How to organise your wedding guest list the right way

Organising your wedding guest list will not be a walk in the park. Unless your wedding is going to be incredibly small and intimate, you’ll need to navigate lots of moving parts, etiquette rules and egos as you plan. If that’s the case, make sure to use these tips on how to organise your wedding guest list with minimal stress:

Divide the guest list up fairly. Dividing up your guest list with your parents and in-laws can be messy, and they’ll likely expect a good amount of invites if they donated money for your wedding. It’s important that you try to keep things relatively equal to prevent any potential drama from taking place.

You might think about giving everyone a quarter of the list each - that’s a quarter for you, your partner, parents, and in-laws. Whatever you do, try and split the list as evenly as possible. If that’s too challenging because of uneven family sizes, offer a proportionate number of extra invites to the larger family.

Oh, and on a side note: don’t accept money from your families until you’ve settled on guest list sizes for both sides. That way, you’ll be free of any obligations while you negotiate.

Accommodate for regrets. Invitation declines “with regrets” are bound to happen for multiple reasons, and on average about 15-25% of your wedding guests will respond “no” to attending. For out-of-town or destination weddings, you’ll see an even higher rate of regrets at 45-65%.

Generally, you should be able to work on a backup guestlist that tallies up to about 10-15% of your total guest list. They’re called your B-list guests, and they give you the option to invite them only after you receive the first wave of declines.

Honestly though, we know the idea of A and B-lists can sound a little harsh. It can feel awkward to “rank” the people in your life, but it’s a super practical approach to take if you want to have the best attendance rate without blowing your budget, paying for no-shows or having to switch venues. Plus, your B-list should still consist of people you actually want there.

Start big, then trim. When you first start planning your guest list, write down everyone you could possibly think of imagining. Go through your phone contacts and social media networks if you need to, and don’t second guess too much as you put them down.

Doing this will help form your A and B-list as you go, but it’ll also make sure you don’t end up leaving anyone out. Realising you forgot to invite someone at the eleventh hour is definitely not a conversation you’ll want to have with them!

Set trimming rules. Set some rules to trim your guest list, otherwise you may find yourself debating endlessly over who to cut or making concessions for everyone! Some common guest list trimming rules include:

No children (bear in mind, this can lead to a few declines). No plus-ones you haven’t met or barely know. No plus-ones, period. No exes (pretty self-explanatory). No distant relatives or family friends (unless your parents are prepared to pay for them).

Want more details? Here are 6 types of people you can cross off your wedding guest list right now.

Be firm about add-ons and avoid verbal invites. If you don’t put your foot down with the add-on invitations, things will get out of hand pretty quickly. Your parents and in-laws will want to tack on countless friends/relatives to the list. Coworkers will overhear your wedding talk and hint about being involved. Some people will straight up demand “Where’s my invitation??” like the humble folk they are.

In these moments, it’s almost always easier to blurt out “Sure you’re invited!” to avoid conflict, but do this and you’ll need to pay extra for their attendance. Worse still, you may even have to “disinvite” them later on, which is a much more awkward conversation to have than just saying no to begin with.

Keep your add-ons at bay by preparing a polite but firm response about your invite policy. Avoid discussing the specifics of your wedding early on and when it comes to parents, let them know that if they want to invite extra guests they’ll need to pay for them.

Use an all-in-one tool for listing names, status and more. You’ve already got guests on the mind - why not start popping everything down into a system? Beyond just naming names, you want to make sure that spelling is accurate for invitations and also be grabbing their details like address, email and dietary requirements.

It’s best to use a tool specifically built for managing wedding RSVPs like Say I Do. You can group parties into singles, couples or families, add and delete from the list in real time, sent them online invites and then track their responses. You can then use the list to create seating plans within the platform.

Another benefit is that if guests decline, you don’t need to remove them from the system. Say I Do automatically marks them as “Not Attending” and puts them in a separate list you can view.