The 2026 Australian Celebrant Survey

Five findings

1. Nine in ten celebrants do more than weddings. 90.2% offer at least one other ceremony type — most often vow renewals, baby naming or funerals.
2. For seven in ten, celebrancy is not the main income. 71.8% earn their main income elsewhere. That only reverses above 41 weddings a year.
3. Paying for software tracks volume. 41.2% of celebrants doing 1–5 weddings a year pay for any business software. At 41 or more, it is 85.5%. The climb is not smooth — it dips in the middle — but the two ends are a world apart.
4. Cost is the dominant objection — and it is not a small-operator complaint. Roughly six in ten name cost, and it runs between 52% and 68% at every volume band.
5. Complexity is a much bigger objection than it looks. 21.8% name difficulty of use. And worry about the effort of switching is concentrated among the busiest, most established celebrants — the ones with something to move — not the quietest ones.

Who Australian celebrants are

Wedding volume across the sample runs from 1 to 150 a year, and the distribution has weight at both ends rather than bunching in the middle.

Celebrancy is the main source of income for 28.2% of respondents. For the remaining 71.8% it sits alongside other work. That split is strongly related to volume: below 40 weddings a year, main-income status runs around one in ten, and it only becomes the majority case in the 41-and-over band, where it reaches 69.4%.

Most celebrants are not only wedding celebrants

Almost every respondent does weddings. Almost every respondent does something else as well — which is what a wedding count on its own will always miss.

The most common single combination is weddings, funerals, vow renewals and baby naming together, held by 18.4% of respondents. That has a practical consequence for anyone reading a celebrant's wedding count as a measure of their business: it isn't one. A celebrant doing five weddings a year may be doing a great deal of other ceremony work.

Who pays, and who doesn't

60.7% use some paid business software and 61.5% use something free. 21.4% — 50 of the 234 — use neither. This survey asked whether celebrants use free or paid tools, never which: it cannot say what products are in use or what anyone spends, and nothing here should be read as market share.

Where it gets interesting is who those payers are.

By income status the same pattern holds: 83.3% of celebrants for whom this is the main income pay for software, against 51.8% of those for whom it is not.

Read together with the volume distribution, that describes two quite different businesses sharing one job title — and the gap between them is wider than the job title suggests.

What stops them

Respondents were asked, in their own words, what would stop them using software of this kind. Every answer was coded twice, independently, against a codebook written before coding began. The two passes agreed on 92.7% of responses outright (Cohen's κ 0.84–1.00 per theme); disagreements were reconciled individually. Answers often carry more than one theme, so the column does not total 100%.

Scroll the table sideways →

* Cost is shown as an approximate share deliberately. Coding free text is a judgement, and three defensible methods put this theme between 56% and 61% — the ordering of these themes is solid, the decimals are not. Device or platform compatibility is shown as a count rather than a percentage: three respondents is too few for a percentage to mean anything.

Cost is not a small-operator complaint

The intuitive assumption is that price objections come from celebrants doing a handful of ceremonies a year. The data does not support it. Cost is named at every volume band, and the lowest share is not among the quietest celebrants — 1–5 weddings: 62% · 6–10: 68% · 11–20: 68% · 21–40: 52% · 41+: 58%.

It is the one objection that does not care how big your business is.

The busiest celebrants worry most about switching

Concern about the effort of moving systems runs the opposite way to what you might expect. Among celebrants doing 41 or more weddings a year, 13 of 62 named it — 21%. In every band below that, three respondents or fewer did. The same pattern appears by income: 18% of those for whom celebrancy is the main income, against 5% of those for whom it isn't.

The people with the most established practices — and the most to move — are the most reluctant to move it. Those two groups overlap heavily but are not the same measure, and both point the same way.

In their own words

"cost especially when you only do a couple of weddings a year"

"Cost and difficulty accessing it. I don't do many ceremonies so subscription would make me think twice."

"if it was too expensive - i think it should be tiered according to the amount of weddings a celebrant completes each year"

"Value for money. For around 25 weddings a year I have my system streamlined and would most likely not be interested."

