THE REVELRY GUIDE TO GETTING MARRIED IN THE UK
Everything American couples need to know before planning a British wedding - including the weird bits nobody tells you.
So, you’ve decided to get married in the UK. Not that we’re biased or anything but…excellent choice.
Maybe London has always been your favourite city. Maybe one of you is British and you’re bringing everyone back across the Atlantic. Maybe you’ve fallen in love with the idea of taking over a country house for the weekend. Or perhaps you’ve seen one too many photographs of a dinner beneath the blue whale at the Natural History Museum and thought: yep, that’s a bit of me.
Whatever brought you here, planning a UK wedding while living in the US is completely doable. We know because we do it all the time.
At Revelry, we’re wedding planners based in London, and more than half of the couples we currently work with are based in the US. So we’re incredibly familiar with the particular quirks of planning a wedding across an ocean: time zones, transatlantic venue visits, British suppliers, American expectations, guest travel, VAT, legal ceremonies and explaining why on earth we call dinner a “wedding breakfast” (spoiler: it’s a really old reason)
Here’s what you actually need to know.
First: can you plan a UK wedding from the US?
Hell yes.
You do not need to spend the year before your wedding flying backwards and forwards to London every six weeks.
A huge amount can be done remotely: venue research, supplier sourcing, design development, budgets, floorplans, entertainment, production, stationery, menus and logistics can all be handled through video calls, email and a very organised planning team on the ground.
We usually consolidate the things that genuinely benefit from you being physically here - venue visits, menu tastings, hair and makeup trials, perhaps a floral or design meeting- into one or two properly planned trips. We even suggest we get some cake tasting boxes sent to your hotel room for a jetlagged midnight feast.
And for everything else? That’s what we’re here for.
We can visit the venue. We can meet the supplier. We can measure the doorway. We can check whether the linen colour described as “warm ivory” is actually warm ivory or inexplicably yellow. You don’t need to get on an eight-hour flight every time somebody needs an answer.
Choosing where to get married in the UK
The UK packs a fairly ridiculous number of wedding options into a relatively small country.
Getting married in London
If a large proportion of your guests are travelling internationally, London is an obvious place to start.
There are palaces, museums, galleries, private members’ clubs, five-star hotels, historic halls, contemporary warehouses and buildings that are several hundred years older than the United States.
It also works brilliantly logistically. Your guests have multiple international airports, thousands of hotels and enough things to do that you don’t need to entertain them from the moment they land.
A London wedding can also become a proper destination experience without requiring everyone to travel onwards once they arrive.
Welcome drinks in a great London pub on Friday. Wedding on Saturday. Long Sunday lunch somewhere fabulous. Done.
Getting married outside London
If your mental picture involves rolling countryside, an English country house and having everyone together for a whole weekend, look beyond the capital.
The Cotswolds, Hampshire, Surrey, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Sussex and further afield all offer extraordinary estates and country-house venues, many with bedrooms on site.
This can create a completely different type of celebration: less “everyone meets at the hotel lobby at 3pm” and more “we’ve taken over a house for three days and nobody is entirely sure what day it is anymore but in a good way”.
The trade-off is logistics.
Once you move outside London, you need to think more carefully about airports, train stations, accommodation, transfers and how 120 people who have never driven on the left-hand side of the road are getting home at midnight.
That’s all manageable. It just needs planning.
How far in advance should you start planning?
For a luxury UK destination wedding, we’d recommend starting around 12–18 months ahead, and potentially earlier if you have your heart set on a particularly sought-after venue or date.
Your venue is usually the first major decision.
Once that’s secured, you can build the supplier team around it: planner, photographer, videographer, caterer if required, florist or floral designer, production, entertainment, stationery and everything else.
If you’re planning from overseas, having your planner involved before choosing the venue can be particularly useful.
A venue can look perfect online and still present some fairly spectacular logistical problems.
Does it have a hard curfew? Is there enough power for the production you’re imagining? Is catering tied in? Where will 150 guests stay? Can coaches physically get down the driveway? Does that beautiful room actually hold your guest count once you’ve put a dance floor in it?
These are significantly more useful questions to ask before signing the contract.
How much does a UK destination wedding cost?
The slightly irritating but truthful answer is: it depends enormously on what you’re planning. But we do know anecdotally that even with the international aspect, it can be more economical hosting a wedding in the UK than in many major US cities.
