This is the running order of the wedding day. If you are looking for the months beforehand, that is the UK wedding planning timeline; the two get called the same thing and are entirely different documents.
The shape below fits a typical UK wedding with a ceremony in the early afternoon. Shift it wholesale if yours starts earlier or later — what matters is the gaps between things, not the clock times.
The shape of the day
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 12:15 | Guests arrive. Allow a full 45 minutes: someone is always circling for parking. |
| 13:00 | Ceremony. Usually 30 to 45 minutes, longer with a religious service or readings. |
| 13:45 | Drinks and photographs. The longest unstructured stretch of the day and the one guests remember being pleasant or being bored. |
| 15:15 | Guests seated, then the couple in. |
| 15:30 | The wedding meal. Two to two and a half hours for three courses, and it will not be less. |
| 17:30 | Speeches. Whether these come before or after the meal is a real decision, not a formality. |
| 18:30 | Turnaround, evening guests arrive, cake cut. |
| 19:30 | First dance, then the band or DJ. |
| 23:00 | Last drinks, last song, and home. The venue's licence decides this, not you. |
Where every wedding runs late
Three places, reliably, and none of them is the ceremony.
- Photographs after the ceremony. Group shots take about three minutes each once you include finding the people in them, and a list of fifteen groups is closer to an hour than the twenty minutes couples budget. Cut the list, or accept the time.
- Getting people seated. Moving 100 guests from a lawn into a room takes fifteen minutes and no amount of announcing shortens it much. Build it into the plan rather than treating it as slippage.
- The turnaround before the evening. If the room has to be reset, that is real time during which guests need somewhere to be and something to hold.
Speeches before or after the meal
Traditionally they come after, which means the speakers cannot eat, and the whole room waits through three courses knowing there is an ordeal at the end.
Before the meal, or between courses, is increasingly common and generally better for everyone: the speakers relax afterwards and the room is at its most attentive early. The argument against is that a long speech delays the food, which guests notice more than couples expect.
Whichever you choose, give the speakers a length and mean it. Three speeches of five minutes is a pleasure; three of fifteen is not, and the difference is entirely whether someone asked.
What guests need to be told
Far less than the full running order. Guests need arrival time, ceremony time, roughly when the day ends, and anything that requires them to move or decide — a shuttle, a change of venue between ceremony and reception, an evening-only start.
Publishing a minute-by-minute schedule tends to backfire: guests hold you to it, and a day that is running twenty minutes behind becomes a thing people mention rather than a thing nobody notices.
A schedule on your wedding website is the right level of detail for this, particularly where the day moves between locations and guests need a map rather than a paragraph.
Build in the gaps
The commonest structural mistake is a schedule with no slack in it, where every item starts when the last one ends. One overrun then moves everything, and the thing that gets cut is always at the end of the day, which is the part you were most looking forward to.
Fifteen minutes of nothing after the ceremony and again before the evening absorbs almost every ordinary overrun. If the day runs to time you get half an hour to stand still, which married couples consistently report as the best half hour of the day.
Give it to someone else
Write the running order down, share it with every supplier, and hand it to one person who is not you. Photographer, caterer, band and venue coordinator each hold one piece, and somebody needs to hold all of them.
That person should also have the phone numbers. On the day, the couple should be the two people in the building who do not need to know what happens next.