Book the day first,
the invitation comes later.

Your wedding is competing for one Saturday against every other claim on your guests' year: other weddings, school half-terms, the holiday somebody books in January, a cousin's christening. The save the date exists because the invitation cannot go out early enough to win that competition. A year out you do not know the running order, the table plan, or whether the ceremony starts at two or three. You do know the day. So you send the day, and nothing else.

That is worth being strict about, because it explains every other rule here. A save the date is not a small invitation. It asks nothing back, carries no detail a guest has to act on, and should be impossible to misread as instructions.

The test is simple. If the only thing a guest does after reading it is open their calendar and block out a weekend, it has worked. If they reply, or start looking at hotels near the wrong town, it has done too much.

The rule has no exceptions: a save the date goes only to people who will definitely be invited. There is no polite way to withdraw one. If a guest holds a Saturday for a year, turns down something else for it, and no invitation ever arrives, that is a real injury, caused in writing.

So the certain part of the guest list has to be settled before a single card goes out. Most lists have a firm core and a hopeful edge: the colleagues and second cousins you would love to have if the venue holds a hundred rather than eighty. Save the dates belong to the core. If there is a version of your list where a name gets cut, that name does not get one — it gets an invitation later, and nobody ever knows the difference.

Address it exactly as you intend to invite. Name the partner rather than writing 'and guest', name children if children are coming, and leave a plus one off entirely if you have not decided, because an implied guest is as binding as a named one. The guest list guide works through who to invite and how to cut a list without falling out with anyone.

There is also no rule that everyone gets theirs on the same day. If half the list is certain and half is not, send to the certain half now.

Common practice is six to twelve months ahead, and eight to ten months is the usual choice for a wedding close to home. Much earlier than a year and people cannot really see the date yet. Much later than six months and you are arriving after the diary has been spoken for, which defeats the point of sending anything.

Two situations move that window, and both move it earlier. The first is a wedding abroad, or anywhere guests need a flight and a hotel. Twelve months is the floor and more is better: people book annual leave in January, and school terms are fixed a year out. Guests are spending money and holiday to attend, and the notice you give is the biggest single thing you control about how many of them say yes. The article on getting married abroad covers what else changes.

The second is a date everyone else wants: high summer, a weekend beside a public holiday, or a Saturday in a region with a short season. Your guests are receiving other people's save the dates for the same months, and the diary fills in the order things arrive.

If you are already inside six months, skip it. Two mailings in a short window is noise, and the second one carries all the information anyway.

The list is short: both names, the date, the town or region, and the words 'invitation to follow'. If you already have a page for the wedding, add its address. That is the whole thing. A save the date that takes more than ten seconds to read is doing somebody else's job.

Write the date out in full — 'Saturday 3 April 2027', not 03/04/2027. Across Europe the same six digits mean two different days, and for a guest who reads dates the American way round, the third of April becomes the fourth of March. The day of the week is worth including: it tells people whether they need a Friday off.

Give the town, not the venue address, unless the contract is signed. 'Near Bordeaux' or 'in Kraków' is enough for a guest to work out whether this involves a flight, a hotel and two days off. It also leaves you room to change venue without having misled anyone.

No start time: it will move, usually more than once, and a time printed a year early is a time somebody will remember and turn up to. No venue address if the booking is not signed. No dress code, because you do not yet know whether the reception is in a barn or a ballroom. No order of the day, no ceremony and reception split, no travel instructions, and no accommodation block you have not actually reserved.

No gift or registry information. In some places putting it on any invitation is thought poor form, and everywhere it is premature on a card whose only purpose is to reserve a day.

Above all, no RSVP. A save the date asks nothing, and if you give people a way to reply, they will. You would be holding answers given a year out, before anyone knew what the date would cost them in flights and leave, and you would have to ask again. Worse, the ones who said yes in April will feel they have already answered when the real invitation lands in December. Ask once, when the answer can be relied on.

A printed card is a lovely object, and it costs you three things: the address hunt, the lead time and the corrections. The address hunt is the part people underestimate: a postal address for every household, in the right format, a year early, is several evenings of messaging relatives. And if the venue moves, the card is wrong permanently and you have to tell everyone twice, which is worse than never having sent it.

Email and messaging apps solve the cost and the speed, but a picture attached to a message has the same flaw as the card. A JPEG is frozen the moment it is sent. Correcting it means sending everything again and hoping people notice the second one is the real version.

A link behaves differently, and that matters most for a save the date because it is the thing you send furthest ahead of the event. In Vowly Event the invitation is a live web address: change the date or the town and every guest sees the new version, including the ones who opened it in March. It comes with a QR code you can print, so a card posted to your grandmother and a message sent to a group chat point at the same page. The page reads in the guest's own language, in nine of them, and the event carries a calendar file, which is what gets a date into a phone rather than a mental list.

The same page then grows. A name, a date and a town becomes the guest page — schedule, directions, hotel suggestions, questions and answers — and the RSVP appears on it when you are ready to ask, not before. You send one address twice, and it says more the second time.

Keep it to a handful of words. A save the date has no argument to make, so the whole text should fit on a postcard with room to spare. Four versions, formal to relaxed, with hypothetical names to swap for your own.

Formal: 'Save the date. Anna Kowalska and Thomas Berg will be married on Saturday 3 April 2027 in Kraków. An invitation will follow.' This is the version that survives being read aloud by somebody's grandmother, and the safest choice when the two families barely know each other.

Warm: 'We are getting married. Saturday 3 April 2027, near Bordeaux. Please keep the day clear — the invitation is on its way.' Shorter still: 'Anna and Thomas. 3 April 2027. Bordeaux. Invitation to follow.' Four lines is not too few; it is the right length for a card that is reserving a square in a calendar.

Abroad: 'We are getting married in Puglia on Saturday 3 April 2027. Flights, hotels and everything else will come with the invitation in the autumn. For now, please hold the whole weekend.' That last sentence saves you a fortnight of individual messages, because guests booking flights need to know whether the Friday and the Sunday are in play before they can book anything.

The invitation is a separate piece of work months later, and the gap is deliberate. Common practice is to send it around eight to twelve weeks before the day, with longer notice where guests are travelling. If you are close enough to send a proper invitation, you do not need a save the date at all — there is a separate article here on when to send wedding invitations, with the timings set against the RSVP deadline and the caterer's final count.

Use the gap. It is when the guest list stops being a rough count and becomes a real list with names, spellings and addresses on it. If you keep that list in a spreadsheet, Vowly Event will import it: .xlsx or .csv, up to 500 rows, with a preview and column mapping so your headings do not have to match anything, and duplicate detection by name or email, which is how you find your aunt on the list twice under two surnames.

Guests will use the gap too. From the week your save the date lands, the questions start: what time does it begin, where should we stay, can we bring the children. If the save the date carried a link, the answers appear on that page as you settle them, instead of arriving one message at a time across four different apps.