What is the average length of a wedding ceremony these days?

I would think closer to 40–45 minutes for the ceremony on average. Mine was about 15 minutes… but I’ve never been to another ceremony as short as ours.

@TheOnlyNeffie I think that mine would be about 15minutes…. When I one day actually even get a guy lol.

@silvermoon we had a very small wedding, only close family and friends.. very casual. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Low stress and lots of time to celebrate with the people we love (rather than spending most of the day/night stuck to a schedule of receiving lines and other stuff.) Loved it that way.

@TheOnlyNeffie Sounds exactly want I want one day :)... small is more intimate too. I’d hate to get married and have a whole lot of people there that I don’t know. Smaller the better I think.

Hi @silvermoon, as a musician I’ve played at something like 200 weddings over the years (in the UK). Church ceremonies here typically last a full hour; civil ceremonies (most frequently held in a pretty hotel somewhere) tend to be about 20 minutes tops. The main difference in the length of time is down to the law that civil ceremonies are not allowed to contain ANY religious matter at all, so there are no hymns sung, no sermon etc.

Incidentally, by far the longest part of the 20 minute ceremony is the signing of the register, which takes abou 10 minutes by the time they’ve let all the guests take photos!

Of the weddings I’ve played at (I’ll play anywhere, so this is not based on any preference of my own) I would say that c.80% of them have been civil ceremonies in hotels.

Catholic weddings tend to be very long… an hour or more. My own weddings were quite short, maybe 20 minutes the first time, and 15 the second. Small and sweet.

I think it depends on the people involved. Church weddings tend to be longer because of the ceremonial aspect, with prayers and music. I’ve been to some weddings where the entrance of the bride and her party takes 15 minutes just to walk down the aisle, starting with the flower girl and ring boy, followed by the three or four bridesmaids and grooms men, and finally the bride herself.

Mine was half an hour, if that. But i’ve been to one that was so long i’m not sure how long it was, but it was booooooring because it just went on too long. The others i’ve been to were longer than mine but i think most of them were under an hour long.

Mine was a civil ceremony, and I think it was about 15 minutes. Church ones are longer because of the sermons and hymns and so on. Plus there’s the hanging about outside for photographs.

i think it is 2 hours,

Like the others have mentioned, it depends on the ceremony. A small ceremony that’s not in a church is more likely to take about 15–20 minutes or so. A church ceremony can be anything from an hour to 3 hours (from my personal experience) depending on the religion.

Our actual ceremony was maybe 12 minutes long. The reception went well into the night. I think if you do it in a church, it probably takes a lot longer. Without the pomp of religion though, there’s not much to do other than publicly avow your commitment to each other (which should probably have been done prior to the wedding day anyway). So it can be pretty short.

The last ceremony I went to took 2 minutes.