobody wants twice. This is the rule to pick when both families are contributing and neither is hosting outright.
50-25-25 — 120 seats You two · 60 seats Your parents · 30 seats Their parents · 30 seats — Half the room to the couple, a quarter to each family. Use it when the list is mostly your own friends and colleagues, or when you are paying for the day yourselves. Thirty seats is roughly fifteen households: enough for a family's inner circle, not enough for their address book.
THE 10% CAP — parents' FRIENDS only, 120 seats Your parents' friends · 12 seats maximum (10% of 120) Their parents' friends · 12 seats maximum Aunts, uncles and cousins · counted in the family bucket, NOT against this cap Tagged "Parents' friends" today: Peggy & Ed Nolan · 2 seats · in · Barbara Kent + guest · 2 seats · not inviting — 2 of the 12 spent. This is a sanity check sitting on top of the bucket split, not a replacement for it, and it only governs friends: relatives are a family layer and get decided as one.
ONE FAMILY IS HOSTING — 150 seats, weighted 40-40-20 You two · 60 seats The hosting family · 60 seats The other family · 30 seats — In the builder, whichever family is hosting goes in the "your parents" row. This is the only rule here that lets funding move seats, and it works only if it is announced before a single name is written down. When you tell the 20% family, say "thirty seats", never "twenty percent".
A FLAT NUMBER EACH — 200 seats, 20 per family You two · 160 seats Your parents · 20 seats Their parents · 20 seats — The cleanest rule when one side has forty relatives and the other has six: both families get the same number, and neither is measured against the other. Raise or lower the per-family number in the builder and your own bucket absorbs the whole difference, which is exactly who should absorb it.
Yours in a note, your parents' on the back of an envelope, theirs in a text message. Build all three here as one list with a circle against every name, download the file once, and the version everyone argues from is the same version.
Two families almost never come out the same size, and they do not have to. What has to match is the rule and the day you announce it. These four blocks are the awkward cases, written the way the builder holds them.
THE SIDES WILL NOT MATCH — one rule, two results Rule: thirds · Capacity: 120 Your parents · 40 seats · came back with 38 Their parents · 40 seats · came back with 14 Unspent · 26 seats — Neither family was short-changed: both got the same number under the same rule. The 26 unspent seats go back to the room, not automatically to the larger family. If you do reallocate them, do it once, out loud, and tell both sides — a quiet reallocation is how a fair split turns into a grudge.
AN OVER-FILLED BUCKET, FLAGGED Capacity · 120 · rule of thirds You two · 40 · list: 39 ✓ Your parents · 40 · list: 47 ⚠ over by 7 Their parents · 40 · list: 31 ✓ ⚠ Seven people over. They do not come out of your 40. They come off the list that went over, or the capacity changes for everybody. — This is the whole reason to write buckets down. An unlocked allocation is one where somebody else's overflow silently becomes your cut, and you find out in April when there is nothing left to cut.
FOUR SETS OF PARENTS — divide a bucket, never add one Capacity · 120 · rule of thirds You two · 40 Your side · 40 → your mother 20, your father 20 Their side · 40 → unchanged — Remarriage splits an existing bucket. Adding a fourth 40-seat bucket does not make 160 seats appear in the room, and the person who pays for the arithmetic is whoever gets cut last. Halve the bucket, tell both halves the same day, and let each of them fill their own twenty.
A TRADED SEAT, RECORDED Your parents · 40 → 44 (asked for four more, for the neighbors) You two · 40 → 36 (agreed once, in exchange) Their parents · 40 (unchanged — and told the same day) — Trades are fine. Untracked trades are not: without a row like this one, four seats are remembered by your parents as "they said yes" and by you as "we gave up four", and there is no way to settle that in March. Write the new numbers down and re-send all three.
Every script here does the same three things: it names the number, it hands the choosing back, and it offers no negotiation on the total. Say each one to the people it concerns, on the day both families are told, and do not relitigate it in a group chat.
"The venue seats 120, so we're splitting it in thirds — 40 for us, 40 for you, 40 for Ruth and Alan. I'm telling them exactly this today. Your 40 is yours: we're not going to second-guess who's on it or ask you to justify anyone. The only thing we can't do is go over 120."
"That's four more names since we agreed the number, which puts you at 47 against 40. I'm not going to pick which seven come off — that's yours to decide, and I'd get it wrong. Send me the 40 by Sunday and I'll put them straight on the list as they are."
"I've never met the Nolans, and honestly that's fine — they're inside your 40 and you should spend it on the people who matter to you. What I'd ask is that you seat them together and introduce us during the drinks, so nobody spends the evening at a table of strangers."
"Here's how we're deciding it. The total is ours, because the room has a limit and it's our wedding. Who fills your 40 is completely yours. If you want more than 40, that's a conversation about how big the wedding is — not about any individual name — and it's one we can have once, this week, before invitations exist."
"You came back with 14 out of 40 and I don't want you thinking you've been short-changed — Elena and Marco got exactly the same 40 you did. If you left anyone off because you were being careful with us, add them now rather than after the invitations are printed. There is room, and this is the moment it's easy."
Most guest list rules govern a person or a whole layer of the family tree. The rules on this page govern neither: they govern a bucket of seats belonging to a contributor. Applying an allocation rule to a person, or a person rule to a bucket, is where these arguments actually come from.
An allocation · Each contributor's bucket. Left unstated, every name your parents add looks like a cut somewhere else on your list — and it usually is one.
An allocation · Each contributor's bucket. Read as a whole-list rule it starts cutting aunts and uncles, who were never what the cap was about.
