On Friday 31 October, Sydney couple Liana and Tim will dress their nephews up in skeleton and dinosaur costumes and get married at the New South Wales registry. Liana will wear a black dress and veil and Tim has bought some Dracula fangs.

The couple will have lunch with 20 close family members and friends before the group heads to the Pyrmont Births, Deaths and Marriages office. The next day, they’re having a 110-person celebration at a venue near their home in Sydney’s north.

“It’s probably the wedding we would have done if we didn’t have parent help,” Tim says of the lunch and registry ceremony. “We’ve been pretty lucky because our parents have chipped in a fair bit. It wasn’t expected, but it was very welcome.”

More people are choosing registry weddings in Australia, with registry offices offering themed services like Liana and Tim’s Halloween vows to meet growing demand.

The price of a complete registry wedding in NSW can be as low as $480. This is a small fraction of the $35,315 industry directory service Easy Weddings estimates to be the average cost of an Australian wedding in 2025, up 4.5% from 2024.

Some couples, such as Liana and Tim, who did not want their surnames published, are having a second reception or bigger celebration after their registry service, while others are letting a government office handle everything.

Liana and Tim opted for a registry wedding to reduce costs and extra admin. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

Between 2021 and 2024 there was an 87% increase in the number of weddings arranged by the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Some of the boom can be attributed to the low number of weddings overall in 2021 due to the pandemic. However, the registry says it is still experiencing rising popularity, pointing to a 32% increase from 2,500 weddings performed in 2023, to 3,306 ceremonies in 2024.

In Victoria, the government is the largest provider of wedding ceremonies in the state. Its busiest year was 2023, with 4,566 couples married, followed by 2024 when 3,634 chose a government service at the Old Treasury Building in Melbourne. In Queensland, where the justice department says its $397.20 weekday weddings are especially popular, 2,243 couples were married at its registry last year.

Organising a private service is much more expensive. Easy Weddings’ general manager, Darcy Allen, says its 2025 survey – intended to inform the industry – found two-thirds of the 4,200 couples who filled out their survey received financial assistance from family and friends. The survey found 90% of couples preferred cash in lieu of wedding gifts. “It’s quite an integral part of wedding planning now,” Allen says.

The couples surveyed by Easy Weddings had everything from “micro” weddings with only a handful of guests right up to 500-person celebrations. Easy Weddings also surveyed 800 vendors and found venue hire to be the biggest expense, at $15,987 on average in 2025. This was followed by catering at an average cost of $6,308, photography at $3,389 and videography at $2,977.

Allan says many couples are opting for fewer guests, or forgoing “traditional elements” to cut costs.

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The average cost of a wedding cake in Easy Weddings’ 2025 survey was $650. “I’m seeing a lot of couples opt for no dessert in general,” Allen says. Those that do spring for dessert are “straying away from a traditional cake”, she says. “We’re seeing a lot of tiramisu towers come through at the minute.”

Liana and Tim say they always had a registry wedding in mind for their legal ceremony, partly because of the cost. “We’re not very traditional so we wanted to keep the next day a bit lighter and not have the admin side of things,” Liana says. “We … want it to be just all the fun bits of the wedding.”

‘We want it to be just all the fun bits of the wedding,’ says Liana. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

The couple budgeted $50,000 for their wedding and are on track to spend $47,000 across two days of celebration. The registry ceremony happened to fall on Halloween, so they’ve decided to embrace the “spooky” theme. The ceremony and lunch will cost about $3,000. “The rest is the next day,” Liana says. “And half of that or more is the venue and food and drinks.”

Liana says they have been “quite strict” to keep within their budget.

Another Sydney bride, Lara, says her 70-guest wedding in August of this year cost about $67,000. Like 28.6% of couples surveyed by Easy Weddings, Lara and her husband exceeded their budget, but she says they have no regrets.

Lara says they have always lived within their means and had an idea in their heads of how much they could spend, factoring in a “small contribution” from their families. They chose to get married in winter to save money on vendors – the Easy Weddings survey found spring is the most popular time of year to exchange vows, which drives up costs – and spent more on a band instead.

“We don’t own a house yet, so I think there will always be a little bit of us that will be like, ‘Oh, that money could have gone into a deposit,’” Lara says. “That’s our biggest … question, but outside of that, in terms of our day, we wouldn’t have done anything differently. It was perfect.”