When to send wedding invitations

Send wedding invitations six to eight weeks before the wedding. For a destination wedding, move that to three or four months so guests can book flights and rooms. Save-the-dates, if you send them, go out six to twelve months ahead. All three numbers come from one date further down the list: the day you need replies by.

The range exists because two clocks run at once. Guests need enough notice to take a day off, arrange childcare or book a train, and you need replies early enough to give a caterer final numbers. Six to eight weeks leaves room for both without handing guests so long that the invitation joins the pile of things to deal with later.

Start with the day the caterer needs final numbers and subtract a week of your own chasing time. That is your reply deadline, and it usually lands three to four weeks before the wedding. Everything before it is scheduling; everything after it is chasing.

Put a real date on the invitation rather than a request to reply as soon as possible, because guests respond to deadlines and ignore appeals. When replies arrive through the invitation's own form instead of a mixture of texts and phone calls, you can see who is still outstanding rather than reconciling four conversations at once. The RSVP wording that gets replies covers the phrasing; the deadline is what makes it work.

A save-the-date asks for nothing. It tells guests that the date is taken and that a proper invitation will follow, which is exactly what they need before they book anything. Send one when the date is more than six months away, when most of the list is travelling, or when the wedding falls in a period that sells out.

A printed invitation is sent once. Anything that changes afterwards — a corrected time, new parking arrangements, a guest who lost the card — needs a phone call or a second mailing. A digital invitation does not work that way: the page you sent is the page guests read, so a correction reaches everyone who opens the link from that moment on.

That changes what the send date is for. Instead of one decisive moment you get a first send and a series of nudges: the link goes to the whole list, then to the people who have not replied a week before the deadline. Because it is one link rather than one envelope per household, the reminder costs nothing and arrives instantly. The mechanics are the same as sending a wedding invitation on WhatsApp.

This is where a spring wedding with a mixed local and travelling guest list usually lands. Shift the whole schedule earlier for a destination wedding and later for a small local one.

Four things move the schedule more than anything else. A destination wedding pulls the invitation forward to three or four months and the save-the-date to roughly a year ahead, because flights and accommodation are involved. A public holiday or bank-holiday weekend needs the same early notice, since everything else that weekend sells out around it.

A short engagement compresses the range rather than breaking it: with ten weeks in total, send the invitation as soon as the venue is confirmed and set the reply date as late as the caterer allows. And if the guest list is still moving, that is not a reason to wait — it is a reason to choose a format you can send in batches, which is a large part of why couples on a tight schedule build the invitation online instead of printing it.