Reception and ceremony

No. Just order one chair per person

Your caterers would move the chairs, if they're full service. I would absolutely use full service caterers for any blank slate menu

Guests shouldn't be moving stuff, but caterers and staff will as long as you pre-plan that. Agree with Willow, full service caterers are definitely the way to go.

You don't need to order a separate set of chairs, but you'd need to hire staff to move the chairs since it's not appropriate to ask guests to move them on their own. Agree with PPs that full service caterers are a great way to go

They can use the same chair for the ceremony and reception. If you wanted to, you could add a little note on everyone’s chair to inform them to move their chair to the table. Or something along those lines.

Order a full-service caterer who will “flip” the space after the ceremony. Guests will remember for years to come if they had to move their chairs themselves.

If a full service caterer doesn’t fit your budget, you can also hire event staff on thumbtack.com but you need to vet them.

Don’t make your guests move the chairs. So, the answer will depend on your staff. We had full service caterers , but they would not move the chairs and asked that we get 2 full sets.


A lot of it depends on how much staff you have, how many guests you have, and how much time you have, and where the 2 spaces are. Our caterers set up and cleaned up both sets of chairs, but didn’t have time to do it between the ceremony and reception as some were serving apps and some were finalizing reception set up. Also, our cocktail hour was directly between the ceremony site and the reception site, so I hey didn’t want to be hauling chairs right through the middle of the guests!

Our wedding was a backyard wedding and we had different chairs for the ceremony which were your typical fold out white chairs. And then we had cross backchair for the reception. It required us to hire however help to move the ceremony chairs out-of-the-way because that’s where our reception tables went.