They say your wedding is the most special day of your life. It may also be one of the most expensive.
According to the online wedding registry and planner Zola, the average U.S. wedding cost $36,000 in 2025. By contrast, the median personal income is about $45,000 per year.
Luca Cian is an expert on consumer psychology at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. (Contributed photo)
Still, most couples – 95% – say it’s worth every penny, even though more than half of newlyweds go into debt to get hitched.
When did weddings start to cost as much as a new car? UVA Today talked to Luca Cian, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and an expert in consumer psychology, to see why people throw their savings into tying the knot.
Q. How much of the rising cost of weddings is due to inflation?
A. Inflation is a real driver, though it tells only part of the story.
Even so, some surveys found a 30% increase in wedding budgets from 2019 to 2024, which clearly outpaces inflation. One thing is premiumization: couples now explicitly want “guest experience,” which translates into spending on ambient lighting, signature cocktails, photo-worthy installations, dedicated content creators and elevated catering. Many of those line items barely existed 10 years ago. The whole wedding industry knows that they can charge more and more without seeing a real pushback.
Q. What role does advertising play? Is it teaching couples to want a wedding they can’t afford?
A. Advertising largely created the modern American wedding as we know it. The diamond engagement ring is the textbook case. In 1940, only about 10% of American first-time brides received a diamond engagement ring. By 1990, after decades of De Beers’ “A Diamond is Forever” campaign and the famous “two months’ salary” rule, that figure was around 80%. Generations of Americans now treat as an ancient tradition what is actually 1947 ad copy.
To your second question, yes, advertising teaches couples to want weddings they often cannot afford. The mechanism is reframing aspiration as obligation. Once people believe that a particular ring, dress or venue is “what couples do,” opting out feels like a personal failure rather than a financial choice.
Q. What about the part social media plays?
A. Social media has supercharged what advertising started.
One reason weddings cost so much, Cian said, is because people view them as a symbol of their identities. (Illustration by Erick Delgado, University Communications; assisted by AI)
The mechanism here is social comparison. On Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok, couples are exposed to a curated stream of influencer weddings, sponsored content and luxury venues, all stripped of context. The pressure is amplified by what I would call the “performance economy” of weddings. About 40% of couples now ask their photographer for “social-first” content, meaning vertical clips designed for Instagram Stories and TikTok. The wedding has effectively become two products in one: a private celebration and a public performance.
Q. Why are people willing to spend so much on weddings?
A. First, weddings are intensely hedonic and identity-laden experiences, and these are precisely the categories where consumers are most willing to overspend. In research I published with Chiara Longoni at Boston University in the Journal of Marketing in 2022, we showed that consumers reason very differently about hedonic experiences (where emotion, sensory pleasure and personal meaning dominate) versus utilitarian ones (where function and price dominate). A wedding sits at the extreme hedonic end. Price comparisons feel inappropriate, almost vulgar, when the product is supposed to symbolize lifelong love.
Second, weddings are public identity statements. Couples are signaling their bond, their values, their taste and their place in a social world. People often believe a wedding is “priceless and worth the splurge.” Once a category is psychologically marked as priceless, vendors gain enormous pricing power.
Third, the planning process itself is a sunk-cost trap. The average U.S. couple spends about 20 months planning a wedding. By the time the venue is booked and the dress is fitted, an extra $500 add-on feels trivial against everything already committed. Vendors understand this and sequence their upsells accordingly.
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