Today we answer the question we always wonder: how much is everyone else? When I did my first wedding expo in 2012 after having been a celebrant for three years already, the average price was $550 for a ceremony. Today, some people are still charging this, but luckily the average has almost doubled.

I remember hearing Dally Messenger years ago say that “you can’t make a living as a celebrant” but the good news is that today, you can.

In January we asked Australian celebrants to complete a survey. Of the 10,339 authorised marriage celebrants in Australia, 297 responded, giving us a 2.87% response rate, and this is our analysis of the survey results.

These are the questions we asked:

  • Do you have plans to increase your fee in the next six months?
  • Is your celebrancy practice your primary or only source of income for your household or family?
  • How many local weddings would you like to do in a regular year at your regular local wedding price?
  • Where do you think you are positioned price-wise in your local market?
  • What level of service do you provide for those fees?
  • Legals-only, regular package, and max package prices.

Celebrants planning to raise their price, and who of us is full time?

About 47% of celebrants are planning to increase their fee in the next six months, which is not a crazy idea considering how our cost of living has expanded so rapidly, inflation and interest rates continue to increase, and most of us are not celebrants for charity, but it provides for our families to some degree.

To what degree is celebrancy putting a roof over a head you ask? 12% of the respondents rely on celebrancy as a primary or only income. 76% rely on celebrancy as a secondary income and just under 12% of us are doing it for fun.

How much?

Legals-Only Ceremonies:

Average Price: $552.

New South Wales has the most expensive legals-only fee, Northern Territory has the cheapest.

Regular celebrant fee

The question stipulated: This fee is what you would regard as your “regular” fee, for your most popular package, for a wedding without extras, without travel, including a PA system if you price that separately. Including GST if you are registered for GST.

  • Minimum Price: $280
  • Maximum Price: $2,500
  • Average Price: $1,029

For the first time the average fee for a celebrant in Australia has jumped across the mythical $1000 mark.

We also asked celebrants what their maximum fee was, if the couple ticked all the option boxes, and bought the maximum package. All of the fees mentioned in this survey are to be ex-travel. The most expensive invoice being sent by a celebrant was $5,000 and the average maximum fee was $1,491.

The cheapest place to get married in Australia by a celebrant is the Northern Territory and the most expensive place to get married is Canberra, closely followed by New South Wales and South Australia.

The data also suggests that there is a slight tendency for celebrants who plan to conduct more weddings in a year to charge higher fees, especially for regular and maximum price categories.

Service-level and price-in-market self assessments

I thought it would be interesting to ask respondents to self-assess where they felt they were in their marketplace price-wise and service-wise.

Did they think they were cheap, expensive, or average? Did they think they were delivering a five-star service, or less?

The average price-in-market assessment was 6 our of 10, so most of us think we’re slightly above average price-wise, whilst the average service-level self-assessment is five out of five thank God.

Celebrants who rate themselves higher in the market price assessment tend to charge more, especially for regular and maximum prices. This suggests that celebrants’ perception of their market position correlates somewhat with their pricing strategies.

The service level self-assessment doesn’t show a strong correlation with the fees charged. This could mean that celebrants’ perception of their service quality is not a major factor in how they set their prices, or that the quality of service is perceived uniformly high across different price points.