Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

Getting married is a postcode lottery

It's official - where a person lives affects the age they get engaged and married, and even who plans most of the wedding, according to a survey released today.

The survey, for Wedding Invitation UK, shows that the youngest people in the UK to get engaged and married are in Northern Ireland. With the average age to get engaged in the region at 21.3 years and then to marry at 22.6 years, they beat the national average hands down (23.5 years and 24.9 years respectively).

Bringing up the rear is Scotland and the North who do the whole getting married thing the slowest and oldest. The average age for someone in Scotland to get engaged is 24.1 years and from the North it is 24.3 years. They then both marry at 25.8 years – eleven months older than the national average.

People in the South get engaged quite young, at 22.9 years, but don’t marry until 24.8 years, one month short of the national average. Midlands folk are pretty average when they get engaged at 23.8 years and married at 24.2 years, but stand out from the crowd by having the longest engagements of the whole country at 22.2 months.

Kevin McNamee, of Wedding Invitation UK, who commissioned the survey, says: “Before this survey I didn’t realise just how much the region you lived in had an affect on getting married – it’s such a postcode lottery. Our clients come from all over, even overseas, but the survey results clearly show where the hotspots are, especially if you want a short engagement* or to wait a while until getting married**.”

* = Northern Ireland at 14.8 months / ** = Scotland and the North at 25.8 years

When it comes to planning the big day (see Notes to Editors for anecdotes) an average 65% of brides take on this role with the bride and groom sharing the work equally in 21% of cases. Grooms in the South or Scotland can heave a huge sigh of relief as only 3% of them do most of the planning (as opposed to 13% in Northern Ireland). Across the UK, the answers for “Who did most of the planning?” came out as:

1.Bride (65%)
2.Bride and groom equally(21%)
3.Mother / Mother-in-Law (7%)
4.Other (other family member / wedding planner) (2%)
5.Groom (5%)

It takes an average of 6.8 months to plan a wedding, but the Scots take over a year at 12.5 months. Next comes Northern Ireland at 7.8 months, followed by the North and Midlands at 6.7 and 6.5 months respectively. It takes, on average, just 5.6 months to plan a wedding in the South.


For further info, contact:

Lindsey Collumbell, Director, Bojangle Communications Ltd
Tel: 01372 274975
Mob: 0771 7744719
Email: lindsey@bojangle.co.uk

Kevin McNamee, Wedding Invitation UK – http://www.weddinginvitationuk.co.uk
Tel: 0115 938 4711
(Kevin McNamee is available for interviews)

Notes to Editors:

Wedding planning anecdotes gathered during the survey:

• Gerard, 32, an IT business owner from Chard, Somerset. ‘She was 35 minutes late because the roof rack fell off the car in front so I thought she wasn’t coming… very funny in retrospect!’

• Roger, 47, a taxi driver from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. ‘Planning weddings is the kind of thing women like to do – men just take a back seat.’

• Victoria, 30, an office administrator from Perton, Staffordshire. ‘We had to plan our wedding two years in advance because we wanted a specific venue and it was very busy on Saturdays.’