Wedding guest list and RSVP tracking: how many will actually come?
Realistic attendance rates, the columns your list needs, how to collect RSVPs without chasing people, and when to give the venue a final number.
One number drives most of the budget: how many people. The caterer prices from it, the kitchen preps from it, the table count comes out of it. Guess wrong and it costs you — in both directions.
How many of the invited actually come
A rough figure: 75-85% of invited guests attend. But that average says nothing about your list. The real number depends on three things:
- Distance. Guests in the same city attend at well over 90%. Out-of-town guests land around 50-70%. International guests can drop below 30%.
- Closeness. Immediate family is close to universal. Work colleagues and the people invited out of politeness are the first to drop.
- The date. A weekday wedding, term time, a bank holiday weekend when half the country is away — all of them pull the number down.
Rather than multiplying the whole list by one percentage, give each guest a likelihood: definitely / probably / maybe / no. Four buckets predict far better than one blanket rate, mostly because they force you to be honest about the bottom third of the list.
The columns you'll wish you had
Spreadsheet or app, these fields all come up eventually:
- Name and phone — for invitations and the final chase.
- Side (partner A / partner B) — used for table layout and for splitting costs.
- Category — family, relatives, friends, work, neighbours. When the list has to be cut, this is the column you cut by.
- Party size — not the number of invitations. "James Carter" is one row but four people with a partner and two children.
- Likelihood — the four buckets above.
- Invitation status — handed over / posted / not yet.
- RSVP — coming / not coming / no answer.
The classic mistake is that fourth field. The list has 180 rows, so someone says "180 guests", the venue is told 180, and 310 people walk in. Rows and people are not the same thing.
Collecting RSVPs
The traditional approach is a phone number on the invitation. It works, but only in one direction: you forget to write down who called, texts get lost in a thread, and two of you tick the same person twice.
The other approach is a small QR code on the invitation. The guest scans it, types their name, says whether they're coming and for how many people, and the answer lands straight in the list. Small detail on paper, but it eliminates the thing that causes most of the pain: you and your partner keeping two separate lists that disagree.
One warning: an RSVP code has to work from day one. Invitations go out two months ahead. If the code only activates a month before the wedding, the guest who scans it on the day it arrives hits a dead page — and they will not try again.
When to commit to a number
Most venues want the final count 7-10 days out. Find that date in your contract early, because drops after it usually aren't refunded, while additions may not be accommodated at all.
A schedule that works:
- 8 weeks out: invitations delivered.
- 4 weeks out: first reminder to anyone who hasn't replied. A group message is fine.
- 2 weeks out: call the remaining non-responders individually. The list is short by then, and it's where the surprises live.
- 10 days out: give the venue a number. Count the non-responders by their likelihood bucket rather than adding all of them.
Late changes
Expect about 5% movement in the final week: illness, work, and the guest who asks whether they can bring a cousin. Planning two or three spare seats into the layout from the start beats hunting for chairs at 9pm.