The guest list is the first number in your plan and the one every other number is derived from. Catering is priced per head. Your venue has a seated capacity and a standing one. Drinks, favours, chairs, cars, invitations and stationery all scale with it. Change the list by fifteen people and you have changed your budget, and possibly your venue. Get the list roughly right before you book anything, even if you are nowhere near final.
Build it by household, not by person
Almost everyone starts a guest list as a column of names, and almost everyone regrets it. An invitation goes to a household - "Mr and Mrs Pascoe", "Jenny and Tom and the girls" - and so does an envelope, a postage stamp, an RSVP and, later, a table. But the caterer needs people, by age. If you only have names you cannot answer "how many invitations", and if you only have households you cannot answer "how many main courses". You need both, and the easy way round is to record the household and list the people inside it.
That structure also saves you the single most annoying job in wedding admin: chasing. One person answers for a household, once, and your list moves by four rather than by one.
The four-list method
Do not build one list together in one sitting. It turns into a negotiation before anyone has seen the size of the problem. Build four separately, then merge:
- Yours - everyone you would genuinely want there if money and space were no object.
- Your partner's, written the same way, without either of you reading the other's.
- Your family's must-invites, asked for as a list with a number attached ("give me your ten").
- Your partner's family's, the same.
Merge them, remove the duplicates, and look at the total. It will be too big. That is the point of doing it this way - the cut is now an arithmetic problem you solve together against a number, rather than four separate arguments about individual people.
Ask families for a number, not a list
Giving each set of parents a fixed allocation - "we can take ten from your side" - moves the hard conversations off you and onto the people who actually know who is owed an invitation. It is also much easier to hold to than a case-by-case veto.
Day and evening, A-list and B-list
A Cornish wedding very often splits into a smaller day guest list and a larger evening one, and that split is the most useful tool you have. Everyone gets asked; not everyone gets asked to the sit-down meal, which is the expensive part. Used honestly, it lets you keep people in rather than cut them out.
The B-list - people you invite as declines come in - is a separate idea and a touchier one. It works, and almost everyone does it, provided you follow two rules. Send the second wave early enough that it cannot be read as a second wave: six to eight weeks before the day is the last honest moment, and after that you are asking someone to rearrange their life to fill a gap. And never tell anyone which list they were on, including in the group chat where it will certainly be repeated.
Cutting it down
When the number does not fit, cut with a rule rather than a feeling. A rule is defensible, applies to both sides equally, and stops the cut becoming personal. Pick the ones you can live with and apply them without exceptions:
Do the cut once, properly, and write the final number down. A list that drifts up by two every fortnight is how people end up paying for twelve unplanned meals.
What to record against each guest
A guest list is only useful if it answers other people's questions without a rebuild. Five of these get asked by someone else - a caterer, a venue, a stationer - and you will be asked for them at short notice.
| Record | Against | Who needs it |
|---|---|---|
| Household name | The household | Your stationer, and your seating plan |
| Postal address | The household | You, the evening you address 80 envelopes |
| One email or phone number | The household | You, for the invitation and every reminder after it |
| Adult, child or baby | Each person | Your caterer - child and baby covers are usually priced differently, and a baby often is not a cover at all |
| Dietary requirements and meal choice | Each person | Your caterer, roughly a fortnight before the day |
| Which side, or which group | The household | You, when you build the seating plan and when you cut |
| Day or evening | The household | Your venue, your caterer and your stationer |
Doing it on Plan My Do
Your event has a guest list built on exactly the shape above: households with the people inside them, so the headline counts - households, adults, children, babies, and how many have not yet replied - update as you type rather than needing a formula. Groups are free-form and a household can be in several ("Bride's family", "University"); the invitation tier is single-valued, because a household is either a day invitation or an evening one and never both. A wedding starts with four groups and Day/Evening tiers already set up, which you can rename or delete.
You can paste the whole thing in from a spreadsheet - one row per guest with a household column - and see what it parsed before anything is saved. The same column set comes back out as a CSV, which is the file your caterer and your venue will ask for. When you are ready to ask people, the RSVP half of the job picks up from here, and collecting meal choices and dietaries handles the part your caterer is waiting on.
For where the list sits in the wider run-up, see the twelve-month wedding planning timeline. If you have not fixed a venue yet, your list and your shortlist have to be built against each other - Cornwall wedding venues by capacity and budget is organised for exactly that.
See how the guest list and RSVP tracker works for households, the spreadsheet import, printable cards and the reminders that chase the stragglers for you.
Build your list once, use it everywhere
Create your event and your guest list comes with it - households, live counts, a spreadsheet import, and a CSV your caterer can read.
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