Ciara Crossan, Founder & CEO, WeddingDates / WedPro looks at what lies beneath the CSO headlines
Every year the official Marriage Data lands from the Central Statistics Office, and every year it gets reported in roughly the same headlines – number of marriages, average age of couples, ceremony mix, and popular days/dates.
This year the three big headlines were: Weddings are down. Couples are older. Civil has overtaken Catholic. All three are true. And all three, read on their own, will lead a hotelier to the wrong conclusion.
Because the headline is never the whole story. It’s the average. And averages hide exactly the detail a venue needs to plan well. When I sat down with the 2025 figures, the interesting part wasn’t the top-line numbers at all. It was what’s sitting underneath them. So let me take the three headlines you’ll see everywhere this year and show you what’s actually going on behind each one. The good news is there’s a lot more opportunity here than the headlines suggest.
Headline 1: “Weddings are declining.”
The reality: it depends entirely on where you are.
Let’s start with the number everyone quotes. In 2025 there were 19,898 marriages in Ireland, down 2.2% on the year before. That’s a real trend and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But that single national figure hides a country moving in several directions at once. While the overall number softened, several areas actually grew. Cork City is up 43.4% since 2022, the single biggest county-level growth story in the country. Wicklow is up 9.4% over the same 3-year period and Dublin City up 7.1%. Sligo is up 4.5% and Cavan grew 7.1% year-on-year. These aren’t blips. They’re a pattern.
What’s happening is that volume is concentrating in cities, commuter belts, and a handful of scenic destination counties. Dublin City alone now hosts 3,202 weddings a year, around 16% of the entire national market, and more than the whole province of Connacht combined. Leinster as a province essentially held flat in 2025 (down just 0.5%) while the rest of the country corrected harder.
So, the honest question for your venue isn’t “are weddings declining in Ireland?” It’s “what’s happening in my county?” For a lot of venues, the local answer is far more encouraging than the national one. The free report gives you the national and provincial picture to get started, and our premium regional breakdown takes it down to your own county, so you can plan around your real number rather than someone else’s average.
Headline 2: “Couples are older.”
The reality: the peak band is still 30-34.
The second headline you’ll see is that the average age at marriage has climbed to 38 for men and 36 for women, a year older than it was five years ago. Cue a lot of assumptions about a wedding market made up entirely of forty-somethings.
Here’s the nuance. An average gets pulled upward by second marriages and later-life couples at the top end. The peak age band, where most of your couples actually sit, is 30 to 34. That’s a meaningfully different customer to the one the “average age 38” headline conjures up.
Why does that matter? Because it changes who your marketing should be talking to. Your core couple is established but not old, planning carefully, comparing venues seriously, and arriving with clear ideas about what they want. They’ve been to other people’s weddings and formed opinions. They’ve saved, and they expect that to buy flexibility, not a one-size-fits-all package. Venues that picture a thirty-something couple who know their own minds, rather than a vague “older couple,” will pitch far more accurately. The opportunity is in flexibility: on ceremony types, timings, catering and how you communicate.
Headline 3: “Civil has overtaken Catholic for the first time.”
The reality: only in one province.
This is the headline I’d most want hoteliers to read carefully, because the national figure and the regional reality genuinely point in different directions.
Nationally, it’s true and it’s historic. Civil ceremonies now account for 33.4% of all weddings, ahead of Roman Catholic at 29.8%. The first time civil has led. And “Other Religious” ceremonies (smaller denominations, Humanist, Spiritualist and similar) have more than tripled since 2019 to 22.2%, which is a story in its own right.
But that national crossover is really a Leinster story. Leinster is the only province where civil is actually ahead of Catholic, and there it isn’t close: civil ceremonies (4,011) outnumber Catholic (2,166) almost two to one. In the other three provinces, Catholic is still the single most popular ceremony type. In Munster it leads at 37.8%, in Connacht 45.8%, in Ulster (pt) 44.4%. Catholic is declining everywhere, yes, but in three of four provinces it’s still out in front.
So, the strategic takeaway depends on your map. A Dublin or Leinster venue that can’t host a civil ceremony on-site is already losing enquiries at the search stage, because that’s where the demand has moved. A venue in Cork, Galway or Donegal is serving a market where the church ceremony is still number one, while civil and “Other Religious” grow steadily behind it. The venues best placed for the next five years are the ones who can host a Catholic-and-reception, a civil-and-reception, or one of those growing alternative ceremonies, and move between them cleanly. The shift is national. The pace is regional. Plan for the direction your local market is actually moving, not the headline.
What this all adds up to
Put the three together and the picture is far more hopeful than “weddings are down, couples are older, the church is out.” The real story is a market that’s concentrating into cities and destination counties, anchored by discerning couples in their early thirties, choosing from a wider menu of ceremonies than ever before. There is real, growing demand here for venues that read their own local data and respond to it.
That’s the opportunity. The one strategy the figures rule out is “do what we did last year and hope.” Everything else is still very much on the table.
There are two easy ways to dig into this. First, download the free 2025 Marriage Analysis Report for the full national and provincial picture: https://www.getwedpro.com/cso-marriage-data/.
Then, if you want to see your own county, the regional trends since-2022 and the full ceremony breakdown province by province, that detail lives in our premium report, which we share exclusively with WedPro clients and with anyone who books a quick demo with the team. It’s the level of detail that turns a national headline into a plan for your venue, and I’d love to know what surprises you most about your own patch.
By Ciara Crossan, Founder & CEO, WeddingDates / WedPro
Ciara Crossan is the Founder & CEO of WeddingDates and WedPro, the lead generation and wedding management platform used by hundreds of top hotels across Ireland and the UK.
Want to learn more about WedPro the Wedding CRM and what it could do for your hotel? Book a no obligation demo here https://www.getwedpro.com/features/schedule-a-demo/ and get a copy of the PREMIUM report with the stats for your county.
