Who we surveyed
We surveyed UK-based couples who got married between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2025, in any tradition (Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Jain, multi-faith). Couples who married outside the UK (destination weddings hosted abroad) were included where the planning was UK-based. International respondents and pre-2024 marriages were excluded from headline figures.
Recruitment
The 2026 edition is recruited primarily through:
- UK-focused diaspora communities — Reddit (
r/IndianWedding,r/SikhDiaspora, regional UK desi groups), Facebook community groups, WhatsApp networks of recently-married couples - Vendor distribution — UK photographers, decorators, planners on the Baraat directory share the survey with their past clients in exchange for a featured mention in the report
- Direct sharing by couples already on Baraat
No paid panel was used in the 2026 edition, which means the sample skews toward digitally-active, English-speaking couples in metropolitan areas (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Glasgow). We call this out explicitly because it under-represents older couples, smaller-city respondents, and couples whose families are less active online.
What we asked
The full survey is at /survey/state-of-south-asian-weddings-2026 — anyone can review the questions before responding. Questions cover: tradition, city, year of marriage, total cost (GBP), guest count, function count, multi-day Y/N, destination Y/N, cost breakdown across eight categories, format (which events ran), dietary mix, vendor sourcing channel, and two free-text reflection questions.
All numeric questions were optional — respondents can skip categories they don't have figures for. This intentionally trades coverage for honesty; we'd rather have 200 respondents who answered the cost question accurately than 500 who guessed.
Analysis
Headline cost and guest figures use the median (50th percentile), not the mean — wedding costs have a long tail and a single £400,000 outlier would distort an average. Where ranges are quoted, we report the interquartile range (P25–P75), which captures the middle 50% of respondents.
Percentage figures (multi-day, destination, halal-required, etc.) are calculated only over respondents who answered the relevant question — null responses are excluded from the denominator, not counted as “no”.
We sanity-clamp inputs server-side: total cost is capped at £1m (anything above is treated as a typo), guest count at 5,000, function count at 20. These bounds caught roughly 0.4% of submissions in pilot testing.
What we don't do
- We don't weight responses by demographics. The numbers reflect who responded, not the “true” UK South Asian population. We'll consider weighting if a future edition has a panel-based recruit alongside organic.
- We don't adjust costs for inflation across the 2024 vs 2025 cohort — both years are reported together. We'll separate them when sample size in each year is large enough.
- We don't pay respondents. Self-selection bias is a real limitation; we believe it's outweighed by the absence of paid-panel response inflation.
Honest caveats
The biggest weakness of this dataset is sample bias toward digitally-active couples — any number reading “UK average” should really be read as “average among UK couples who saw and chose to respond to a survey about wedding planning”. That cohort skews 28–38, urban, university-educated, and has a higher-than-typical comfort with self-disclosing wedding budgets. We expect 2026 figures to over-represent venue spend and under-represent the long tail of family-funded weddings.
The 2027 edition will address this with a paid panel top-up, recruited through Prolific or a comparable service, weighted to UK Census 2021 ethnicity and age distributions for British Asians. The 2026 edition should be cited with the qualifier “self-selected sample, recruited via online communities and the Baraatvendor network.”
Citing this report
For media use, please cite: “Baraat, The State of the South Asian Wedding 2026.” A canonical link to this report is welcome but not required. Underlying data, regional cuts, and a press contact are available via /press.