A 50-person dinner in a private London dining room and a 200-person wedding involving a museum takeover, temporary kitchen, custom production and a 12-piece band are technically both “London weddings”. Their budgets will bear very little resemblance to one another.
For international couples, there are also some UK-specific budget considerations worth knowing about.
VAT
This is the big one.
UK supplier prices may be subject to VAT at 20%.
Sometimes VAT is already included in the price you’ve been quoted. Sometimes it’s added on top. When you’re comparing proposals, make sure you know which.
A £10,000 quote becoming £12,000 isn’t the kind of surprise anyone particularly enjoys.
Service charges
Hotels and venues may also add service charges to food and beverage costs, so check proposals carefully rather than assuming the headline number is the final one. But bear in mind a lot of the time the service here is optional/discretionary.
Currency
If your wedding budget is held in dollars but your suppliers are being paid in pounds, exchange-rate movement can make a meaningful difference over a year or more of planning.
We recommend building some breathing room into the budget rather than planning right to the absolute limit of what today’s exchange rate allows.
UK wedding suppliers vs US wedding vendors
This needs it’s own blog post and we’ll get to that. Even with things like you saying vendors, and us saying suppliers :)
There are also some differences in the way British wedding businesses package and price their services, so don’t assume something that’s standard in a US proposal will automatically be included here.
Ask questions.
How many hours does your photographer cover? Does the venue include tables and chairs? Is staffing included in catering? Who clears everything at the end of the night? Does your florist return for breakdown? Is transportation priced one-way or for the entire evening?
This is also where having a UK planner can save an enormous amount of translation - both literal and cultural — between what you’re expecting and what a British supplier assumes you mean.
The legal bit: can Americans legally get married in the UK?
Yes, but this is the part to investigate early.
The rules depend on where in the UK you’re marrying, your citizenship and immigration status, and the type of ceremony you’re having.
England and Wales have their own marriage requirements, while Scotland and Northern Ireland have different systems.
If you’re coming from overseas specifically to marry in England or Wales and aren’t settling here, you may require a Marriage Visitor visa depending on your circumstances. There are also rules around giving notice before a legal ceremony, including residency requirements.
Because immigration and marriage requirements can change — and because everyone’s circumstances are different - this is one area where you should always check the latest official UK Government guidance rather than relying on a wedding blog (including this one).
Some international couples decide that the easiest option is to complete the legal marriage in their home country and have their full wedding ceremony and celebration in the UK.
That can give you much more flexibility over where, when and how your ceremony takes place.
Romantic? Absolutely.
Administrative? Considerably less so.
We’ll cover the legal side in much more detail in our separate guide to getting legally married in the UK as an overseas couple.
Do UK weddings work differently from American weddings?
Yes.
Not dramatically enough that you’ll feel as though you’ve entered another dimension, but enough that you’ll occasionally discover something you assumed was universal absolutely isn’t.
For example:
British couples talk about the wedding breakfast, which is not breakfast. It’s the main wedding meal.
Rehearsal dinners are much less traditional here, although they’re becoming increasingly common - particularly for destination weddings.
An open bar isn’t automatically included or expected.
A ceremony rehearsal the day before is not a given, you’ll likely have to ask for it.
Wedding-day timings can be different.
The idea of first dances before the dinner is a not the norm here.
The way venues, catering and service are packaged can be different.
Tipping culture is definitely different.
And yes, evening guests are a thing: some traditional British weddings invite additional guests to join after dinner for dancing and drinks.
You don’t need to adopt any British tradition just because you’re marrying here.
In fact, some of our favourite international weddings take elements from both cultures and completely ignore the bits that don’t suit the couple.
We’ll go much deeper into this in our guide to the differences between UK and US weddings.
Think about the whole wedding weekend
If people are crossing an ocean for your wedding, the wedding itself is rarely the only event.
And nor should it be.
A destination wedding gives you the rare opportunity to have most of your favourite people in the same place for several days.
You might have:
welcome drinks or a rehearsal dinner
the wedding itself
a Sunday brunch, roast or pub lunch
sightseeing or activities for guests
an informal farewell event
You absolutely do not need to programme every waking minute of your guests’ trip.
They’re adults. London has pubs. They’ll cope.
But giving people one or two opportunities to spend time together outside the wedding day can completely change the feeling of the weekend.
It also means you actually get to speak to the people who’ve travelled 3,500 miles to see you, rather than attempting to have 120 meaningful conversations during a drinks reception.
Make life easy for your guests
Your guests need slightly more information than they would for a wedding back home.
