≡ Menu

How to Price Your Wedding Services

in Business of Weddings
Bride carries beautiful ivory and pale peach rose bouquet after the wedding ceremony.

Setting up a pricing structure for your services is often difficult for self-employed professionals. At first, you might be tempted to charge right around whatever the going rate is for similar services in your area. But if you do that without regard to your actual costs of doing business, you may be doing yourself a great disservice.

In order to determine your rates and ensure that you will actually make a profit at the end of the job, it is imperative that you know what your overhead costs are. In the early months of establishing your business, you’ll likely have a lot of overhead costs as you get set up.

For the purposes of this exercise, however, you’ll want to create a list of your monthly recurring costs of doing business (web hosting, business cell phone, etc.) and then amortize one month’s worth of expenses over one year by multiplying that figure times twelve. In addition to this yearly total, you’ll want to estimate how many promo packets you’ll send out in a year (don’t forget shipping costs), any advertising costs and any other anticipated business expenses over the course of a year. Add this estimate to your initial overhead estimate.

Next, you need to figure out how much you’ll incur in expenses on one actual job – this includes the cost of any supplies you’ll need for the gig, other employees or contractors you’ll need to pay, the cost of travel to and from the wedding including meals, and any other post-wedding costs (wedding albums sent to the client, etc.)

Finally, attempt to realistically estimate the number of weddings you’ll book in one year. This will be difficult to do if you are just starting out, so choose a number that you feel you can conservatively reach once things start rolling and your business has gotten off the ground. For example, if the wedding season in your area is May through October and you realistically see yourself being able to book one wedding per weekend throughout the season, this means that you may do 25 weddings in one year.

And now for the moment of truth.

Take the sum of your annual overhead costs (recurring costs, advertising, etc.) and divide that number by 25. The resulting figure represents your break-even cost, assuming you don’t have any further job-related costs – additional supplies, contractor fees, etc. If you do have additional costs, add your per-job estimated cost for these additional expenses to the break-even total above.

a real-world example

John Smith is a classical guitarist and expects to book 20 wedding ceremonies in the upcoming year. He doesn’t have a lot of overhead costs, but here are his annual business expenses:

Advertising $500
Cell Phone $760
Guitar Supplies (strings, etc.) $120
Instrument Insurance $140
Office Supplies $50
Promo Materials & Shipping $250
Website Hosting/Maintenance $180

Total: $2,000

John mainly works as a solo musician so he doesn’t have other contractors to pay, and he charges his clients for travel and parking costs in addition to his standard fees, so there is no need to factor those additional costs in here.

Now that John knows that his break even cost to doing a year’s worth of weddings is $2,000, he divides that number by the anticipated number of weddings he’ll book—20 by his estimate—and comes up with a break-even cost of $100 per wedding. In other words, John must charge at least $100 per wedding for his services, otherwise he’ll be losing money rather than making money.

Now John can price his performance services appropriately, knowing his breakeven cost of doing business. Be sure you know what this number is, and don’t be apologetic to clients wondering why you charge what you do. There is a cost of doing business no matter what the business is—price your service or product fairly and don’t shortchange yourself! If you do, you’ll likely burn out trying to work enough low-paying gigs just to pay the bills.