Approved wedding venues in England and Wales, 2026: the register in numbers

To hold a civil wedding or civil partnership somewhere other than a register office or religious building, a venue needs approval from its local council. The government publishes one national list of those approved premises. We analysed every row of that list, as published on GOV.UK, and matched each venue’s postcode to its county or unitary authority and region. Here is what the list shows on 31 Oct 2026.

Headline findings

• The national list of approved wedding venues on GOV.UK was last updated on 17 Oct 2025, 379 days ago. Of its 7,182 entries, 2,943 (41.0%) now show an approval end date that has passed; 1,113 had already passed on the day it was published.
• That leaves 4,238 venues in date on the list as at 31 Oct 2026, or 6.83 for every 100,000 people in England and Wales.
• 375 approvals reach their end date in the next 90 days (31 Oct 2026 to 28 Jan 2027), and 1,926 (45.4%) in the next 12 months. The busiest month ahead is March 2027, with 224.
• The South West has the most venues per head (11.2 per 100,000 people). London and the West Midlands have the fewest (both 4.6). Wales has 10.3 per 100,000, against 6.6 in England.
• Among areas with at least 100,000 residents, Westminster (35.8 per 100,000), Powys (33.4) and Westmorland and Furness (30.7) lead. Barnet (0.74), Bexley (0.78) and Birmingham (0.85) have the fewest.
• You can marry at 25 football club grounds, 15 racecourses, 85 venues with “castle” in the name and 181 with “barn” in the name.

A passed end date on the national list does not prove a venue has lost its licence. Councils renew approvals locally, and GOV.UK itself warns that “not all the current venues may be listed”. Always check with the venue and its council register office. Download the area table as CSV.

The national list is 379 days old

The approved premises list on GOV.UK carries a “last updated” date of 17 Oct 2025. Each entry shows the date its approval runs to. Approvals are granted for a fixed period, after which the venue applies to renew. Because the national file has not been refreshed since October 2025, entries pile up with passed dates even where a council has since renewed them:

If you are booking, ask the venue for its current approval and confirm it with the local register office. Our venue pages show the end date from the national list and flag passed dates. You can see the approvals ending soonest here.

Where the venues are: by region

30 in-date venues have a postcode on the national list that could not be matched to an area, so they are left out of the regional and county counts.

Most and fewest venues per head

These are the areas with at least 100,000 residents. The City of London (28 venues for about 15,600 residents, from livery halls to hotels) and the Isles of Scilly (2 venues, about 2,300 residents) top the full table but are left out here because their populations are so small.

By raw count, Kent (146), Cornwall (135), North Yorkshire (127), Lancashire (122), Norfolk (108) have the most approved venues.

375 approvals end in the next 90 days

The areas with the most approvals ending by 28 Jan 2027 are North Yorkshire (16 of 127), Cornwall (12 of 135), Dorset (11 of 89), Lancashire (11 of 122), Hampshire (10 of 97), Hertfordshire (10 of 61). Venues renewing should check their council’s process early. Couples with a date booked can ask their venue whether its renewal is in hand. See the full list of approvals ending soon.

What kind of places can you marry in?

Hotels and country houses make up a large share of the list, but it also includes some unusual places. Counts are of in-date venues whose name on the national list contains the word. Names on the list are often shortened, so treat these as minimums.

25 football club grounds are approved, which we checked name by name. They include Arsenal, Aston Villa, Manchester City, Newcastle United, Leeds United, Crystal Palace, Southampton, Norwich City, Sheffield United and Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground. So are 15 racecourses, among them Aintree, Ascot, Chester, Doncaster, Haydock Park and York. Browse by type in our venue styles guides.

Every county and unitary authority

175 upper-tier areas in England and Wales. Click a column heading to sort. Download as CSV.

Methodology

• Venues: GOV.UK, “Civil marriages and partnerships: approved premises list” (data table, file last updated 17 Oct 2025), read on 31 Oct 2026. The file we analysed is byte-for-byte the one published on GOV.UK that day. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Status: an entry is “in date” if the approval end date shown is on or after 31 Oct 2026. We did not change or estimate any date.
• Areas: each in-date venue’s postcode was matched to its county or unitary authority and region using ONS geography (via postcodes.io). 30 postcodes could not be matched.
• Population: ONS mid-2025 population estimates for local authorities, all ages, downloaded from Nomis (dataset NM_2002_1) on 31 Oct 2026.
• Venue types: word counts in venue names, plus hand-checked lists of football grounds and racecourses (rugby, greyhound and hotel names excluded).
• The script and its output are kept with our records. Duplicate rows on the national list (12 identical name-and-address pairs) are counted as printed.

Wedding venue hotspots and deserts, 2026: half of approved venues are within 1.58 km of another (data and CSV)

Cite this data

Approved Venues (2026), “Approved wedding venues in England and Wales, 2026: the register in numbers”, https://approvedvenues.co.uk/guides/approved-wedding-venues-data-2026, analysis of the GOV.UK approved premises list (updated 17 Oct 2025) and ONS mid-2025 population estimates, 31 Oct 2026. You are welcome to reuse the figures and CSV with a link to this page. Questions or corrections: hello@approvedvenues.co.uk.

See also: registrar fees by council · approvals ending soon · all counties · venue styles · for venues