How long was your entire wedding?

That's definitely standard. Our ceremony is 6-6:30, cocktail hour 6:30-7:30, dinner/dancing 7:30-midnight.

6 hours is plenty of time, unless you're having a particularly long ceremony and/or cocktail hour. Curious - is there a specific reason that you think you'll need more than 6 hours?

If you do photos beforehand, it should be plenty of time. My ceremony is at 5:30, approximately 15 minutes, followed immediately by the reception, which is lasting till 10pm.

That's plenty of time. Our ceremony won't even be 30 min

That's pretty standard. Are you able to access the venue early for setting up, taking pictures, etc? Our venue is the same - 5pm ceremony, 11pm reception ends - but we can get in at 2pm to get ready.

That is about an average amount of time I’d say. Our wedding ceremony will be from 5-5:30 and then cocktail hour into reception will go from 5:30-10:30.

We extended our hours with the venue for this exact reason. It was $100 per extra hour. We extended it until 2:00 am. FH family are West Indian and like to party/drink all night long! 6 hours total was definitely not enough time for us. However, this is pretty standard.

Also to piggy back on what Jen said, I’d definitely look into having time to set up and what not. If this is including set up time also, no I do not think that’s enough time. We have access to our venue starting at 10:00 in the morning but it’s also a venue that does only ONE event per day.

A standard wedding is 30-min ceremony, 1-hour cocktails, and 4-hour reception, so 5.5 hours total.

But that leaves you with no time for set-up before the wedding or break-down at the end of the night, so do they allow extra time for that?

Our coordinator and DJ arrived 2 hours before my ceremony to set up. The cake was delivered one hour before. Our ceremony started at 6pm; we had the room until 11pm, but our reception was over by 10pm.

Ours starts at 6 and goes until midnight. It does seem short but it’s really not.

Our venue typically has evening weddings begin at 6pm (ceremony) and have the reception end at 11:30pm. It was plenty of time.

However, they began setup around noon for our wedding, and we had access to the ceremony area for pictures starting at 3:30. The ceremony space was opened for guests to begin being seated at 5:30. MFB makes a great point that you should clarify whether the 5pm start time means that's when you're allowed to get in to decorate/setup or whether decorating/setup takes place earlier in the day, as well as find out if 5pm would be the ceremony start time or whether that's the soonest guests would be allowed to begin entering and finding seats.

Our ceremony will be at 5, and we anticipate it taking about 30 minutes.

Cocktail hour will be from 5:45-6:45

Reception from 6:45-10:45 but I doubt anyone will actually stay that late! It'll probably end closer to 10/10:15

Most venues give you 4-5 hours for the reception and about 30-60 minutes for the ceremony. We ended up paying $500 for an extra hour. We figured that after spending thousands on our wedding we might as well spend a little to get more time to enjoy our day. So our entire wedding will be 6.5-7 hours. But average is definitely 5-6 hours total.

Does that time include set-up and clean up? If not, you're definitely safe. If so, it may be pushing it!

Our reception is set for 5 hours. Start at 6 over at 11. We are having our ceremony at 330 so we have time for photos and to talk with our guests. We are also doing a private photo shoot before ceremony.

We had our venue from Noon until 12AM, but Noon-3 was for setup.

Our ceremony was at 3 and lasted about 15-20 minutes (possibly longer because I dropped the ring and it almost fell off the 500ft mountain we were on and we all had to recompose ourselves after that gem of a moment). Took guests 25 minutes to get to the venue from our ceremony site, so cocktail hour started at 4.

Dinner was at 5/5:30 and then we partied it up for the rest of the night until Midnight, so our reception alone was somewhere around 5 hours and it FLEW by. I couldn't imagine only having a few hours for the fun part if the whole thing is 5 hours.

Ceremony 5:30-6:00pm

6-7 cocktail hour

7:00-11:00pm everything else

I think it all depends on the timeline you guys want. Our ceremony is at 5:00 and the reception will be over by 10:00. We decided to do pictures before the ceremony so we could enjoy cocktail hour with our guests. And instead of paying to stay longer at our venue, we blocked hotel rooms at a hotel that has a bar next door so we can all meet up for an informal after party once the official celebration is done.

I feel you may be rushed I personally feel I need more time myself,maybe find one where you can use from Friday till Sunday,that’s what I did and I’m not at all stressed on time

Our venue allows six hours for the whole event. It was one of the reason we chose the venue we did. We went to a lot of venues where five hours were standard.