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Catering is priced per plate. So the distance between “we invited 400” and “380 people ate” is not trivia — it is one of the largest variable costs of the whole event, and most families guess at it.
The uncomfortable part: nobody can tell you your attendance rate. It depends on how far people travel, the day of the week, how many functions you are hosting, and how close each guest is to the family. A published average would be a made-up number dressed as advice.
What you can do is measure your own, and stop treating three very different numbers as one.
The three numbers
Invited. How many people you sent an invitation to. This is the least useful number, and the one people quote.
Accepted. How many replied yes — counted in heads, not invitations. A cousin who accepts and brings three is four plates. If your RSVP asks “are you coming?” instead of “how many of you are coming?”, this number is already wrong.
Arrived. How many actually walked in. This is the only number that was ever real, and the only one worth recording for next time.
Each step down that list loses people, and each gap is specific to you. The first time you run an event with all three recorded, you have something no generic statistic can give you: your own conversion from invited to arrived, which will be roughly true for the next event with the same guest list.
Why the gaps happen
Invited → Accepted leaks through silence. People mean to reply, the message scrolls away, and they assume everyone knows they are coming. This is a friction problem, not a rudeness problem — and friction is fixable.
Accepted → Arrived leaks both ways, which is what makes it dangerous. Guests who accepted fall ill, get stuck, or double-book. Meanwhile, families who never replied turn up with four people because attendance was “obvious”. These two errors do not reliably cancel out, and you will not know which way yours runs until you have measured once.
Getting more replies
Four things move the response rate more than any wording:
Make replying one tap. A link that opens straight onto Accept or Decline, with the guest’s name already filled in, beats “please call and let us know” by a wide margin. Every extra step is people lost.
Ask for a number, not a yes. “How many of you will be coming?” with a cap you set. This single change is what turns your accepted figure into a plate count.
Give a deadline with a reason. “Please reply by 25th November so we can confirm numbers with the caterer” works. A bare date does not. People respond to a constraint they understand.
Send exactly one reminder. To the people who have not replied — never to everyone. Two weeks before the deadline is about right. More than one reminder reads as nagging and does not add much.
Then count at the door
If you take one thing from this: tick people off as they arrive. Scan an entry pass, or search the name and tap. It takes a second per guest.
It gives you two things. On the day, you know when the last of the family has arrived and whether to hold the food. And afterwards, you finally have your own arrived-versus-invited ratio — the number that makes your sister’s wedding next year a calculation rather than an argument.
A working method
- Build the guest list as households, with a name and a contact for each.
- Send a personal invitation that asks how many are coming, with a cap on plus-ones.
- Set the RSVP deadline a few days after your caterer’s cut-off, and say why.
- Send one reminder to the non-repliers before the deadline.
- Give your caterer the accepted head count, not the invited count, with whatever margin they advise.
- Check guests in at the door.
- Write down all three numbers. That is your baseline for the next one.
None of this is complicated. It is just rarely done, which is why so many families cook for a number nobody measured.
Our invitation studio does the counting: every guest gets a private link that asks how many are coming, you can cap plus-ones, set an RSVP deadline, nudge only the people who haven’t replied, and check guests in at the door with a scannable entry pass. The dashboard shows accepted heads and arrived-versus-expected side by side.
Frequently asked questions
- What percentage of invited guests usually attend?
- It varies far too much for a single number to be useful. Attendance depends on travel distance, the day of the week, how many functions you are hosting and how close the guest is to the family. The only reliable figure is your own: collect RSVPs, then track how many of the people who accepted actually walked in.
- Why do more people come than RSVP’d?
- Plus-ones that were never declared, children counted as “not a plate”, and family who assume their attendance is understood. This is why the RSVP form should ask for a number, not a yes, and why plus-ones need an explicit limit.
- How do I get people to actually RSVP?
- Make it one tap rather than a phone call, give a deadline and say why it exists, and send one reminder to the people who have not replied. A private link that opens straight to Accept or Decline does more for your response rate than any wording.
- Should I set an RSVP deadline?
- Yes — about two to three weeks before the event, or whatever your caterer needs plus a few days. State it on the invitation. A deadline without a reason gets ignored, so say what it is for: “so we can confirm numbers with the caterer”.
- How do I count plus-ones properly?
- Ask each guest how many people are coming in total, cap it at a number you choose, and count heads rather than invitations. An invitation is not a person; a guest bringing two is three plates.
- What is the most accurate way to know who came?
- Check guests in at the door. Scanning an entry pass or ticking names off as people arrive is the only way to get a real arrived-versus-expected figure — and it is the number that makes your next event much easier to plan.