Quick answer
Guest list at 12 months, save-the-dates at 8-10, invitations at 8 weeks, RSVP deadline at 3-4 weeks, seating in the final fortnight. Everything else on a wedding timeline bends around those five dates.
12 months out: the guest list is the budget
Before venues, before dresses, before anything with a deposit: decide roughly how many people you are inviting. Almost every large cost on a wedding is a per-head cost, so the guest list is not one decision among many — it is the decision that sets the size of all the others.
Build the list somewhere you can actually maintain, not in a note on your phone. You will edit it for a year.
10-8 months: save-the-dates
Send them as soon as the date and venue are confirmed, particularly for peak-season dates or anywhere guests need to travel. A save-the-date does not need a full guest list structure — but starting it here means the invitation stage is a send, not a data-entry project.
6 months: decide the shape of the day
Ceremony, reception, evening — and who is invited to which. Getting this straight now determines how the invitations are structured, and it prevents the painful late discovery that half your list was invited to the wrong part.
3 months: build the event page
Directions, accommodation, schedule, dress code, the answer to whether children are invited. Every question you answer here is a message you will not have to reply to individually in the busiest month of your year.
8 weeks: send the invitations
- Group households so one invitation covers a couple or a family
- Set plus-one permission per guest before you send, not after
- State the RSVP deadline in the invitation and on the page
- Send a test to yourself first and open it on a phone
For destination weddings, move this to 12 weeks. Guests booking flights need the runway.
5 weeks: the first reminder
To non-responders only, framed as "in case it got lost". Set it as a rule when you send the invitations so it happens without you remembering.
3-4 weeks: the RSVP deadline
Published deadline, not vendor deadline — keep a week of buffer behind it. Send the deadline reminder three to five days before, then work the remaining pending list by phone.
2 weeks: final numbers and seating
Give the caterer the headcount and the dietary list. Start seating now rather than earlier — a plan built before the replies are in gets rebuilt. Auto-assigning households and couples first leaves you with the genuinely human decisions rather than the mechanical ones.
The final week
- Send one practical message: timings, address, parking, weather plan
- Confirm the seating plan and print or share it with whoever is running the room
- Give someone other than the two of you access to the guest list for the day
- Decide how guests will be checked in, even if the answer is a printed list
After the wedding
Export the final list while it is accurate — thank-you notes are far easier when attendance, plus-one names and addresses are all in one place, and that record decays quickly if you leave it a month.