Wedding Guest List Template

{Photo Credit: Lindsay O’Connor Photography}

Once you’re engaged your first wedding to-do is:

draft your guest list and collect mailing addresses.

Collecting everyone’s addresses can take some time, especially when you’re relying on parents to collect from their friends. Putting pen to paper will start the conversation around how large a wedding you’re going to have. You can’t realistically start to look at venues until you know how many people you’re inviting.

As you collect addresses compile them in my Wedding Guest List Template so you can track everything from escort card formatting to RSVP’s in one place.

Grab my FREE template below and save it to your Google Drive Wedding Folder. If you haven’t started your wedding folder yet and need to get more organized, this blog post is for you.

Ask Guests For Their Addresses

My favorite FREE tool for collecting addresses is postable. Postaable will give you a link you can email to your guests where they can easily input their own address. It will format all the info into an excel sheet you can copy and paste into my template. The key to my Wedding Guest List Template is to use columns for all the information you are going to need to collect from your guests. I’ve done the work for you. You’ll just need to customize the document a bit by asking yourself these questions.

The biggest questions to ask yourself

to customize your Wedding Guest List Template:

1. What wedding weekend events will I need a headcount for? Each event should have a column. I’ve included “Rehearsal Dinner“ and “Farewell Brunch“ columns but you may have more or less.
2. Does your venue require a meal selection in advance? If the answer is yes you’ll want to make sure you have a column in The Wedding Guest Template for each meal choice. I have included 3 “Meal Choice“ columns to get you started. Replace the generic meal choice titles with the actual choices you’re offering guests. If you’re planning a buffet or your venue/caterer doesn’t require a meal choice in advance you can delete these columns.
3. Chances are at least a few of your guests will have dietary restrictions. You can list these or any special notes in the “Special Requests” column.
4. Are you inviting kids? If the answer is yes, you’ll want to use the “Under 21” column to track these guests so you aren’t charged a bar package fee for any under age guests.
5. Are you providing transportation? If the answer is yes you’ll want to use the “Transportation Pickup” columns in The Wedding Guest List Template to track how many seats are needed from each of your pick up locations. I have created two columns for you. You may need more or less.
6. Are you delivering welcome gifts to hotels for your guests? If the answer is yes you’ll want to use the “Hotel” column to track where each guest is staying so you can plan for the right number of welcome gifts per location.

How Do You Get This Information

When you get around to selecting your invitations you’ll want to make sure that you are asking all of the above questions in your RSVP card. I’m a big believer that your RSVP card is the most important piece in your invitation suite. I wrote a whole blog post here to guide you through exactly what you need to ask to save yourself tons of time in the final weeks of planning.

Save Time On Your Seating Chart

As you add names and addresses to your Wedding Guest List Template assign each person a “Category”. These categories typically look like “bride’s college friends” “groom’s high school friends” “bride’s family friends” “wedding party” etc. You get the idea. When everyone is assigned to a category you can easily sort your guest list. Then, when it’s time to do your seating arrangements your tables will naturally come together. Mark each guests’ table assignment in the “Table” column.

If you’re new to Google Sheets and don’t know how to sort the info YouTube has the answer here. I mean what can’t we learn on Google?!