How many guests to invite

Everyone says that you'll be surprised who comes to your wedding and who doesn't. But right now I am just trying to figure out how many people FH and I can actually invite without going over our Maximum. Can you believe we don't have a minimum but a max number of people. Right now our RH gave us a strict rule of no more than 150 ppl including us. Our guest list is at 180ppl. We are thinking we are going to send invites out to family first and then to friends, so it's not like we actually have a b-list of guests. Our families are so big...and little kids are already not invited.

We do have a lot of factors that play into all of this.
Our wedding is in Philly and the only ones that live in PA are FH and I. All of his family is from CT and mine lives in Long Island and Florida. Sometimes we think having a wedding here is guaranteeing that X amount of ppl won't show up. But since philly is a historic and fun city, we think that maybe ppl will try to make a vacation out of it.

So after this long post my question is:
What is a safe number to invite if we can't go over 150 ppl?

TIA!!!

that's a toughie! i would consider doing an A & B list, and sending out the A's a little earlier...and for each 'No' you get, you send out a B list.

<--- as you can see by our invitation count, we are one of those instances where we are VERY surprised at who said yes, and all the 'No's' we got. so each situation is different!

OMG I'm having the same problem! My room max's out at like 140 so I'm trying to figure out how many invitations to send out that I won't go over that!

We're probably going to end up doing and B list and as the no's come in I'll send out the next invite on the list.

Initially though I think I'm going to start with sending out invitation for 150 people mabe? But what if they all say yes???

Ugh! Such a headache!

yes...a headache indeed. FH and I keep going back and forth whether to invite these distant cousins. We don't want to upset their parents (FFiL's brothers and/or sisters) by not inviting these cousins but I don't want to not have some of our friends who mean so much more to us.

It's like inviting guests praying they will decline. ahhh.
I know that in our families' weddings first cousins always get invited. But some of them FH hasn't seen in over 6 years.

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Posted by melissas28

Most RHs have told me to expect 15-20% of your guest list to send regrets.

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This really depends tho. I wouldn't believe that in all cases.

We invited 152 people and had 127 people show up. Four of the people who didn't come were relatives of mine that lived in Austria. We got married here, but DH's family is from ALL over hte country and my friends came from as far as ARGENTINA, so people will travel.

Anyway, we figured on the 15-20% rule and it totally wasn't true. Luckily for us it didn't have any reprucussions.

Honestly, if you can have 150, invite 150. But send your invites a little early so that you can invite more people as the no's come in. Just have response cards printed with a later date for the second batch.