On a recent, frigid Friday, soon-to-be newlyweds and their guests crowded the lobby of the City Clerk’s Manhattan office on Worth Street. Among them were Kathryn Flexner, 32, and Ian Underwood, 31, along with their witnesses: Kathryn’s parents, Susan and Peter; and their photographer, Rachel Rodgers.
After clerk Madeline Plasencia led the couple in an 84-second ceremony, the bride and groom didn’t head out to meet more guests at a lavish reception. The Underwoods took some more photos in the Marriage Bureau, and then their wedding was complete.
“Weddings have been so blown out of proportion,” the bride — now Kathryn Underwood — told Gothamist after her ceremony. “How do you create a unique and meaningful experience for yourself that feels different, feels individualized, and isn’t perpetuated by this notion of having to do something a particular way?”
The Underwoods’ municipal wedding, including the photographer, the City Clerk’s $25 fee, and the couples’ outfits, totaled around $1,000. Since they’re moving to Virginia soon, the West Village couple planned a staycation that will nudge their overall celebration costs closer to $10,000.
Danielle Krasniqi, 36, married her husband, Dylan Kammerer, in a backyard ceremony in May 2023 at their rented apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They then celebrated with over 200 guests in the gymnasium of the Salvation Army next door. She estimates the entire affair cost under $6,000.
“That is really attributed to our many, many, many loved ones who chipped in or donated their time or their expertise in whatever field so that we didn’t have to have to shell out,” Krasniqi said in a phone interview.
Krasniqi is proudly nontraditional — she proposed to Kammerer — but even she struggled to build a wedding divorced from others’ pricier expectations.
“It’s hard,” she said. “People are stuck on traditional things and what societal expectations have become around weddings.”
Those expectations come with a cost. According to the Knot’s 2023 Real Weddings Study, the average NYC nuptials cost $63,000, part of a larger upward trend in wedding spending. The costs are partly driven by the fact that many weddings are no longer one-day affairs.
“Guest experience is a top priority among couples getting married in the next year,” said Lauren Kay, the Knot’s executive editor, via email. A 2025 forecast by The Knot highlights weekend-long weddings that are “tightly-branded experiences” with “tailored welcomes and immersive events” for guests. (Read: very expensive for hosts.)
In fact, the average New York City wedding is so prohibitively expensive for some couples that local companies exist to fight against it, selling the promise of a lower-budget wedding.
Lia Semeritis started her business, Cakewalk, in 2023 to cater to couples looking for stylish, personalized weddings that wouldn’t break the bank or spiral into sprawling affairs. Cakewalk offers photography, location scouting, an officiant, planning, and marriage license arrangement for celebrations with up to 20 guests. Packages start at $3,000.
Semeritis knows the pressures modern brides face firsthand — her 2019 wedding doubled in budget, from $40,000 to $80,000, and found her anguishing over petty details.
“When my grandmother called me and she was like, ‘Lia, I just want you to be thinking about the length of the tablecloth that goes under the cake,’ that was when I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve made a mistake,’” Semeritis said in an interview.
Now, some of her clients come to her in similar states of distress.
“I get so much web traffic between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., and I get a fair amount of emails during those hours where someone literally says, ‘I’m gonna cancel my whole wedding. What you’re offering sounds exactly like what I want,’” Semeritis said.
Wedding Packages NYC specializes in “micro weddings,” meaning 50 or fewer guests. It offers wedding planning, an officiant, and a photographer in Central Park for $949. Couples can also add things like live instruments, hair and makeup styling, and a vintage checker cab for additional costs. (All of those amenities are already part of “The Everything Package,” which goes for $2,850.)
Veronica Moya, the owner of Wedding Packages NYC, told Gothamist via email that brides looking to downscale — like those behind Cakewalk’s late-night inquiries — account for about 10% of her clients.
Moya teams up with her husband, Bradley Lau, when in need of a rain location. Lau owns Love Chapel NYC, a tiny but glittering space on 56th Street. A “Standard Ceremony” package (30 minutes of chapel time with an officiant, no photographer included) goes for $400, and you can bring up to 20 guests. For comparison’s sake, it would cost parishioners $1,410 and non-parishioners $1,110 to get married at St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church on 49th Street.
Sadia Charles, 36 (now Sadia Charles-DeGazon), and Marshall DeGazon, 37, were married in a Standard Ceremony at Love Chapel NYC on Nov. 23. Their 19-year-old son, Jerquwan, was their witness.
Lau customized the ceremony to include a nod to the couple’s Christian faith, and the bride opted for a traditional walk down the aisle. Both of those things would not have been possible if the couple had wed through the City Clerk.
Their other guests were their three-year-old son, two of the bride’s friends (who also acted as photographer and videographer), and her stepfather. Afterwards, the party took pictures in nearby Central Park and celebrated with dinner at Hawksmoor on 22nd Street.
Charles-DeGazon estimated that they spent around $4,500 altogether.
“Growing up, you want fancy, you want everything, but what we did, to me, was sufficient,” Charles-DeGazon said in a phone interview. “I wanted more family members there, sure. But the setting, how intimate everything was — I think that’s exactly what I would want all over again, to be honest.”