Typical wedding
From RNZ this week
The Wedding Planner director Susannah Reid said in 2023 $58,000 was a typical budget for a wedding across New Zealand but this year, the average cost was more like $87,600.
As we’ve seen in the past, this use of ‘typical’ by people in the wedding industry doesn’t have a lot to do with how the word is normally used. In that post, in 2014, the typical value from the marital-industrial complex was $30,000. In 2025 dollars that’s about $40,000, so apparently the real cost of “typical” weddings has more than doubled over the time StatsChat has been running.
Radio NZ also have this week: How New Zealand couples saved on their wedding (and what they splurged on). The most expensive wedding here is less than a quarter of the “typical” budget; the others are less than 10%.
If you think about it, estimating the actual cost of a typical wedding is quite hard. Technically it’s not that difficult: the government keeps track of marriages, so you could do a survey of a sample of marriages and ask people, but the Births, Deaths, and Marriages people will only let you browse arbitrary marriages from the distant past. Contemporary marriages are public records, but public access to them is by name rather than just by year. If you don’t have a genuine sample, you’ll tend to notice big weddings more than small ones.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »