Wedding Guest List Calculator

Guests Invited is your entered invitation count, while Invite This Many for Target treats that same number as a target headcount and works backward through Acceptance Rate to show how many invitations you'd actually need to send to expect that many acceptances. At an 80% acceptance rate, hitting a target of 150 accepted guests means sending closer to 188 invitations -- the two figures only match when Acceptance Rate is 100%. The lower Acceptance Rate goes, the larger this recommended count grows, so at low acceptance rates it can end up well above your entered Guests Invited figure -- that's the math working correctly, not a bug. At exactly 0% it shows "N/A" instead of a number, because no invitation count can ever produce a non-zero result when nobody accepts.

No. Total Expected Guests is calculated entirely from Guests Invited, Acceptance Rate, and Plus-One Invites (%) -- Children (%) only comes in afterward, splitting that already-calculated total into Children Attending and Adult Guests. Raising or lowering Children (%) redistributes the same total guest count between adults and children without changing the total itself.

The calculator applies Acceptance Rate to the plus-one invitations the same way it applies to primary invitees, then adds the resulting plus-one attendees on top of Primary Guests to get Total Expected Guests. A higher Plus-One Invites (%) means more invitees are extended a plus-one, so more additional guests are expected to attend beyond the core invite list, assuming they accept at the same rate as everyone else.

Meal Equivalents weights each child at 0.6 of an adult meal portion, a common catering-planning convention reflecting that children's meals are typically smaller (and often cheaper) than full adult portions. This makes Meal Equivalents useful for estimating food quantities or catering costs, while Total Expected Guests and the table counts still treat every attendee, adult or child, as one seat.

Round Tables Needed divides Total Expected Guests by 8 (a standard round-table capacity) and always rounds up to the next whole table, since a partially filled table still has to be booked and set. If your guest count doesn't divide evenly by 8, the last table will have empty seats -- this is expected behavior, not a bug, and matches how venues actually book tables.