How Long Everything Takes on Your Wedding Day

One of the sneakiest wedding planning problems isn’t colours or centrepieces – it’s time.

Couples often build a wedding day timeline that looks perfect on paper… until real life shows up with slow hair, traffic, long speeches and “just one more photo”. The result? Rushing through moments you actually wanted to enjoy.

This guide breaks down how long everything really takes on your wedding day, so your wedding day schedule feels calm and realistic rather than frantic.

If you haven’t already, it pairs really well with Create a Wedding Day Timeline Without Crying and your big-picture Wedding Day Planning Checklist: Organise Your Day.

Getting Ready: Hair, Makeup and the “Getting Dressed” Gap

This is where people almost always underestimate time.

Rough guide (for most weddings):

• Hair and makeup for one person can easily be 45–75 minutes each, depending on the style.
• For a wedding party, you’re usually looking at 3–5 hours total, sometimes more if you have a larger group.
• Getting dressed, taking a breath, doing a first look in the mirror and a few photos can easily take 30–45 minutes on top.

The best way to think of it: it’s not just “hair and makeup from 9–11”. It’s:

• Arrival, setup, coffee
• Hair and makeup rotation
• Time to eat something
• Getting dressed without feeling rushed
• A few photos before you leave

A digital wedding planner like WedBuild is being created so that these blocks can sit clearly at the start of your wedding day timeline – not squeezed into one vague line.

Travel Time: Add More Than You Think

If your ceremony and reception are in different places, travel is where a neat wedding day schedule can quietly fall apart.

Consider:

• Guests needing time to walk to cars, load kids, find keys
• Traffic, parking and figuring out where to go
• Your own movements with your photographer

Even if a map says “13 minutes drive”, that can easily become 25–30 minutes door to door, especially with a group moving around at once.

When you’re planning your wedding day timeline in something like WedBuild, treat travel time as its own proper block – not something that magically fits “in between” two perfectly timed events.

Ceremony: Not Just the “Official Bit”

Ceremonies are another place where people either overestimate or underestimate.

Most non-religious ceremonies are around 20–30 minutes. But the time around the ceremony matters too:

• Guests arriving and finding seats: 15–30 minutes
• Latecomers (there are always a few)
• Post-ceremony hugs, congratulations and quick photos: 15–30 minutes

So if your ceremony “starts at 3:30 pm”, a more realistic view is:

• 3:00 pm–3:30 pm: Guests arrive and get settled
• 3:30 pm–4:00 pm: Ceremony
• 4:00 pm–4:30 pm: Hugs, confetti, quick group photos

When you build your wedding day run sheet, it’s worth writing all of that out as separate points instead of just “Ceremony 3:30–4:00”.

Photos: Group, Family and Couple Shots

Your photographer will help guide this, but as a ballpark:

• Immediate family photos: 15–30 minutes
• Extended family and group photos: 20–40 minutes depending on how many combinations you want
• Couple portraits: 20–40 minutes, sometimes split across golden hour and earlier in the day

If your dream is lots of relaxed photos with guests and a long portrait session, make sure your wedding day timelinegives you that space.

WedBuild is being designed so that when you map your schedule out, these photo blocks can sit clearly between ceremony and reception, rather than being squeezed into “somewhere in there”.

Reception: Dinner, Speeches and Dancing

This is where a lot of couples accidentally stack too much into too little time.

As a rough guide:

• Guest arrival / drinks: 30–45 minutes
• Entrances / welcome: 10–15 minutes
• Each speech: 3–7 minutes is ideal (longer feels long very quickly)
• Main course service for a full room: easily 60–90 minutes
• Dessert or cake service: 30–45 minutes
• First dance and dance floor open: 10–15 minutes for the “formal” bit

If you have, say, five speeches, that can easily be 30–40 minutes of speaking once you include intros and transitions, especially if people go off-script.

When you’re planning your wedding day schedule, try to:

• Spread speeches across the evening rather than doing them all in one block
• Give yourself real time to actually eat (you’d be surprised how many couples don’t)
• Leave plenty of room for open dancing at the end, if that’s important to you

A tool like WedBuild is being created to help you move these blocks around visually as you refine your run sheet.

The “Admin” Moments People Forget

There are a few hidden bits that often don’t make it into the first draft of a wedding day timeline:

• Time for you to step away and breathe (even just 5–10 minutes)
• Quick outfit change or touch-up before formalities or dance floor
• Vendor pack-down rules (some venues have strict timing)
• Final goodbye or exit moment if you’re doing one

They’re small, but if you don’t make space for them, you end up trying to squeeze them in on the fly.

One of the reasons WedBuild is being developed as a digital wedding planner is so that couples can see both the “obvious” moments and the little ones in a single, clear timeline.

How AI Can Help Keep Your Timings Realistic

This is where AI wedding planning quietly becomes useful.

Instead of guessing, AI can help you:

• Structure a wedding day schedule based on the kind of day you want
• Prompt you about common timing mistakes couples make
• Suggest where to add buffer time so it doesn’t all feel rushed

If you want to understand more about how AI fits into your planning, you can read AI Wedding Planning 101: Digital Wedding Planner.

WedBuild is being built with this kind of support in mind: not to tell you how your wedding “should” look, but to nudge your timeline towards something that actually works in real life.

Bringing It All Together

The point of knowing how long everything really takes isn’t to turn your day into a military operation. It’s to give you enough structure that you can actually relax into it.

A solid wedding day timeline:

• Protects the moments you care about
• Helps guests feel looked after
• Gives vendors something clear to work from
• Makes it less likely you’ll feel rushed or pulled in six directions at once

WedBuild is being created to hold all of that in one place: your timings, your guests, your plans and your priorities – so your wedding planning feels organised, and your wedding day itself feels like what it’s meant to be: a celebration you’re actually present for.

And if you’re still putting together the rest of your planning, you can zoom back out with Wedding Day Planning Checklist: Organise Your Day and build everything else around a timeline that finally makes sense.