There comes a time in every young woman’s life when she’s faced with a question that tests the limits of her love. Caught up in the euphoria of the moment, she squeals out a “Yes!”—only to later pause and consider the commitment, the financial entanglement, the sheer amount of her life she’ll be expected to devote to this person.
Will you be my bridesmaid? was once a simple request requiring maybe one night of doing shots with the bride and one day of sporting a pouffy dress with a modest neckline. But being a bridesmaid, for many young women, has metastasized into an 18-month affair featuring four-day retreats in destination accommodations, $800 gowns, an unpaid part-time job monitoring group chats and Venmo requests, and multiple showers (gifts technically optional, but socially mandatory). Last season, SNL captured inflation in the bridesmaid economy with a trailer for a bridesmaid-cult documentary. “I tried to say I couldn’t afford to go because of my student loans,” a traumatized-looking woman said about the bachelorette trip. “The maid of honor texted back ‘no worries!!!!!’ with a sparkle emoji. I knew what that meant. I sold my car to make it happen.”
[From the July/August 2023 issue: The fake poor bride]
I have been a bridesmaid every year for the past seven years. I have a savings account titled “[name]’s bachelorette & wedding.” It has never been closed—only replenished each time I edit the name from “Amy” to “Madison” to “Mary.” Other people’s weddings are a $2,500 line item in my annual budget, which brings my total spent on bridal-party duties to nearly $20,000. Have we reached peak bridesmaid? I desperately hope so, because I am a 27-year-old woman, and I have plenty of friends left who have yet to make it to the altar.
A recent report from Zillow found that the typical combined cost of going to one bachelorette party and one wedding is $2,010. That’s only $62 less than the average monthly rent in America. On that topic, the same study found that nearly half of Gen Zers and Millennials have made a housing sacrifice—living with an extra roommate or renting a smaller apartment—to be able to afford others’ wedding events. Let me repeat that—half of Gen Zers and Millennials say that they are sacrificing the quality of their housing to celebrate someone else’s wedding.
If you’re a bridesmaid, the price tag is higher. According to the Knot’s most recent data, from 2023, the average bachelorette party lasts two days and costs $1,300, before factoring in any travel costs (a $600 increase from 2019). For bachelorette trips that require guests to fly, the average is $2,000. And these numbers don’t include the sneaky expenses that really tank you—the countless Venmo requests, the tacky party decor, the “heavily encouraged” professional makeup and hair, the coordinated outfits, the text from the maid of honor reading “Wait! I have the cutest idea!” (It’ll only cost you another $200.)
[Read: A wedding reveals how much help is really available to you]
The friends I polled reported spending upwards of $3,000 on being a bridesmaid. But many pay more. Allison Odhner, the CEO of Bach to Basic, a luxury-bachelorette-party-planning company, told me she has organized trips that cost more than $10,000 a head.
When she started her company, in 2016, Odhner put together bachelorette weekends that cost just $300 a person. She would buy decorations at HomeGoods to ship to the brides. Now, she said, no one sets up their own decor. Odhner charges a flat rate for her services, as many wedding planners do. But there are tiers. At the high end, brides can pay for Odhner herself to be there all weekend—your personal bachelorette concierge.
And when the weekend is over, her company provides another important service: It invoices each bridesmaid for exactly what she owes.
Bridesmaid inflation isn’t just affecting the cost of each wedding; it’s also driving up the number of times a woman might be expected to be a bridesmaid. If you haven’t been to a wedding in a while, you might think, Okay, there’s the maid of honor, the best man, and then maybe three more friends on each side. Not anymore! Data on the size of wedding parties are hard to find, but anecdotally, they’re booming. When the pandemic hit, in 2020, the bridal industry scaled back. Many ceremonies could accommodate only a few dozen guests, and many wedding parties were narrowed down to the best man and the maid of honor. “I really was convinced that it was the death of the bridal party,” Sarah Schreiber, a former editor at Brides magazine who now consults on weddings and gives “tough-love wedding advice” on TikTok, told me. She said that, for a while, she imagined a wedding culture defined by minimalism and intentionality. But that’s not what happened. “One of my clients just came back from a wedding where there were 30 people in that bridal party.”
At a wedding this summer in Mississippi, I witnessed the boom firsthand from a church pew. The altar was flooded in a sea of pastels. Seventeen bridesmaids smiled forcibly at the crowd, elbows touching. I started to get a bit offended that I wasn’t up there. I mean, my God, was I even in this girl’s top 50?
In the South, many brides choose “honorary bridesmaids” in addition to their official ones. These women don’t stand with the bride at the altar, but they get ready with the bride, wear matching or coordinated dresses, and sit in the front row for the ceremony. Add your bridesmaids and honorary bridesmaids together, and you’re talking 20, 30 women—almost half of a sorority pledge class.
