When Should I Send Out Save the Date Cards for my Wedding?

Words by Utterly Printable

As you may expect there is a proper etiquette to sending out traditional wedding stationery. When it comes to timings you need to be clued in as to when to send out your save the date designs.

Floral save the date for weddings

What is the Timeline?

Depending on a few criteria, save the date cards need to be sent out about 6 to 12 months before the wedding. Obviously, if you don’t have that much time before your wedding you either need to crack on with your classic wedding invitation, or design a save the date online as soon as possible. In general, save the dates are a great piece of printed wedding stationery that gives people notice of your upcoming nuptials and, of course, the fact that they are invited to share the day with you.

Destination Weddings

Destination weddings require somewhat more in the way of planning than local weddings. Generally, they tend to be smaller affairs and you may not have as many friends and family coming. But for those key people that you definitely do want to attend, you should be looking to give them 6 to 12 months’ notice with your save the date card. They are going to need to book hotels, flights, and make arrangements for childcare if you’re not inviting children.

Local Weddings

You know your guests better than anyone else. If you’re getting married in your hometown, and most of your guests live there too, you can actually downgrade the time for sending the save the date card to between four and six months. People still need to arrange certain things, and if you are planning a wedding in peak holiday season you are politely asking people not to go away when you are getting married. So, giving them a warning is only fair. If you know you have a lot of guests travelling to the venue who will be looking to spend the night, and possibly even stay longer then pushing to 6 months is better if you can possibly squeeze that into your timings.

But We Don’t Know All the Details!

When it comes to wedding save the date cards, you do not need to have everything set in stone. The only thing you need to have is the date and an idea of the location. It doesn’t matter if you are still trying to decide on location as long as you know roughly what geographical area it’s going to be in. It is kind of a preliminary invite to establish that people will be around on the day you have invited them. It can be as simple as the name of the bride and groom, a town, and the date. And the lack of details gives you the opportunity to have fun with the design. We particularly love our range of cheap photo save the dates. They’re perfect for holding a lovely photo of you and your partner.

Save the date for wedding with photo

We here are Utterly Printable are striving to be the best place to buy save the dates. Not only do we pride ourselves on our range of affordably printed cards, but we also now have a range of gorgeous online wedding save the dates. As part of our wider online invitation collection, we now offer save the date cards for SMS and WhatsApp. They’re incredibly quick and easy to send out and end up being very cheap relative to a classic save the date. We definitely recommend you take a look!

Text message save the date card