Save the dates!!

6-12 months before the wedding is ideal and most common. Make sure that your venue and guest list are set in stone because every save the date, even to local people, must be followed up by a formal invitation.

View Quoted Comment Yes I knew about the invitations, I wanted to have my guest list back 3-6 months before the wedding lol, I am a huge planner in advance. Thank you!

View Quoted Comment That's way too early. No one is for sure going to be able to tell you if they can attend a wedding 3-6 months in advance and even if they do it's extremely likely some or a lot of your guests will be contacting after to say they either can or can't attend.

MAX 12 months out.

View Quoted Comment Do you mean rsvps? That is way too early. No one can accurately confirm what they can commit to prior to 4 weeks before the wedding.

I agree that save the dates should go out no earlier than a year before your wedding. There are no advantages (i.e., you won't get any better attendance rate by sending them earlier) and several potential downsides to sending them sooner.

Send them too early and invitees might get confused about your actual wedding date/what year you are getting married (people tend to not read things carefully), people are more likely to lose something/forget about it the longer ago they receive it, and wedding fatigue is a real thing (no one can stay excited about something for that many months).

I had the same issue. While the excitement is real and I'm sure friends and family are all asking for dates, it may be too early to send out save the dates in the mail. As an alternative, my partner and I sent out save the date GIFS via text to all our guests using our engagement photos. At the 1 year mark we sent out our save the dates by mail, everyone was still excited to receive their hard copy save the date.

This is just an idea of what worked for us!

January 2023 would be an appropriate time to send save the dates if your wedding was in October 2023. If I received a save the date in that time frame for a 2024 wedding, I would definitely assume you made a big typo and got the year wrong

I totally get the excitement and wanting to get things out asap, but even 12 months is the general recommendation for destination weddings. Local weddings typically go out even later. As others have said, people might forget or think there’s a typo. But another thing to help you feel better about waiting is that you have so much time, you’ll probably change your mind about a few things/have new ideas. We used a stationer to get custom save-the-dates and between the time we first reached out to her and when she started designing, we had more information about our venues and what our theme and colors would be. We absolutely love the end result and how tailored they are to our wedding and wouldn’t have been able to say the same if we’d ordered them super early.

I was gonna send my save the dates October of 2023 and then send actual invites in 2024 bc we are also getting married in October of 2024