An allocation · Each contributor's bucket. Applied silently it is not a rule, it is a grievance — the other family finds out by counting the tables.
The whole list · The list as a whole. Enforced name by name it becomes weeks of trading; enforced as a total, it is one decision that holds all three buckets up.
A whole layer · Every household in the circle. Half a layer is visible to everyone in it, whichever bucket paid for the seats.
One person · One named individual. Dressed up as an allocation rule it removes seats from a bucket that had nothing to do with the decision, and everybody knows which decision it really was.
This page splits seats and only seats. Who pays for what is a genuinely separate conversation, and running the two together is how a seat allocation turns into an argument about money — settle the room first, in people. To turn the number you can seat into the number of invitations you can send, use the wedding attendance rate — its answer is exactly the capacity number this builder takes. Whether a guest in anyone's bucket brings a partner is covered by the plus-one rules, whether children count against a bucket at all belongs with adults-only invitation wording, and if unspent seats might be offered out later, the timing lives on second-wave invitations. Once all three buckets are full, collecting everyone's contact details is the next job — this builder never asks for one.
Each of these takes one sentence to agree in advance and about six weeks to fix afterwards. None of them is about who is invited; all of them are about how the number behaves.
Not the same week — the same day. A family that hears its number second assumes it was decided after the other one, and there is no way to prove otherwise.
Say it explicitly, because "you have 40" is heard as "find 40". A family that would happily have invited twelve people should not feel obliged to find twenty-eight more.
The 10% cap governs friends. Aunts, uncles and cousins are a family layer and get decided whole, the way every other layer on the list does. Tag them separately or the cap will start cutting the wrong people.
A weighted split is a decision you two make and announce, not a right a contribution creates. Who pays for what is a separate conversation and it does not belong on the same page as this one — settle the seats first, in seats.
When a rule does not divide evenly, the spare seats sit in the couple's bucket. It is the only bucket that can absorb a change without anyone feeling demoted, which is why the builder puts them there.
None of these are catastrophes and every one of them is survivable. They are worth avoiding because each costs a conversation, and the conversations are the expensive part.
Once a specific person has been said out loud, removing them is personal. Every rule on this page works in advance and none of them works retroactively — the number has to arrive before the first name does.
The moment you cross a name off, that cut is yours and you will be asked to defend it. Hand the list back with the number attached and let them do the arithmetic; they will cut harder than you would have.
Seven extra guests on one side means seven of your own people quietly come off, and nobody involved ever finds out that a trade happened. Flag it the day it happens, out loud, to both families.
Trimming a large family to match a small one cuts real relatives to satisfy a symmetry no guest will ever notice. Match the rule and let the totals land unevenly — that is what a fair split looks like from inside.
Every change made privately with one side has to be announced to the other or it becomes a secret. Re-send all three numbers whenever any one of them moves, even if two of them did not.
This opens on 120 seats with the rule of thirds selected, so all three buckets read 40. Tap another rule and the same 120 becomes 60-30-30, or 48-48-24 when it is weighted towards whoever is hosting. Change the capacity to your own room, tag each name with the circle it belongs to, then download the file. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere — there is no autosave, so download it before you close the tab.
The same list with an allocation on top: your seats, their seats, and what each set of parents actually gets.
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.
4 circles are on this list. A circle is what the consistency check reads.
14 people in 7 householdsThat leaves 106 seats spare against the 120 you set — room for a whole circle, not for a handful of individuals.
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.
Between a quarter and a third of your total, per set of parents. At 120 seats the rule of thirds gives each family 40 and leaves you 40; the 50-25-25 split gives each family 30 and leaves you 60. Pick whichever fits how the wedding is being paid for and how much of the list is your own, then give both families the same number on the same day.
It splits the room three ways: a third of the seats to the couple, a third to one set of parents, a third to the other. At 120 seats that is 40 each. It is the easiest rule to say out loud and the hardest to argue with, which is why it is the default — and when the number does not divide evenly, the spare seats stay with the couple.
Only if you decide they do and say so in advance. A weighted split — 40% to you, 40% to the family hosting, 20% to the other — is a legitimate rule, but it has to be announced before anyone writes a name down, and the smaller share should be quoted as a number of people rather than a percentage. Contributing money does not automatically convert into seats, and a family that assumes it does has usually never been told the total.
Give them the number, hand the list back, and refuse to do the cutting. "That puts you at 47 against 40 — I'm not going to pick which seven come off, send me the 40 by Sunday" ends the conversation without a single name being discussed. Editing their list yourself makes every cut yours to defend, and they will always cut harder than you would have.
Completely normal, and usually fine. Those guests belong inside your parents' allocation rather than on top of it, which means they cost your parents seats instead of costing you seats. If you want a limit on top of the split, the common one is no more than 10% of the whole list for parents' friends — 12 people at 120 — and it applies to friends, not to aunts, uncles and cousins.
Let it be uneven. Both families get the same number under the same rule; what they do with it is theirs, and a family that comes back with 14 out of 40 has not been cheated by a family that comes back with 38. Do not move the unspent seats to the larger family without telling both sides, and if the family sizes are extremely different, give both a flat number instead of a percentage.
You two own the total, because the room has a limit and it is your wedding. Each set of parents owns who fills their own bucket. That division survives almost every disagreement, because the arguments that feel like they are about a person are nearly always about a number nobody has said out loud yet.
Build the list here, download it, and import the file into Text My Wedding — the same names then carry the invitation, the RSVP and every reminder, without anybody retyping them.