"Cost... and I'd want a long enough trail period to really test the functionality - and it would have to integrate with QLD BDM or there would still be double handling of the important information, therefore an increased margin for error."

"Ease or lack of using it. A lot of us celebrants who have been doing this for 15+ years are old, please have pity on us"

"If it were too complicated or the screens were too busy. Not able to use over multiple devices."

"Multiple logins and systems"

"System frequently going down (perhaps the system could somehow be available offline too so in the event it goes down, basic data and info could be accessed - perhaps in some kind of back up). … If there were ever issues with a client accessing a different clients portal (that would be a big no no, for privacy purposes)"

"Cybersecurity concerns"

"It took me ages to set up my Dubsado! Knowing I would have to go through that process again and get to know a new systems puts me off using a new one, but I'd do it if it was truly going to be a better platform for me."

"If it ain't broke...!"

"absolutely no need nor requirment for such software."

"if it required extra and repetitive data entry, the less key strokes the better"

"Nothing. I would pay good money for the all in one convenience."

What they expect it to cost

Respondents were asked what they thought software of this kind would cost per month. This is a guess at market price, not a statement of what any respondent would pay — the two are not the same thing, and this figure should never be described as willingness to pay.

Expectations rise only modestly with volume: a $20 median in the quieter bands against $30 among the busiest. Even celebrants doing more than 40 weddings a year mostly expect a purpose-built tool to cost somewhere between $30 and $50 a month.

How this survey was run

234 responses from Australian marriage celebrants, collected via an online form in mid-2026. Seven questions: whether they use free business software, whether they use paid business software, what would stop them using software of this kind, what they think such software costs per month, roughly how many weddings a year they do, whether celebrancy is their main income, and which services they offer.

The survey was distributed through the personal and professional network of Luke Firth, a practising Australian marriage celebrant, beginning with a post in a Facebook group for celebrants and spreading by word of mouth. That makes this a convenience sample with snowball referral — not a random sample. Respondents were not equally likely to be reached, and the sample should be assumed to lean towards celebrants who are better networked and more professionally engaged than the profession as a whole. Luke is a co-founder of CelebrantCentral, which published this report.

No margin of error is quoted here, and none should be calculated from these figures. Margins of error describe probability samples, where every member of a population has a known chance of selection. This is not one. There are over 10,000 Commonwealth-registered marriage celebrants in Australia (Attorney-General's Department); these 234 are a real but non-random slice of them. Read the numbers as a substantial signal from an engaged part of the community, not as a population estimate.

Quotes are reproduced verbatim, including original spelling and typing. They are anonymised, and wedding volume is given as a band rather than an exact figure, because in a profession of this size an exact high volume can identify a person.

What this survey cannot tell you

• It is not a random sample. See the method above. Do not treat these figures as population estimates for Australian celebrants, and do not calculate a margin of error from them.
• Everything is self-reported and unaudited, including wedding counts, which respondents were invited to approximate.
• It cannot name a single tool. The survey asked whether celebrants use free or paid software, never which. Any market-share claim drawn from this report would be invented.
• It has no spending figure. There is no question here about what anyone actually pays, only what they expect such software to cost.
• The theme percentages are coded judgements, not answers to a multiple-choice question. Two independent passes agreed on 92.7% of responses; the remainder were reconciled by hand. Treat the ordering as solid and the decimals as approximate.
• No respondent was removed from these figures. A pre-specified integrity check was applied to the whole dataset — including the unusual answers, such as the single $299 cost estimate and the highest wedding counts — and excluded none of them. Four answers to the free-text question did not address the question at all; those four are excluded from the objection table only, and remain in every other figure on this page. Removing responses after seeing which findings they affect would not be cleaning data, and we did not do it.

Cite this survey

These findings are free to quote, with attribution. If it is useful to you, please use it.

The 2026 Australian Celebrant Survey, CelebrantCentral, 12 August 2026. n=234 Australian marriage celebrants. Convenience sample; not a probability sample.

If you would like a figure broken down a different way, or want to check something before you publish it, ask and we will pull it from the raw responses.