How much does it cost to renew your wedding vows?
It can cost nothing. There is no licence to buy and no officiant you are required to hire, so the ceremony itself is structurally free. Everything above zero is the cost of the party you build around it, priced like any other gathering that size.
Why we won’t quote you an average
Because there isn’t a trustworthy one. As at August 2026 no wedding-industry survey covers vow renewals the way the big annual surveys cover weddings, and the numbers circulating online do not agree with each other — a few hundred dollars in one place, five figures in another, a precise-looking national average in a third with no sample, no year and no method behind it.
They disagree because they are measuring different events. “Vow renewal” covers two people on a beach at dawn and a hundred-guest party with a band, and averaging those produces a number that describes neither. So here is the answer by line item instead, which is the thing you can actually price.
What the line items actually are
The ceremony itself
£0 / $0
There is no licence fee because there is no licence, and no mandatory officiant fee because no jurisdiction requires a licensed officiant for a ceremony with no legal effect. This line is genuinely, structurally zero. It is the single biggest difference between a renewal and a wedding.
Someone to lead it
£0, or a celebrant's standard fee
A friend, an adult child or one of you does it for nothing. A professional celebrant charges their usual rate, which is the same rate they would charge for a wedding — you are buying their time and their writing, not a legal function. Renewing inside a church is the one case with its own arrangements: ask the parish, since practice and any expected offering vary.
Guests, and therefore everything
the whole variable
This is the line that produces every headline figure. Two people cost nothing. Twenty people want feeding. Sixty people in a hired room with a meal and a bar is a wedding reception, and it is priced like one in your area. When a website quotes a vow renewal cost, this is almost always the only thing it is measuring.
Venue
£0 upwards
Renewals have a real advantage here: no licensed venue is needed, because nothing legal is happening. A garden, a beach, a living room and a hired room are all equally valid, which removes the constraint that drives most wedding venue costs.
Photography
hourly rates apply
The most common single spend, and the one people regret skipping. A renewal needs an hour or two, not a full day, so it is usually booked at an hourly or short-coverage rate rather than a wedding package.
Rings, flowers, dress, cake
entirely optional
All four are common and none is expected. Many couples re-use the rings they are already wearing — Common Worship even provides different wording for a ring given again versus one already worn. Original outfits get worn again at renewals more often than at any other event.
Package deals
treat with care
Resorts, chapels and destination venues sell fixed-price renewal packages, and register offices and councils in the UK publish set fees for a renewal ceremony you can look up on their own site. These are real prices for a real service — just be clear you are buying a venue and a script, not anything that makes the renewal more valid than one held in a garden.
The useful way to think about it
Decide the guest number first and the budget answers itself. Every other decision is downstream of it, and it is the only lever that moves the total by an order of magnitude. A renewal is the rare ceremony where the cheapest version is not a compromise: nothing about two people and a written vow is a lesser event than the same words said in a hired room.
When you get to the part that actually matters, there are twenty-four complete renewal vows here, and they cost nothing either.
Common questions
- How much does it cost to renew your wedding vows?
- It can cost nothing. There is no licence to buy and no officiant you are required to hire, so the ceremony itself is free. Every cost above zero comes from the event you build around it — guests, venue, food, photography — and is priced exactly as any other gathering of that size would be.
- Is there an average cost of a vow renewal?
- No reliable one, as at August 2026. No wedding-industry survey covers renewals the way The Knot's covers weddings, and the figures circulating online disagree wildly — from a few hundred dollars to over twelve thousand — with no stated methodology behind any of them. Treat any single quoted average as invented.
- Do you have to pay for a marriage licence to renew your vows?
- No. You are already married. There is no second licence, no fee, and no registration of any kind, because a renewal creates no marriage and has no legal effect.
- What is the cheapest way to renew your vows?
- Two people, no officiant, somewhere that means something, vows written yourselves. That costs nothing and is a complete renewal — nothing about it is a lesser version of the ceremony. Adding a photographer for an hour is the single cheapest upgrade with a lasting result.