When to Send Save the Dates, What to Put on Them, When to Skip

Knowing when to send save the dates comes down to four numbers. Allow 6 to 9 months for a wedding most guests can drive to, 9 to 12 months for a peak-season Saturday, and 12 to 18 months when people need flights and annual leave. Send nothing at all until the venue deposit has cleared.

A save the date is the cheapest thing you will send for a wedding, and the one that binds you hardest. It carries almost no information and cannot be withdrawn. The timing is the easy half of the job.

Deciding who receives one is the half that causes trouble, usually in the fortnight after the engagement party, when enthusiasm runs well ahead of the venue contract.

When to send save the dates, by what you are asking guests to book

The card reserves a day in somebody’s diary before anything else claims it. Lead time therefore follows the commitment, not a rule of etiquette. A colleague flying from Toronto needs the date before their leave year opens; a cousin driving 40 minutes needs a fortnight. Work from the hardest-to-book guest rather than the average one.

When to send save the dates for a destination wedding

Twelve months, and treat that as a floor rather than a target. The Knot’s planning benchmark assumes roughly 80% of invited guests accept, and no equivalent figure exists for weddings abroad, so budget for more declines than that. Guests are buying flights, two nights of accommodation and at least two days of leave, which is a holiday they did not choose. Give them the town, the nearest airport and a rough cost band early, because the ones who cannot afford it need time to say so gracefully.

Short engagements have their own clock

Under six months the card is dead weight, so send a complete invitation instead. The paperwork keeps its own clock regardless. Banns are arranged about four months ahead and read on three Sundays in the three months before the wedding. Civil notice in England and Wales is 28 days, while Scotland’s window runs from 29 days to three months.

Two conditions to meet before a single card goes out

The first is the venue deposit. Not the enquiry, not the provisional hold, and not the coordinator’s verbal yes. The deposit, paid, against a signed contract carrying the date. Venues release holds to whoever pays first, and a card sent against a hold is a card you may have to retract.

The second condition gets skipped far more often. Settle the day guest list first: the people who will sit down to the wedding breakfast, which is the main seated meal, whatever hour it happens. While that list is still moving, the send date is not the question you should be asking. If the date itself later moves, ring people individually rather than issuing a second card that reads as a correction.

Why is a save the date impossible to take back?

Couples treat these cards as a soft signal. Recipients do not. Once somebody has moved a holiday or declined another wedding on the strength of yours, the commitment is made, and no later letter unmakes it.

The classic British own goal follows. Fifty cards go out in the glow of booking the venue, then somebody does the per-head arithmetic. Hitched, surveying 2,020 couples married in 2025, put the average cost per guest at £272, up 4% on £261. Eight optimistic names is £2,176, so eight people move quietly to the evening list, each holding a card that said keep the day free.

If you sent one to someone you cannot now invite

No wording fixes this, and anyone selling you a graceful script is selling you fiction. What helps is doing it early and in person.

• Ring them, well before the invitations go out. The call is the apology, and a message is not.
• Give the real reason, which is numbers. « The venue seats seventy and we are at eighty-six » is believable because it is true.
• Offer the evening properly. Name a time, mention the band, and promise a drink with you.
• Do not ask them to keep it quiet. Secrecy turns an awkward decision into a grievance.

Should evening guests get a save the date?

As a rule, no. The card says keep this day free; an evening invitation then says keep from half seven free, and the gap between those two messages is where the offence lives. A guest who received nothing, then a warm evening invitation, feels included. One who had a save the date first feels demoted.

Two exceptions are worth making. If an evening guest is travelling far or booking childcare months out, send something with evening reception from 7.30pm printed on it in plain words. If you cannot separate the two tiers yet, send nothing and bring the invitations forward instead.

What the card must contain, and three things people wrongly add

Five items, and no more than five.

• Both full names, so it is obvious whose wedding this is when the card comes off the fridge in March.
• The words « save the date », which do the whole job of the card.
• A date written out in full: Saturday 12 June 2027, not 12/06/27.
• The town or area. « Near Bath » is enough to price a hotel room.
• « Invitation to follow », so that nobody replies to it.

Three things belong nowhere near it:

1. An RSVP or reply-by date. The card asks for nothing. Add a reply mechanism and you collect acceptances given before the timings existed, then have to ask again.
2. Gift list or honeymoon fund wording. A gift-list card with the invitation is accepted in the UK; on a save the date it reads as a bill arriving before the meal.
3. The ceremony time. It is the detail most likely to change, and the one guests write straight into a calendar.

