Getting asked to stand up in a friend’s wedding used to be a straightforward compliment. Increasingly, it’s a financial and emotional gamble that friendships don’t always survive. A survey of 1,105 Americans who served in a wedding party within the past two years, conducted by menswear retailer Modern Gents, found bridesmaids spend an average of $1,110 per wedding compared with $902 for groomsmen, a 23% gap. More strikingly, roughly 30% of bridesmaids said being in the wedding party strained their relationship with the couple, versus just 13% of groomsmen. The honor of being chosen, it turns out, comes with a bill and a risk that fall disproportionately on women.
The Spending Gap Is Only Part of the Story
The $1,110 average for bridesmaids in the Modern Gents survey covers more than a dress. It stacks up against showers, bachelorette trips, gifts, shoes, alterations, and the general expectation that bridesmaids coordinate and contribute more visibly than groomsmen. Time follows the same pattern: bridesmaids reported spending 82 hours, or roughly 3.4 days, on wedding-related activities, compared with 70 hours for groomsmen. Ten percent of bridesmaids said they’d gone into debt specifically to participate, and 17% took on a second job to cover the cost, versus 15% of groomsmen. The respondent pool skewed slightly female and younger, 61% women and 39% men, with 55% Millennials and 45% Gen Z, which suggests this isn’t a legacy complaint from an older generation of brides. It’s the live experience of the people getting married and standing up for each other right now.
Where the Bridesmaid Dollars Actually Go
A separate cost breakdown from financial services company SoFi, drawing partly on The Knot’s 2025 Real Weddings Study of nearly 17,000 couples, itemizes where bridesmaid spending piles up: roughly $128 for the dress itself, $75 to $150 in alterations, about $100 for hair and another $100 for makeup, plus a bridal shower gift in the $50-to-$75 range and a wedding gift closer to $160. Layer in a bachelorette trip, which The Knot pegs at an average of $1,300 per attendee, and SoFi’s own estimate of total bridesmaid costs climbs closer to $1,900, even higher than the Modern Gents figure once travel and hospitality are folded in. The two surveys used different methodologies and different expense categories, but they point in the same direction: whichever way it’s measured, bridesmaid costs consistently land above what groomsmen report spending on tuxedo rentals and bachelor parties.
Why the Friendship Strain Runs So Much Higher
The relationship-strain numbers are where the survey gets uncomfortable. Nearly a third of bridesmaids reported that participating damaged their relationship with the couple, more than double the rate reported by groomsmen. Modern Gents’ data also found 44% of bridesmaids believe wedding-party expectations have become unreasonable, compared with 29% of groomsmen, and that the cost pressure is already changing behavior before an invitation is even accepted: 25% of women and 20% of men in the survey said they’d declined a wedding-party invitation specifically because of the expected expense. That gap tracks with the added labor: bridesmaids are more often expected to plan showers, manage group chats, coordinate outfits, and absorb last-minute changes, on top of the spending itself. When the workload and the bill both land heavier on one role, resentment has more places to take root, even between people who genuinely love each other.
This Isn’t a New Problem, Just a Worsening One
Broader wedding-party data backs up the trend. A LendingTree survey covered by CNBC found that Americans spend an average of $825 to be part of a wedding party, with half of participants going into debt over it and 56% saying they felt pressure to spend beyond their means. Nearly 40% expressed regret about how much they’d spent, and roughly 1 in 5 people had turned down a wedding-party invitation over cost, though that same reporting found 69% said declining didn’t ultimately damage the friendship. That survey didn’t break results out by gender the way Modern Gents’ did, but the overall picture is consistent: wedding-party participation is a bigger financial and emotional lift than most people expect going in, and it’s been trending that way for years, not just this wedding season.
What the Honor Actually Costs
None of this means saying yes to standing up in a friend’s wedding is a mistake. It means the automatic assumption that it’s pure honor, no downside, hasn’t matched reality for a while. When nearly a third of bridesmaids say the role strained a friendship they presumably valued enough to accept the ask in the first place, that’s a sign the expectations attached to the role need resetting, not that the friendships themselves were fragile. Brides who want their wedding parties intact on the other side of the big day might start by asking what they’re actually asking for, in hours and dollars, before they ask who’s willing to give it.
