Some wedding photography statistics and estimates

According to this web page, there are 2.4 million weddings per year in the United States, generating “over 60 billion dollars a year in wedding and ceremony related expenses.”

The same source states that wedding photography averages 6.6% of wedding spending, so wedding photography is a $4 billion industry.

How many wedding photographers are there? Well if two-thirds of the weddings have a professional photographer, and each photographer averages 20 weddings per year, then there are 90,000 wedding photographers. That means there are five times as many wedding photographers as there are actuaries in the U.S.

But how many of these wedding photographers are making six figure incomes? Alas, probably not too many. You need to charge a lot more than $2,000 per wedding to be a six figure wedding photographer. The six-figure wedding photographer needs to charge $8,000 per wedding, and if he clears $6,000 net income per wedding, and shoots only 20 weddings per year, then his income is $120,000 per year.

But there are top wedding photographers who shoot one wedding per week, and have a low paid staff to do the dirty work like photoshopping the pictures and putting albums together. These top guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Are amateurs with digital cameras threatening the industry? Not for the top guys. The people who are paying for six-figure weddings will always be willing to spend in excess of $10,000 on photography for the wedding (as long as people continue to believe that photography is a "required" part of a wedding).