The 2026 Wedding Vendor Price Transparency Report

1. Most wedding vendors do not publish a price

of 5,618 readable wedding-vendor websites, across 107 US cities, publish any price at all -- a starting price, a minimum, a package, a fee or a per-person figure. 538 more sites could not be read.

Category	Sites read	Publish a price	Share
Photographers	792	336	42%
Videographers	464	135	29%
Florists	615	138	22%
Catering	600	133	22%
Venues	1,034	228	22%
Cake	353	71	20%
Djs and bands	461	88	19%
Hair and makeup	442	75	17%
Transport	259	41	16%
Hotels	598	44	7%

2. Half of what is published is not a wedding price

Of 923 per-person figures found on those sites, only 154 sit in a sentence about a wedding. The rest are corporate lunches, continental breakfasts, drop-off catering and admission prices -- stored correctly, and useless for a couple. Once each vendor is counted once, 90 vendors nationally publish a per-person wedding price. That is why this report publishes no per-person figure: below a floor of 15 it would be a number about nothing.

3. No city in America publishes enough to price a wedding

Of 109 cities crawled, 0 have 8 or more venues publishing a wedding-page figure; the best city has 6. A local "average venue cost" page is, on this evidence, not a measurement.

4. Where a national floor can be stated

"Starting at" is a floor, not a price. Across categories with at least 15 wedding-page figures, one per vendor:

Category	n	Lower quartile	Median	Upper quartile
Photographers	253	$850	$2,400	$4,000
Videographers	99	$1,360	$2,400	$3,500
Florists	68	$285	$1,925	$4,500
Djs and bands	59	$750	$1,400	$2,000
Venues	52	$700	$3,700	$6,000
Hair and makeup	32	$165	$400	$650
Cake	16	$210	$375	$500

5. What vendors say when a couple actually asks

Two things vendors will put in an email and almost never on a website: the service charge and the deposit. Both below are from replies to real couples, one figure per vendor, published only at n ≥ 15. (Reply counts and rates are not published yet; they will be once the sample is larger.)

Of 55 vendors who quoted a service charge, the median was 20%; 64% said 20% or less and 29% were above 22%. The service charge is the line most often missing from a 'per person' figure, and on a $20,000 reception it is a few thousand dollars.

Of 29 vendors who named a deposit, 66% asked for half down and 24% for a quarter or less.

Method

Websites: the homepage and up to a few same-site pages whose link says pricing, packages, weddings, menus or rates, read once, GET only, one host at a time; a figure is kept with the sentence it sat in and the page it came from. A figure counts as a wedding figure only when its own sentence mentions a wedding, reception, ceremony or bride. Bands are one figure per vendor and are published only at n ≥ 15. Asks: every vendor emailed for a real couple since the product went live, counted once; a reply is any message back from that vendor; a full price is a stated all-in for the couple's date and count. Aggregates only. This page updates as the counts do, and says when it was counted.