What does a wedding venue cost in your area?
Venue costs move more by market than by taste. See what published sources hold for your market, and get a plain answer where they hold nothing.
Pick a vendor type and a market. Where a published source covers it, you get the spread with the source named, the year it was published, and how it was gathered, and your quote placed inside it. Where none does, you are told so plainly. No verdict, no scolding, just the position.
No national venue spread is on record
Specimen record · Venue · National
Siftwick holds no national spread from The Knot or Zola for this vendor type, so nothing is drawn here and nothing is estimated in its place.
Where they disagree, the gap is the finding
Both publishers that carry a usable statistic run their own vendor marketplaces, and they do not report the same measure. Where they diverge for a vendor type, Siftwick shows both bands and names the gap rather than averaging them into a number neither publisher published.
The number is not the whole of it
These are the lines a venue quote is built from, sorted by whether each one sits inside the number you are shown or arrives after it.
No survey prices these lines
| Line item | Published cost |
|---|---|
| Inside the number you are shown | |
| Site hire | No sourced figure |
| Food and drink minimum | No sourced figure |
| Tables, chairs and linen | No sourced figure |
| Arrives after the number you were quoted | |
| Service charge | No sourced figure |
| Corkage | No sourced figure |
| Cake-cutting | No sourced figure |
| Breakdown and overtime | No sourced figure |
| Delivery and access | No sourced figure |
What an account opens
Every dash above is a figure nobody has published: the cost surveys price a vendor, not the lines inside its quote. A free account opens the full breakdown — what each package tier includes and which lines move when you ask — and it opens no figure, because there is none to open.
Create a free accountEvery figure carries its source
Figures come from published surveys by vendor type, never by individual venue, and nothing is estimated where no survey covers your market.
- Named source
- No source name, no figure. There is no third option.
- Publication year
- Shown beside the figure, with the collection year wherever the publisher gives one.
- Sample basis
- Who was asked and how, with the sample size wherever the publisher gives one, so you can weigh it.
Who pays for this
You are the customer here
Almost every page that answers the cost question is vendor marketing paid for by vendors. That does not make the figures wrong. It means nobody publishing them is sitting on your side of the table.
- A national average alone cannot tell you whether your market runs expensive or cheap
- Service charge, corkage, and breakdown fees rarely appear in the headline venue price
- You are asked to commit to the largest line in the budget with the least information
Siftwick takes no money from vendors. No listings, no referral fees, no placement money, no lead-gen. Nobody can pay to move a range, sit beside one, or keep one off the page.
Which leaves exactly one side of the table Siftwick can answer to, and it is yours. Today that asks an email address of you and nothing else.
Look it up before the next call.
Venues get booked a year out, so the pricing question comes first.