Cash gifts and no cake: how Australian couples spend and save on weddings | Weddings

On Friday 31 October, Sydney couple Liana and Tim will costume their nephews up in skeleton and dinosaur costumes to get married on the New South Wales registry. Liana will put on a black costume and veil and Tim has purchased some Dracula fangs.The couple may have lunch with 20 shut relations and mates earlier than the group heads to the Pyrmont Births, Deaths and Marriages workplace. The following day, they’re having a 110-person celebration at a venue close to their house in Sydney’s north.“It’s in all probability the marriage we’d have performed if we didn’t have dad or mum assist,” Tim says of the lunch and registry ceremony. “We’ve been fairly fortunate as a result of our dad and mom have chipped in a good bit. It wasn’t anticipated, however it was very welcome.”Extra persons are selecting registry weddings in Australia, with registry workplaces providing themed companies like Liana and Tim’s Halloween vows to satisfy rising demand.The worth of an entire registry marriage ceremony in NSW may be as little as $480. It is a small fraction of the $35,315 trade listing service Simple Weddings estimates to be the common value of an Australian marriage ceremony in 2025, up 4.5% from 2024.Some {couples}, resembling Liana and Tim, who didn’t need their surnames revealed, are having a second reception or greater celebration after their registry service, whereas others are letting a authorities workplace deal with all the things.Liana and Tim opted for a registry marriage ceremony to scale back prices and additional admin. {Photograph}: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The GuardianBetween 2021 and 2024 there was an 87% enhance within the variety of weddings organized by the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.Among the increase may be attributed to the low variety of weddings total in 2021 because of the pandemic. Nonetheless, the registry says it’s nonetheless experiencing rising reputation, pointing to a 32% enhance from 2,500 weddings carried out in 2023, to three,306 ceremonies in 2024.In Victoria, the federal government is the most important supplier of marriage ceremony ceremonies within the state. Its busiest yr was 2023, with 4,566 {couples} married, adopted by 2024 when 3,634 selected a authorities service on the Previous Treasury Constructing in Melbourne. In Queensland, the place the justice division says its $397.20 weekday weddings are particularly in style, 2,243 {couples} have been married at its registry final yr.Organising a non-public service is far more costly. Simple Weddings’ common supervisor, Darcy Allen, says its 2025 survey – meant to tell the trade – discovered two-thirds of the 4,200 {couples} who stuffed out their survey obtained monetary help from household and mates. The survey discovered 90% of {couples} most popular money in lieu of marriage ceremony items. “It’s fairly an integral a part of marriage ceremony planning now,” Allen says.The {couples} surveyed by Simple Weddings had all the things from “micro” weddings with solely a handful of friends proper as much as 500-person celebrations. Simple Weddings additionally surveyed 800 distributors and located venue rent to be the most important expense, at $15,987 on common in 2025. This was adopted by catering at a median value of $6,308, images at $3,389 and videography at $2,977.Allan says many {couples} are choosing fewer friends, or forgoing “conventional components” to chop prices.The typical value of a marriage cake in Simple Weddings’ 2025 survey was $650. “I’m seeing a variety of {couples} go for no dessert usually,” Allen says. People who do spring for dessert are “straying away from a conventional cake”, she says. “We’re seeing a variety of tiramisu towers come by on the minute.”skip previous publication promotionSign as much as Saved for LaterCatch up on the enjoyable stuff with Guardian Australia’s tradition and way of life rundown of popular culture, developments and tipsPrivacy Discover: Newsletters could include details about charities, on-line adverts, and content material funded by outdoors events. If you happen to wouldn’t have an account, we’ll create a visitor account for you on theguardian.com to ship you this article. You may full full registration at any time. For extra details about how we use your knowledge see our Privateness Coverage. We use Google reCaptcha to guard our web site and the Google Privateness Coverage and Phrases of Service apply.after publication promotionLiana and Tim say they all the time had a registry marriage ceremony in thoughts for his or her authorized ceremony, partly due to the fee. “We’re not very conventional so we wished to maintain the following day a bit lighter and never have the admin aspect of issues,” Liana says. “We … need it to be simply all of the enjoyable bits of the marriage.”‘We wish it to be simply all of the enjoyable bits of the marriage,’ says Liana. {Photograph}: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The GuardianThe couple budgeted $50,000 for his or her marriage ceremony and are on monitor to spend $47,000 throughout two days of celebration. The registry ceremony occurred to fall on Halloween, so that they’ve determined to embrace the “spooky” theme. The ceremony and lunch will value about $3,000. “The remaining is the following day,” Liana says. “And half of that or extra is the venue and meals and drinks.”Liana says they’ve been “fairly strict” to maintain inside their price range.One other Sydney bride, Lara, says her 70-guest marriage ceremony in August of this yr value about $67,000. Like 28.6% of {couples} surveyed by Simple Weddings, Lara and her husband exceeded their price range, however she says they don’t have any regrets.Lara says they’ve all the time lived inside their means and had an concept of their heads of how a lot they may spend, factoring in a “small contribution” from their households. They selected to get married in winter to economize on distributors – the Simple Weddings survey discovered spring is the preferred time of yr to alternate vows, which drives up prices – and spent extra on a band as an alternative.“We don’t personal a home but, so I feel there’ll all the time be just a little little bit of us that might be like, ‘Oh that cash might have gone right into a deposit,’” Lara says. “That’s our greatest … query, however outdoors of that, when it comes to our day, we wouldn’t have performed something in a different way. It was good.”