It's more expensive to get married than buy a house in these major cities
It’s no secret that holding your dream wedding can come with a nightmarish bill. But a recent study revealed that the cost of nuptials has climbed so high in some places that it’s actually more affordable to buy a house.
In 47 American cities — including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Philadelphia — the average price of an 8% down payment on a single-family home is less than the average cost of a wedding, according to an analysis by Zoocasa, a brokerage firm that has a vested interest in real estate.
The analysis of 80 cities compared the National Association of Realtors (NAR) 2023 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers to the Knot’s reports on the average wedding cost in American cities to identify where consumers were spending more.
In New York City, the median cost of a single family home is $698,800, while the average cost of a wedding is $63,000. Assuming a newly married couple makes an 8% down payment on their home — or $55,904 — it costs less to buy a house than it does to throw an elaborate wedding.
Notable exceptions to this trend include Los Angeles, where a down payment is $68,384 and a wedding is $48,000; Boston, where a down payment is $63,472 and a wedding is $50,000; and San Francisco, where a down payment is $115,920 and a wedding is $51,000.
Experts have attributed the rising cost of nuptials to a myriad of factors: couples are delaying their weddings until they’re older and have higher incomes; wedding vendors are needing to upcharge to financially compensate for the seasonal nature of the industry; and a pent up demand following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is making it possible to charge brides and grooms more money.
“You have [fewer] venues and the same number of weekends,” Vishal Joshi, the CEO and co-founder of Joy, a wedding planning and registry company, told Marketplace.
Despite widely-held anxieties about big-ticket weddings, nearly 20% of Americans say that they’ve spent more time planning for their current or future wedding than they have for retirement. Sixteen percent of Americans say they would even be willing to go into debt for their big day, according to a recent study from financial planning advisor Empower.
In fact, the cost of weddings — even for attendees — has gotten so steep that nearly half of Americans say they hope they won’t be asked to be a bridesmaid or groomsman in the next year, the Empower study revealed.
