Wedding planners are consultants who help brides-to-be and grooms-to-be in every step of the wedding process, depending on client wishes. Some clients request wedding planners just for the day-of details, and others hire wedding planners to be involved in every single detail of the wedding over the course of weeks or months prior to the wedding. Wedding planners are negotiators, event planners, conflict managers, and designers. If wedding planning sounds like the career for you, here is information regarding how much money you will likely make.
Median for All Event Planners
Wedding planners are event planners who specialize in weddings. Event planners work in the hospitality field and can work for a number of different kinds of organizations. Often, event planners work for venues like hotels or convention centers to help plan events in the space their organization offers. The median salary for all event planners (ignoring specialty) is around $45,000 per year, or around $22.00 per hour.
Median for Wedding Planners
Wedding planners tend to get paid more than other kinds of event planners because of the nature of weddings. Clients who are paying a wedding planner tend to be a bit wealthier than people who don’t hire wedding planners. Additionally, if you are an experienced and well-known wedding planner, you may land celebrity clients who often pay millions of dollars for their wedding. This means you get a higher cut. The median salary for wedding planners is somewhere around $50,000, but some wedding planners can make over $100,000 per year. The salary of the wedding planner is dependent on the number of weddings they plan per year.
Location
Wedding planners who work in cities tend to make much more money than wedding planners in less populated areas. Location is all about how close you can get to the money. Working in a city typically means access to a higher number of clients, and wealthy people also tend to live in cities. New York and LA, for instance, are among the cities where wedding planners make the highest salaries per year.
Pay Rates
Wedding planners typically earn money by contracting with clients who agree to pay wedding planners a set rate or a percentage of the total money spent on the wedding. It’s up to the wedding planner to set the rate of pay, and wedding planners have to be strategic. If you are planning weddings for clients at the lower end of the income bracket, you are likely to make more if you have a standard rate. If you plan weddings for extremely wealthy people, you are likely to make a great deal more if you request pay based on the overall cost of the wedding.
