Budget · August 2026

GST on Wedding Services in India 2026: What a ₹1 Crore Wedding Actually Pays in Tax

Most families build a wedding budget from quotes. Venue, catering, decor, photography, rooms. Then the invoices arrive and every line has grown, because almost nobody budgets the tax. On a ₹1 crore wedding, GST across the major heads can run ₹15-18 lakh depending on how the contracts are structured. That is not a rounding error. It is the single most forgotten line in family wedding budgets, and it is entirely predictable if you look at the published rates before you sign anything.

Start with the venue. Banquet or venue rental, billed on its own, attracts 18 percent GST. This is a well-sourced, standard rate in published tax explainers. So a ₹15 lakh rental line quietly becomes ₹17.7 lakh. Some venues never show you this because they do not bill rental separately at all — they fold everything into a per-plate price. That choice, made by the venue, changes your tax outcome, which brings us to catering.

Catering is where structure decides the rate. Under the rules in force since October 2019, when a hall and catering are supplied together as one composite package, the catering is typically taxed at 5 percent without input tax credit. A standalone caterer brought into a venue, or a bundled event-management package, can instead attract 18 percent with input tax credit. Same food, same guests, materially different tax. The contract is not paperwork to skim on the way to the tasting. The contract is the rate.

Guest rooms changed recently. Effective September 22, 2025, following the 56th GST Council meeting, hotel rooms below ₹1,000 a night are nil-rated, rooms from ₹1,000 to ₹7,500 attract 5 percent without input tax credit, and rooms above ₹7,500 attract 18 percent with input tax credit. The old 12 percent slab is gone, and the threshold is now tested on the actual price charged rather than the declared tariff. For a wedding block of 60 rooms over two nights, which side of ₹7,500 you land on is worth doing the arithmetic.

Decor and photography are simpler: both attract 18 percent as standalone services. The trap here is not the rate but the quoting convention. Some vendors quote inclusive of GST, many quote exclusive, and a few leave it ambiguous until the final invoice. A ₹20 lakh decor quote that turns out to be exclusive is really ₹23.6 lakh. Ask the question explicitly on every quote, and insist the answer appears on the invoice.

Put it together on a worked example. A ₹1 crore wedding might carry ₹40 lakh of catering, ₹15 lakh of rental, ₹20 lakh of decor, ₹10 lakh of photography and ₹15 lakh of rooms. Run the published rates across those heads and the GST line lands somewhere between ₹15 lakh and ₹18 lakh — the low end if catering sits in a 5 percent composite structure, the high end if services are billed standalone at 18 percent. Families who never budget this line feel it as mysterious cost overrun. It was never mysterious. It was on the rate card the whole time.

At Dream Weddings by TRIPN, the first conversation is the honest one: we put the tax line into the budget on day one, structured against the actual contracts, so the number you commit to is the number you pay. If a planner shows you a budget with no GST line, ask why. One caveat runs through everything above: these are published 2025-26 rates, and GST is a moving target. Confirm current rates with your chartered accountant — rules change.