Nothing says "til death do us part" like going into debt over imported flowers that cost 30% more than they did two years ago. Wedding spending jumped 8.5% in 2026, according to a Bank of America Institute analysis of payment data, as tariffs and inflation combine to make the happiest day of your life also one of the most financially devastating. The average wedding now costs $36,000. Let that number sit with you for a second.
The Bill Keeps Growing and It's Not Just Inflation
The Bank of America report tracked real credit and debit card spending across wedding categories: venues, catering, photography, florists, apparel. These aren't luxury upgrades couples are choosing. These are the baseline costs of throwing a wedding, and they are all going up.
CBS News reports that the 8.5% spike reflects two overlapping disasters hitting at the same time. One is broad-based inflation, which hit 4.2% annualized in May, its highest point in over three years. The other is the specific, targeted damage done by President Trump's tariff policies to imported goods that happen to show up at basically every wedding ever held.
Flowers. Chocolate for the dessert table. Cocoa in the wedding cake. If it crosses a border before it crosses your banquet hall threshold, someone upstream paid a tariff on it, and that someone passed the cost straight to the couple writing the checks.
Thirty-Six Thousand Dollars. For One Day.
In 2025, the average American wedding cost $36,000, up $3,000 from the year before, according to Bank of America citing data from registry site Zola. That is not a typo. Thirty-six thousand dollars. The median American household income is somewhere around $80,000. Couples are spending nearly half of a year's income on a single event.
For context, Bank of America points out that wedding costs now rival those of buying a car. Which is a completely wild comparison, except that it's accurate, and a car is something you can actually use on Tuesday.
And 2026's 8.5% jump means this year's couples are spending even more. The $36,000 figure is already last year's number. If you're planning a wedding right now, you're almost certainly looking at something north of that, before you've even picked a venue or hired a photographer.
Geography Is Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting Here
The Bank of America report found that wedding spending by couples in the South grew five times faster than spending by couples in the Midwest. Five times. That is not a small regional variance. That is a fundamentally different economic experience of the same national moment.
Bank of America floats two explanations: regional cost-of-living differences, or different wedding styles between regions. Both are probably true and neither changes the underlying math. Southern couples are getting hit harder, full stop.
What the report does not say, but what hangs over all of this, is that tariff impacts are not uniformly distributed across the country either. Agricultural goods, floral imports, and food supply chains vary by region. Some of what looks like a Southern wedding spending surge is almost certainly a Southern tariff exposure problem wearing a flower crown.
Gen Z Is Getting Married. Millennials Already Did (or Gave Up).
Here is an interesting demographic wrinkle buried in the Bank of America data: Gen Z weddings have tripled since 2019, while millennial weddings dropped roughly 20% over the same period. The report frames this as the marriage milestone "shifting to younger Americans," which is a polite way of saying millennials either already got married or quietly stopped believing they could afford to.
This matters for the cost story because Gen Z is entering the wedding market right as prices are at their worst. They did not have the option of getting married in 2018 when a $36,000 price tag would have seemed absurd. This is just what weddings cost now, and they're learning that in real time.
The one bright spot in the data, if you want to call it that: more couples are choosing lab-grown diamonds over natural stones, CBS News reports, which Bank of America reads as a sign that people are hunting for savings wherever they can find them. When the ring is the budget item you're cutting corners on, things have gotten genuinely tight.
The Dingo Take
Let's be direct about what the Bank of America report is actually describing. It is describing a White House trade policy that is making it more expensive to get married. Not metaphorically. Literally. The tariffs that were sold to Americans as a tough negotiating tool and an economic masterstroke are showing up in florist invoices and wedding cake quotes. Couples planning the most expensive day of their lives are now budgeting for the cost of the president's import fees as a line item. That is what winning looks like.
The 4.2% inflation figure is the part that should make people angrier than they seem to be. That is the highest annualized inflation rate in more than three years, in a year when the administration promised tariffs would strengthen the economy and bring prices down. Instead, prices are up, confidence is rattled, and people are swapping out real diamonds for lab-grown ones just to keep the total bill under some version of manageable. This is not a prosperity story. It is a coping strategy story.
Somewhere right now, a couple in Georgia is sitting at a kitchen table going through wedding quotes and realizing that the flower budget they set eight months ago does not work anymore. They are not thinking about trade deficits or geopolitical leverage or the long game of reshoring American manufacturing. They are thinking about whether they can still afford peonies. And the answer, in the year 2026, is increasingly no.
