When should i send formal invites?

I've just ordered my invites and we get married in March 2023. I'm sending them out at the beginning of September with people to RSVP by the end of October (we have our final meeting with our venue on the 30th October).


We have exclusive use of our venue so our day guests will be staying over and they have all be assigned a room. I am only going to send out our evening guest invites once all the day guests have RSVP. If any day guests cannot attend, I will then assign a room for our evening guests at our venue to ensure all the rooms are full.
I will get all our evening guests to RSVP by the end of December and thats when all the rooms need to be paid for at our venue.
I don't think there is any set way of doing it. Just do what works for you xx

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We don't have any evening only guests, everyone is invited to the whole day as it's such a journey, so do you think our RSVP date needs to be sooner?

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Ooh okay so all your day guys are RSVPing about 5months in advance... so potentially we might want to think about moving ours up a bit with an RSPV date of February 2023 or something!

Thanks for sharing, it's really useful to see how other people are thinking about it!

View quoted message Yes Ours is kind of a destination wedding too, we are from Greater Manchester and we're getting married in Anglesey, Wales. We also get married on a Friday so we thought 5 months before is a good timeline for people to book time off work, arrange childcare, sort travel arrangements and book their rooms xx

Our circumstances are similar to you Chloe, I believe. We’re also getting married in August, it’s on Anglesey so about 2hrs away for most of our guests, and it’s in mid-July 2023. We’re having 50 total and there is no segregation between day and evening guests.


We’ve just sent our Save the Dates last week. Most people already knew but it’s a great way of collecting the email addresses for the invites and also just put that reminder out there at a good time when people are starting to think about next summers plans.
We’re sending out the official invites to our primary list in mid-January, after the Christmas rush and once people are back to work so can book their leave for the year. We were going to go with an initial end of March RSVP, we’ll send out any invites to the people on the secondary list from the declines of the primary as we get them, with the last RSVP date being around beginning of May.
Hope that helps. I don’t think there is too much right or wrong in it, just whenever is best and comfortable for you planning wise

I am getting married at the beginning of June 2023 and I sent my invites out last week, with a RSVP deadline for 1st February.

I did this early because my wedding is a Thursday in the school holidays, so I wanted to give as much advance notice as possible, without doing it so early that people forget. Also a lot of my family and friends are either teachers or work for the NHS, so don't have the standard annual leave that starts fresh in January, so there was no need to wait until then.

I think that if your wedding is in a popular tourist area and your guests need accommodation, that you should send them out soon. I am going to a wedding in April and I struggled to get a hotel, because things seem to book out so far in advance. Also, as you said you need time to invite your B list if anyone from your A list declines. People don't RSVP as quickly as you would think, so you will need time for those B people to respond.