Investment: how much does a wedding planner actually cost?
A luxury wedding planner is more than just an event coordinator. We are designers and creatives who have experience creating weddings that are impactful, unique and utterly beautiful. Of course, we are also incredibly organised and can get you access to the best suppliers for your wedding. Come the week of the wedding, we are sorting all of the logistics, making sure all the suppliers know where to be and when and ensuring your day runs smoothly. So how much do we cost?
If you see a wedding planner offering full-planning services at a fixed price of £4000 or less, I’m sorry, but you need to look the other way. It takes, on average, 250 hours to plan a wedding, marquee weddings even more, luxury weddings designed by planners MUCH more. You are paying for our time, expertise, contacts and creativity. And that deserves to have a fee that reflects that. Let’s use a wedding that has been planned in 250 hours as an example. A planner charging £3000 for full-planning is making £12 an hour on that wedding; that is only JUST above minimum wage. It is also not possible to full-plan more than 8 weddings a year if you are one person or a very small team. That means an annual salary of £24,000 - before costs and taxes have been accounted for. And remember, that was just a 250 hour wedding!
Most credible and industry-famous planners will charge you a percentage of your overall wedding budget, ranging from 10-15%, with a minimum fee. This is because your budget reflects the amount of work that will be needed. A £30,000 wedding probably doesn’t need a wedding planner, but when you enter the luxury market where budgets are upwards of £80,000, a wedding planner starts to seem a little more necessary. A £250,000 wedding will require a lot more planning, because your guest count is likely to be higher, we will be working with suppliers that are industry-leading, there will be more entertainment, more food and drink, more on-the-day management etc. By charging a percentage of your overall budget, we can be sure to allocate all the time needed to design and create your wedding and the value of what we do is appropriately renumerated.
To conclude, we love what we do. We want to work with you and other leading suppliers in the industry. But it’s always a good idea to have an idea of just how much wedding planners cost so that you can make an informed decision about whether your wedding will benefit from one.
(P.s. EVERY wedding, no matter now big or small, needs an on-the-day coordinator. So if your budget doesn’t stretch to a full-planning service, consider our on-the-day coordination service, which usually starts about 6 weeks before your big day!)