One deliberate exception: if the wedding is adults-only, say so here. Parents need months to arrange childcare, and learning it at invitation stage is worse.

Save the date wording: eight examples to copy

These assume you have settled when to send save the dates and, more importantly, to whom. Change the names and the county, and keep the structure.

When to send save the dates to guests who need flights or visas

Two calendars govern this, and neither is yours.

Visas run on appointment availability

A guest needing a visitor visa faces two waits: a biometrics appointment, and then the decision. Published processing times shift with the season and the country, and the appointment queue is often the longer of the two. Check the current official guidance for that country rather than what a friend went through two years ago.

Applicants are commonly asked for an invitation letter naming the host, the address they will stay at and the dates. A save the date is not that letter. Say on the card that one is available, then send it as a signed document. Raise it now, because many guests will not think about a visa until the invitation lands, by which point the window has closed.

Annual leave is allocated, not requested

Leave years commonly run to 31 December or 31 March, and the popular summer weeks go in the first fortnight of the new one. A card arriving in February for the following August has missed the allocation round in many offices. Landing before the leave year opens is worth more than three extra months of notice.

School holidays compound it. Scottish terms and English half-terms do not align, so a June date can be term time for one family and a holiday for another. For guests bringing children from India, the Gulf or North America, the school calendar binds harder than the fare.

Do you need a wedding website at this stage?

Only if the page exists and says something. A holding page with two names and a heart is worse than nothing, because the guest visits once, finds nothing and does not return.

At this stage the page needs four things. The date, the nearest town and its station or airport, three or four places to stay at different prices, and a line saying invitations will follow. It does not need an RSVP.

The tidy version makes the save the date and the invitation the same address. A digital invitation is a page rather than a card, so the link you share a year out later carries the timings, the RSVP, dietary requirements and the table plan. TislitEvent works that way, at a flat €44.90 for unlimited guests.

When to skip the card, and what one really costs

Skip it in five situations.

• The engagement is under 6 months.
• The wedding is small and local. Bridebook’s UK Wedding Report, from around 7,000 couples, puts average ceremony guests at roughly 74; at half that size the card says nothing new.
• The venue is not signed and paid for.
• The day guest list is not final. This is the expensive one.
• Everyone already knows, because it went round the family group chat after the engagement do.

The money runs three ways. Postage comes first. According to Royal Mail’s published rates, a 2nd Class Letter up to 100g costs 91p, but the Letter format stops at 240mm by 165mm by 5mm. A slim A6 card posts at 91p, while a 5 by 7in card becomes a Large Letter at £1.55, so a hundred of those is £155 in stamps for one date.

Printing comes second, against an average UK stationery spend that Bridebook puts at £378. The Knot’s Real Weddings Study of 10,474 US couples married in 2025 records average save-the-date spending of $150, against $220 for the invitations themselves. That is two-thirds of the budget for a fraction of the information.

Third, and much the largest, is the guest list you lock in. Every name receiving a card is a name you have committed to feeding at £272 a head. So the question of when to send save the dates is really a question about when your list stops being a draft. That moment is always later than the excitement wants, and earlier than the panic allows.

Frequently asked questions

How early is too early for a save the date?

Beyond 18 months, the card stops working. Guests cannot plan that far out, the date gets filed and forgotten, and you will have to remind everyone anyway. The only cases that justify more are visas and long-haul travel. In practice, anything sent before the venue contract is signed is too early, whatever the calendar says.

Do save the dates have to match the invitations?

Not visually. Nobody compares fonts, and the two pieces arrive months apart. What must match is the guest list: everyone who received a card must receive a day invitation. Matching the names is the rule that matters, and the classic mistake is treating the card as a design decision rather than a list decision.

Can you send a save the date by text or email?

Yes, and most couples now do for part of the list. A message costs nothing and can be resent to the three people who lost it. Keep it as short as a card, since « Eleanor and Thomas are marrying on Saturday 12 June 2027 near Bath, invitation to follow » says everything. The weakness is that group chats bury information, so send a link rather than an image.

Sources: Royal Mail · Hitched · Bridebook · The Knot

Read next: Wedding RSVP Deadline: How to Set a Date That Actually Holds · Wedding Dietary Requirements: How to Collect Them Properly and Safely · Adults Only Wedding Invitation Wording Without the Family Row