Give them plenty of notice and make your wedding website genuinely useful.
Include recommended airports, hotel options at different price points, transportation information, dress codes, event timings, local recommendations and anything they need to know about travelling between venues.
For London weddings, think about where people are likely to stay in relation to the wedding rather than simply recommending your favourite hotels across the entire city.
London is big.
A hotel can technically be “in London” and still involve a heroic journey to your wedding.
If you’re marrying outside the city, guest transportation becomes even more important. We generally don’t recommend leaving 100 international guests to individually solve the final 20 miles of their journey through rural England.
Organised transfers are your friend.
What should you bring from the US?
Usually, as little as possible.
Unless there is something very specific or sentimental that you can’t source here, importing wedding items creates extra luggage, customs considerations, shipping risk and someone eventually asking:
“Whose suitcase are the 140 menus in?”
There are exceptional designers and suppliers throughout the UK and Europe. Florals, stationery, linens, furniture, lighting, production, cake, styling pieces and gifting can usually all be sourced this side of the Atlantic. And also sent to us as a base.
If there’s a particular US photographer, fashion designer or creative whose work you love, that’s different. International creative teams travel for weddings all the time.
But shipping 120 charger plates across the Atlantic because they’re four dollars cheaper?
We’d gently confiscate your spreadsheet…
Do you need a UK wedding planner?
Technically? No.
But then that’s like asking “can you cut your own hair?”. You could, you could figure it out - but there will be less panic and fewer tears if you get someone on board who has done it before.
You can plan a UK wedding from overseas yourself.
But there is a significant difference between being able to do something and wanting to spend the next 18 months doing it.
The biggest advantage of having a planner based here isn’t simply having somebody to make a timeline.
It’s having somebody operating in the same country as your wedding.
Someone who knows the venues.
Someone who knows which suppliers are genuinely brilliant rather than simply very good at Instagram.
Someone who understands the contracts and pricing.
Someone who can attend meetings when you can’t.
Someone who can tell you when something is normal for the UK market and when you should be questioning it.
Someone who knows that the beautiful country-house venue you’ve found requires every supplier to be out by midnight and has precisely one taxi company within a 15-mile radius.
And someone who can take everything you’ve imagined from thousands of miles away and make sure it’s actually there when you arrive.
How many times do you need to visit the UK before the wedding?
This varies, but for most of our international couples, one or two well-planned trips can accomplish an enormous amount.
Rather than flying over for individual appointments, we build planning days.
You might see shortlisted venues, have your tasting, meet your florist, do your hair and makeup trial and walk through the venue with us within the same trip.
Anything that doesn’t require you can happen without you.
And when you do arrive for the wedding, you should feel like you’re arriving for your wedding - not turning up to begin a week-long career in event production.
Planning across time zones
A five-to-eight-hour time difference is annoying.
It isn’t insurmountable.
The key is having clear systems, organised communication and a planning process specifically designed to work remotely.
You shouldn’t need to be awake at 5am because somebody in London wants to discuss napkin samples.
Nor should you spend your working day coordinating seven separate British suppliers.
Your planner should be doing that.
We coordinate the supplier team here, consolidate information and decisions for you and make sure the planning keeps moving even when you’re asleep on the other side of the Atlantic.
Quite literally, things can get done while you sleep.
Don’t try to make your UK wedding look “British”
Unless that’s actually what you want.
Getting married in a stately home doesn’t require a string quartet.
Getting married in London doesn’t mean you need a red double-decker bus.
A palace does not require a princess theme.
And absolutely nobody is going to confiscate your Marriage Visitor visa because you haven’t incorporated afternoon tea.
The reason to marry in the UK is because you love the setting, the architecture, the energy, the history or simply what this place means to you.
Take those things.
Then make the wedding look like you.
We love taking incredible British spaces and doing something completely unexpected inside them.
The building can provide the history.
You provide the personality.
So, is planning a UK wedding from America complicated?
It has a few extra moving parts.
But it shouldn’t feel complicated.
You need a great venue, a realistic budget, a brilliant supplier team, a sensible plan for your guests and somebody here keeping an eye on everything you can’t see from across the Atlantic.
The rest is the fun bit.
At Revelry, we’re London-based wedding planners working with couples across the US and around the world to create weddings throughout London and the UK.
We’re your team on the ground, your British wedding translators, your professional question-askers and, occasionally, the people who will tell you that you categorically do not need to air-freight a chair across the Atlantic.
You’re there. We’re here. We’ve got it.
