How Much Money to Give at a French Wedding in 2026
In short
- The working convention is €50 to €80 for a colleague, €80 to €150 for a friend, €150 to €300 for close family, and €200 to €300 if you are a témoin.
- Unlike every other country in this series, France has never surveyed what guests actually give. Treat any confident average you read, including ours, as convention rather than measurement.
- What is measured: a French wedding costs €215 per guest, of which the caterer is €110.
- If you are invited only to the vin d’honneur you are not going to the wedding dinner, and the amount changes completely. Check which invitation you have.
Every other country in this series has a number somebody has counted. Spain has a sector report, Ireland has a poll of four thousand people, Korea has bank records. France has an unusually precise picture of what weddings cost and no measurement at all of what guests put in the envelope, which is worth saying plainly rather than inventing a figure to fill the gap.
That absence is not an oversight. It follows directly from how the French do this.
What is actually known
The Rapport sur le Secteur Nuptial 2026, run by Mariages.net across 1,304 couples married in 2025, puts the average French wedding at €19,293 excluding the ring and the honeymoon, for around 90 guests. That works out at €215 per guest, with the caterer alone taking €110 of it. Just over half of couples, 51%, went past their budget, and only 33% kept to it.
The two halves of that are moving in opposite directions, which is worth noticing. The total budget fell about 3% against 2024 while the cost per guest rose, because the average guest list shrank from 97 people to 90. French couples are not spending less on you. They are inviting fewer of you and spending more on each.
So the cost side is firm. A seat at a French wedding costs about €215 and the food on it costs about €110.
What nobody has established is what guests give against that, and this is where the widely repeated “€150 per person” figure comes from: not from research but from a convention that wedding sites copy from one another. It is a reasonable convention. It is not a finding.
The bands, offered as convention
| Your relationship to the couple | Typical amount |
|---|---|
| Colleague or acquaintance | €50 to €80 |
| Friend | €80 to €150 |
| Cousin, aunt, uncle | €100 to €200 |
| Close family | €150 to €300 |
| Témoin or wedding party | €200 to €300 |
| Invited to the vin d’honneur only | €30 to €50 |
| Student, any relationship | €50 |
A couple gives once, at roughly one and a half times the solo figure.
Anchor yourself against €110, the caterer’s cost per head, rather than against €215. France has no cover-your-plate expectation in the Polish or Romanian sense, and a friend giving €100 has done nothing wrong at a wedding that cost twice that per seat.
The vin d’honneur is a different invitation
This is the trap, and it has no equivalent in Britain or the United States.
A French wedding often runs in two parts. The vin d’honneur is a drinks reception after the ceremony, an hour or two of champagne and canapés, and the invitation list for it is wide: neighbours, colleagues, the extended village. The dîner afterwards is smaller, seated, long, and frequently goes until dawn.
Plenty of guests are invited to the first and not the second, and this is completely ordinary rather than a slight. If your invitation names only the vin d’honneur, you are costing the couple a glass of champagne rather than €215, and €30 to €50 is the correct amount. Giving €150 for a canapé is not generous, it is a misreading.
The invitation will usually make the distinction with a time and a place rather than with words, so if you are unsure, ask whoever invited you. Nobody will think less of you for checking, and the alternative is turning up to a dinner you were not counted for.
The urne and the cagnotte
There is rarely a moment when you hand money to anyone.
At the reception there will be an urne, a decorated box, a birdcage, a postbox, sometimes a tree with pegs, sitting on a table near the entrance. Envelopes and cards go into it and the couple open them days later. Nobody watches, which is the point.
The liste de mariage at a department store has largely given way to the cagnotte, an online pot the couple set up and share by link, often pointed at the honeymoon or the house. If a couple send you a cagnotte link, that is the mechanism they want and using it is neither cold nor lazy.
Where both exist, either is fine. Where neither has been mentioned, the urne will be there on the day and cash in a card is always safe.
Write a card. France takes the written word around a wedding more seriously than the amount, and a bare envelope with notes in it reads as unfinished in a way it would not in Korea or Poland.
Témoins, and the collective gift
The témoins are the legal witnesses and the closest thing France has to a wedding party. They give more, €200 to €300 and often above, and they are usually the people organising something collective on the side, a group present, a contribution towards a trip.
If a collection is going round among friends, that is normally the whole of your obligation and you do not give twice. Ask what the total per head is and pay it, rather than adding an envelope on top and quietly inflating the norm for everyone else.
If you are the foreign guest
The French dinner is long and the toasts and animations run late, so treat the invitation as covering a full night rather than an evening.
On the money, the useful thing to hold onto is that France is not doing arithmetic. There is no plate to cover, no ledger being kept, and no figure your envelope will be measured against, which is precisely why nobody has ever bothered to survey it. €100 from a friend is correct and unremarkable, and the card you write will be read more carefully than the amount inside it.
Frequently asked questions
How much money do you give at a French wedding?
€80 to €150 as a friend, €150 to €300 as close family, €50 to €80 as a colleague, and €200 to €300 as a témoin. These are conventions rather than survey figures, because no French study of guest amounts exists.
Is €100 enough for a French wedding?
Yes. It sits inside the normal band for a friend and covers the €110 the caterer charges per head almost exactly.
What is a vin d’honneur invitation worth?
€30 to €50. A vin d’honneur is a drinks reception after the ceremony and does not include the wedding dinner, so the gift scales down accordingly.
Do I have to cover the cost of my meal at a French wedding?
No. France has no cover-your-plate rule. The average guest costs the couple €215, and nobody expects an envelope to match it.
What is an urne at a French wedding?
A decorated box near the entrance where guests leave cards and envelopes. There is no moment of handing money to the couple, and the urne is opened privately after the day.
Should I use the couple’s cagnotte instead of cash?
Yes, if they have shared one. More than 60% of French couples now use an online pot rather than a store list, and contributing to it is exactly what they are asking for.