The Wedding Tax Is Totally Real Except When It Isn’t

Weddings cost more than parties — but why?


On the morning of her wedding, Andrea, now 32, went to a salon to get her hair done, as brides are wont to do. Only she didn’t say she was her wedding, or even a wedding; the appointment, she told them, was for “an anniversary party.” The price: $75 for a normal updo. “If it had been a wedding thing, they would have rolled out the champagne and the mimosas and done a whole elaborate thing that we didn’t want or need,” she says. The price for the full wedding treatment? “Closer to $350 dollars.” (Today, the salon website lists an ominous bridal price of $85+.) In a fairytale ending, the regular updo was suitably bridal, Andrea got married and saved approximately $275, and everything was and remains fine.

So here is the question: Was it the same?

In an oft-cited stat, the average American wedding costs $35,329, which is more than half of the median American household income ($55,775). This is a number that seems absurd and unsettling, evidence that something must be profoundly amiss — that someone, somewhere, is screwing us all. “I definitely will say that I believed that fully,” says Jasmine Lilly, now a wedding cake baker in Bozeman, Montana, who also hosts The Avowed Podcast, which explores how people get married, and why. “I was like, why are weddings so expensive? It’s preposterous, it doesn’t make any sense, they must just mark up the price when they know it’s for a wedding.” Vendors, she thought, had to be cashing in on the same out-of-control culture that makes spending $35,329 on a wedding seem like a totally reasonable thing to do.

There is a small body of literature devoted to proving the existence of the so-called “wedding tax,” the idea that services cost more if they’re for a “wedding” than they would for a “party,” even if the “party” were identical to the “wedding” in all ways except name. In 2016, Consumer Reports sent secret shoppers to five metro areas, and found that more than a quarter of vendors — 28 percent — charged more for a wedding than for an identical 50th anniversary soiree. An Atlanta photographer charged nearly double for an “almost identical package of services,” while a hotel in St. Louis tacked on more than $8,000 of additional wedding-only fees. A New York restaurant starts its prices at $55 per head for unspecified banquets, compared to $125 for a wedding off-season. A Vox video shows two people calling the same caterer: The “wedding” cost $17,000; the ambiguous “event” cost $15,000. NBC’s Jeff Rossen went “undercover” for a Rossen Reports investigating the industry markup, and found — well, not that much, actually, but he did discover the wedding DJ cost $850 more than a non-wedding DJ.

“You should expect to spend 30 or 40 percent more on a wedding,” says one high-end planner who works in New York state. “When I contract for my own rate for planning, I’m trying to remember wedding culture, and trying to account for this being a heightened day — more important than the birth of a child, for a lot of people,” he tells me. “This is the biggest day they’ve had in their whole life, or they’re considering it that way. That’s high intensity, and often high stakes.” Also, high stress: for a party, there is most likely one person involved — the host. For a wedding, there is the couple, plus parents, plus other assorted familial associates.