[Read: It’s time to stop inviting plus-ones to weddings]
The honorary bridesmaid’s most important job, however, is to go on the bachelorette weekend. This results in what is perhaps the most insulting part of the bridesmaid boom. The bride’s intention in inviting all these second-tier friends (including women who don’t even rank as “honorary”) may be that she just can’t bear to “exclude” anyone, but there’s also a more practical reason to increase the guest list. If you’re splitting the price of a rental house, more guests brings the cost down for everyone. A friend of mine who recently served as one of these non-bridesmaid bridesmaids flew across the country and dropped thousands of dollars on a bachelorette weekend. “Big regret,” she told me. Like many honorary bridesmaids, she didn’t feel that honored. It’s like the bride is saying: You don’t matter enough to stand beside me on my wedding day, but I do expect you to pay $2,000 to join me for binge drinking in Nashville.
A male friend once described my bridesmaid frustrations as “the most self-inflicted wound to ever exist.” He had a point. I am an adult who has agency over how she spends her money. But saying no to a close friend when she’s talking about her wedding is a delicate process.
“No one’s really permitted” to decline, Selena Coppock, the comedian behind the parody X account @NYTvows, told me. If you do, “there are major repercussions that affect the friendship.” One of Coppock’s most viral posts was a 2016 tweet that reads: “‘I married my best friend,’ gushed the bride, standing next to 6 women who spent $3K apiece to support & celebrate her in that life event.” In 2023, she posted an updated version of the tweet that accounted for bridesmaid inflation—she bumped the figure to $8,000. A support group was born in the comments section, in which former bridesmaids mourned their savings accounts.
Here’s a question for brides: Why are you making your friends suffer so much?
I asked Schreiber to tell me what she’d say to brides who are navigating the madness of bachelorette culture. “It’s really hard to break the cycle,” she said, especially if you’re one of the last of your friends to get married. “When it’s your turn, isn’t it fair for them to drop everything and come celebrate you?” But “that’s the type of psychology that’s kept us in this inflated world.” If your friends have already gone on 10 bachelorette trips, they’re just not going to be that excited. “Life isn’t fair,” she said, and “people have budgets.”
One way for brides to think about it, she said, is to realize that they’re also the host—for the wedding and the bachelorette party. It’s just not polite to make people pay what they can’t afford to celebrate you. (I’m talking to you, bride who made her bridesmaids split the cost of the cocaine she brought on her bachelorette weekend—even if the friends didn’t partake.) “You claim to love these people, so let’s treat them like you love them.”
Schreiber predicts that the bridesmaid insanity will cap out soon. She thinks that Taylor Swift’s wedding—which promises to be the event of the century—will be the peak. (Swift has said that everyone she’s ever talked to will be getting an invite.) After that, she thinks we’ll see a resurgence of smaller festivities. “After a period of so much excess and oversharing, I think the idea of keeping things quiet and restrained is going to come back,” she told me.
Coppock agrees. “Every bubble has to pop at some point,” she told me. “I wonder if eventually this will all be seen as cringe, if it will feel very ostentatious and tacky to be caught in the streets of Nashville wearing T-shirts that say Bride Tribe. But it’s hard to buck the trend.”
[Read: Welcome to wedding sprawl]
I know some people who are already trying to do that. One of my friends has been a bridesmaid in seven weddings over the past two years, most of which have included upwards of 15 bridesmaids. At the beginning, she made a hard decision: She wasn’t going on a single bachelorette trip. “I feel guilty every single time,” she told me. “You always feel like the shitty friend.” But she’s saved more than $10,000.
One woman I met who told me she skips every bachelorette she’s invited to has invented a brilliant hack—she records a video of herself taking a “shot” (of water) and sends it to the bride and bridesmaids, along with $50 for drinks. Sins atoned.
Madeline Kuluz was 21 when she first sported an overpriced chiffon gown in a friend’s wedding. Eleven years later, she’s been a bridesmaid or maid of honor in 13 weddings and been on more than 20 bachelorette trips.
She is from Olive Branch, Mississippi, and at first, the celebrations were manageable. “We would go to the casinos on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the night,” she told me. But around 2016, the trips started getting bigger, the destinations more expensive. She once had to pay for a Carnival cruise to Cozumel, Mexico, while she was still in law school and earning no salary. “That cost me $873,” she told me. “That number is seared into my brain.” She estimates that she spent a minimum of $2,500 on each wedding. The times when she was a maid of honor, she spent more than $3,500. For years, she couldn’t afford to take any vacations of her own. She was, in large part because of weddings, “drowning in credit-card debt.”
A few years ago, when it was her turn to say “I do,” she decided to abstain from the festivities entirely. She and her husband had a choice: They could have a wedding or pay off her bridesmaid debt. They chose to pay off the debt. They eloped, and then “went to New York City for the weekend.”
Her friends were angry—what did she mean, no wedding? Every bride gets a wedding! Perhaps, they felt that attending her wedding was the only way they could expunge the guilt they felt for making her shell out thousands for their own. “They would ask me why,” she told me. “I was like, did anyone ever ask you why you were having a wedding?”
It’s a question that more of us should ask ourselves about a tradition that demands so much not just from the betrothed, but from their single friends as well.
In the end, all of the debt that Kuluz amassed to make those brides happy lasted longer than some of the friendships themselves. Out of the 13 women Kuluz was a bridesmaid for, she remains close with only four.
