How many will actually come — or how many to invite to fill the room. Because “expect 20% to decline” is useless if half your family is flying in.
Nothing is uploaded. Everything is worked out in your browser.
The advice you’ll find everywhere is “expect 10–20% to decline.” That figure is only true for the guest list it was measured on — a mostly local one. Travel is what actually drives the number. Somebody who can drive twenty minutes will almost always come. Somebody weighing flights, a hotel and two days off work will not.
So a 150-person list that’s nearly all local and a 150-person list scattered across three states produce very different rooms, and planning both with the same percentage is how couples end up either paying for empty chairs or scrambling for tables.
The rates this calculator starts from are the planning rules of thumb used across the wedding industry, not a survey we ran: roughly 85% of local guests accept, 55–65% of out-of-town guests, and 40–50% for a destination wedding. Friday, Sunday and weekday dates shade every figure down. Treat the range as the honest answer and the midpoint as a working number — your own family’s habits beat any average.
Turn it into an actual list. The free guest list template tracks RSVPs against the estimate as replies land, and totals meal choices for your caterer automatically. Once you know your headcount, what a wedding costs at that guest count becomes a real number rather than a guess, and the budget planner will split it across categories.
For a local Saturday wedding, usually around 80–85% of everyone invited. Add travel and it falls fast. For a destination wedding, many couples see under half.
Roughly your seat count divided by your expected acceptance rate — about 141 invitations if you expect 85% to come. The calculator does this and shows the range.
You can, but it has to go out early enough not to read as an afterthought — in practice as the first declines arrive, around six weeks out. Many couples find it calmer to invite slightly over capacity from the start.
No. There’s no account, no email box and no upload. Close the tab and it’s gone.