What is a realistic wedding budget for an average couple in SG?

Question

Getting married next year. Everyone throws around scary numbers. We are not rich, want something nice but sane. What did you all actually spend and where did the money go? Trying to set a real budget.

Techie Jun Hao · Accepted Answer

Did ours recently, so real numbers-ish. The big buckets: banquet (usually the biggest, hotel vs restaurant vs void deck changes everything), gown/suit rental + photography, actual-day photo/video, makeup, rings, and misc (invites, favours). A hotel banquet drives most of the cost because it's per-table and you're feeding a big guest list. How we kept it sane: 1) trimmed the guest list ruthlessly, every table is real money, 2) did a restaurant banquet instead of a 5-star hotel, food still great, cost far less, 3) rented gown/suit instead of buying, 4) the ang bao/red packet from guests offsets a big chunk of the banquet, we came out roughly break-even on the dinner. Set your budget by deciding guest count and venue tier FIRST, those two decide 70% of the total. Don't let vendors upsell you on things guests forget by next week.

Preschool Teacher Ling · Answer

Ang bao market rates basically subsidise the banquet, and you must factor this in before you panic at the scary total everyone quotes. For our hotel dinner, the guests' red packets roughly covered the per-head cost, so the intimidating banquet 'price' was never our actual out-of-pocket damage, it largely washed out. The real out-of-pocket hit for us was everything else that guests don't pay toward: the photography and videography, the gown and suit, makeup, rings, and the miscellaneous bits that quietly pile up. So when you're building your budget, mentally separate the banquet (largely offset by ang bao) from the 'true spend' items (fully on you), because that reframing makes the whole thing far less frightening and shows you where to actually cut if needed, which is the non-banquet stuff.

SMU Grad Xinyi · Answer

The guest list is the master lever on your whole budget, full stop, because almost everything scales with headcount, every extra table is a whole chunk of banquet cost plus more favours, bigger venue, more invites. We cut ours from around 30 tables to 20 by being honest and inviting only people we actually talk to and would grab a meal with, not obligatory distant relatives and colleagues we barely know. The result was both far cheaper AND the day felt more intimate and genuine, we could actually spend a moment with each table instead of a blur of strangers. So before you agonise over venues or vendors, lock your realistic guest count first, that single number quietly decides most of your total. Decide headcount, then build everything else around it.

CPF Guru Benjamin · Answer

A void deck or restaurant wedding is totally respectable and saves a serious amount, don't let anyone make you feel it's 'cheap', because it isn't. We did a lunch banquet at a restaurant, which is cheaper than dinner, the food was genuinely better than some stiff hotel banquets I've been to, and every guest was happy and full, which is what people actually remember. Nobody recalls the chandelier or the marble lobby a month later, they remember whether the food was good and whether the day felt warm and 'you'. So put your money where it's felt, decent food and a nice atmosphere, and skip the prestige markup. We poured the savings into our BTO reno instead, which we live in every day, unlike one fancy night.

What is a realistic wedding budget for an average couple in SG?

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