If you take on a wedding outside of your town it’s so important that you charge accordingly.  You have to charge for your travel and accommodation expenses. 

Charging Wedding Clients for Travel

I charge for travel/mileage for any event outside of my immediate area, which means any event over 30 miles away from me.  

In 2021, the standard IRS mileage rate is 56 cents per mile for business miles driven.

So I charge 56 cents per mile for any event that’s 30 or more miles away from me.  I charge for mileage there and back. As well as mileage for any site visits I make before the wedding weekend.

In addition to charging for mileage I also charge for hotel accommodations.  

I usually charge around $130 for accommodations, but it does vary from location to location.  If the wedding is more than 2 hours away from me I add an accommodation charge for the night of the rehearsal. I sometimes add accommodations for the night of the wedding as well (if the rehearsal takes place the day before the wedding).  

I will usually drive back home after a wedding if it’s only a couple of hours away. If it’s any further than that I usually will add accommodations for two nights to their invoice.

To figure out how much to charge for the hotel accommodations I search hotels in the area of the wedding to determine how much they charge per night.  Some cities charge a lot more than others.  Which is why the hotel/accommodations charge varies from wedding to wedding.  

I always add travel and accommodations to the clients first invoice so they know what they are expected to pay for travel and accommodations for the wedding weekend.

If a client hires us for Full Service Wedding Planning and the wedding is out of town I will have to make trips to the area for vendor meetings, site visits, etc.  So I always add in the amount for travel for site visits x1 or x2 times.  I make a note on the invoice that this amount will be added as many times as we have site visits to the area, but I know we will go over at least two times before the wedding day, usually more though.  

Hope this helps! Hit reply if you have any questions or need help with anything else.

 Here to help!

xo, Terrica