Here comes the ... money
Wedding boom provides jolt to economy, but it may get better next year, experts say
Meg Van Dyke, who runs a Pittsburgh wedding planning company, spent a recent weeknight frantically calling photographers for a May wedding. All eight who fit her couple’s criteria were fully booked.
“I’ve never had a problem finding vendors before,” she said. “It’s absolutely booming.”
Weddings are roaring back after a pandemic-induced slump, leading to booked-up venues, a dearth of photographers and rising prices on catered dinners. As demand picks up, it’s providing an additional jolt of spending to the U.S. economy.
The race to the aisle is payback after a lost year of ceremonies.
As lockdowns swept the nation, weddings slowed abruptly at the onset of the pandemic.
Shane Mcmurray, founder of The Wedding Report, estimates that 1.3 million marriages took place in the United States last year, compared with the typical 2.1 million. Those were often “micro-weddings,” according to industry insiders, with just a handful of guests, if any were present at all.
That’s turning around sharply. Weddings have not quite returned to normal for 2021, but they are quickly rebounding, and Mcmurray forecasts that next year they will jump to the highest level since the 1980s as engaged couples who have waited out a pandemic finally tie the knot.
Once that pent-up demand plays out, he expects that long-running trends like cohabitation without marriage will come to dominate.
Many economists agree.
“My instinct, immediately, is: This is not a marriage boom; this is a wedding boom,” said Jessamyn Schaller, an economist at Claremont Mckenna College in California.
She added that even with the shortterm pop, there were likely to be fewer marriages than there would have been had the pandemic never happened.
In other words, the wedding boom is probably a blip.
Marriage rates have been dropping for decades and hit a record low of 6.1 per 1,000 people in 2019, down from 8.2 in 2000. The decline has come alongside a drop in fertility, which also hit a new low before the onset of the coronavirus.
What the wedding rebound could do is lay the groundwork for a brief post-pandemic baby bump, since couples often wait to exchange vows before they have children.
Lyman Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, tracks fertility intentions in surveys and keeps a close eye on state-level birth data. A baby bust that took hold after the pandemic started appears to be turning around, much faster than expected.
“It is a rapid return to normal,” Stone said. The nascent wedding rush “probably means that we have a couple of years here where we have somewhat more positive fertility than was previously expected.”
Lest onlookers get too excited, Stone points out that what was expected was a slow decline in births.
And Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, cautioned that the early signs of a fertility rebound could be a false signal, since the pandemic is still playing out, and it will take time to see how birth trends shape up.