---
title: 'When to send your invitations'
description: 'Save the date at twelve months, invitations at three, replies at six weeks. What each deadline is actually protecting, and how to fix a late start.'
source: 'https://envelope.love/blog/when-to-send-wedding-invitations'
category: 'Planning'
published: '2026-05-28'
updated: '2026-05-28'
---

# When to send your invitations

Save the date at twelve months, invitations at three, replies at six weeks. What each deadline is actually protecting, and how to fix a late start.

This is the plain markdown copy of https://envelope.love/blog/when-to-send-wedding-invitations, published by Love Envelope for machine readers. The page itself carries the same words.

Every timeline you will read gives roughly the same numbers. What they rarely explain is what each date is protecting, which is the only way to know which one you can move.

## The timeline

- **Twelve to nine months.** Save the date. Protects travel and annual leave.
- **Four to three months.** The invitation itself. Protects your reply date.
- **Ten weeks.** Reply deadline. Protects the caterer’s number.
- **Six weeks.** Chase the silent ones.
- **Two weeks.** Final numbers to the venue, and the day’s detail to the guests.

Two adjustments. If the wedding is abroad, or over a bank holiday, push everything a month earlier. If nearly all your guests are local, you can compress the whole thing and lose nothing.

## What each date is really doing

**The save the date protects flights and leave.** That is its entire function. It needs two names, one date and a town, and nothing else at all. Send it before people book their summer.

**The invitation protects the reply date.** Guests do not answer on receipt, they answer at the deadline, and a proportion answer after it. Sending three months out gives you room for that to happen and still be fine.

**The reply date protects the caterer.** This is the only date in the list with money attached, and it is usually set by a contract rather than by you. Work backwards from it. Whatever your final numbers date is, put your reply date at least three weeks before it, because you will spend those three weeks chasing.

## Sending late

Plenty of couples end up here and it is far less damaging than it feels. What breaks a late invitation is not the date, it is the silence beforehand.

1. **Tell them today.** A message that says the date and nothing else, sent tonight, protects the diary while you finish the invitation.
2. **Ask for a faster reply.** Two weeks rather than four, and say why in one clause.
3. **Chase earlier.** A week after sending, not three.

Digital sending helps here for one reason above all others: there is no print run and no post between deciding and arriving. There is more on that in [the guide to digital invitations](https://envelope.love/blog/digital-wedding-invitations-guide).

## The order things have to happen in

The reason invitations go out late is almost never the invitation. It is the four decisions that have to be finished first.

1. **The final guest list.** Including the arguments. Nothing can be sent while one household is still undecided.
2. **The venue and the ceremony time.** Both, exactly.
3. **The reply deadline.** Which means reading the catering contract.
4. **What you are saying about gifts, children and dress.** These three hold up more invitations than anything else, because each one needs a conversation.

Do those four and the invitation itself is an afternoon. [The full checklist](https://envelope.love/blog/invitation-checklist) lays out the rest of it in order.

## Two dates people forget

**Two weeks before.** Send the day’s detail: timings, parking, where the taxis go, what the weather is doing to the plan. Guests have long since lost the original card, so this is genuinely the information they will use.

**The week after.** Thank you notes are easiest written while you still remember who gave what and who drove four hours.

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