Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.
When Emily Pierson decided to get married in Vermont, she knew she had to act fast before venues and vendors booked up.
Having often visited her mother’s childhood stomping grounds in the Green Mountain State when she was younger, the Las Vegas-based educational consultant said she had long considered Vermont a “hidden gem.” But lately, she said, more couples are catching on.
“It is kind of a hot wedding destination now,” Pierson said of Vermont, “especially for folks in the New England area.”
Pierson and her husband, Tad, got married over Memorial Day weekend at Basin Harbor in Vergennes. The guests, many of whom were new to Vermont, spent the weekend’s free moments shopping and exploring in the city, as well as further north in Burlington.
All told, the Vermont wedding industry likely adds hundreds of millions each year to the state’s economy, according to industry reports used by the sector’s professional association. In the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, those reports also show the high-end side of the industry has nearly doubled in size, as business leaders say the state’s profile as a destination has grown.
Vermont has a great deal to offer for those with the means to pay for elaborate celebrations. $50,000 on flowers? Local vendors have seen higher. Helicopter tour? For sure. Falcons at the cocktail hour? Someone’s ahead of you.
According to Talena Companion, an advocate for the Vermont Association of Wedding Professionals, luxury weddings (defined as events over $100,000) have seen “standout growth” in the last five years. Companion cited combined reports from industry databases such as The Wedding Report and The Knot, which estimate the state’s luxury industry grew to roughly $31 million in 2025 from less than $17 million in 2019.
Companion said that number is likely conservative, given that it does not capture some smaller — though no less boutique — weddings. Nonetheless, she said, this high-end expansion has far outpaced the industry’s overall growth in recent years.
Vermont’s industry leaders say it’s a sector driven by visitors.
For luxury wedding planner Jaclyn Watson, out-of-state customers make up 80% of her clientele. Boston, New York, California and London are all business hotspots.
Watson is based in Hyde Park, and her business takes on between eight and 10 weddings annually. Each event generally carries a budget ranging from $250,000 to over $1 million.
“Luxury weddings,” she said, are “more demanding — a lot more expectations.”
But Watson said those are expectations that Vermont is meeting more and more often.
This upper echelon of the wedding industry has “kind of exploded,” since the Covid-19 pandemic, agreed Watson, who is also the president of the Vermont Association of Wedding Professionals. Partly, she said, weddings have simply become more expensive due to rising prices on goods like flowers and food. What would have been a mid-tier wedding before might now be considered a luxury event, she said.
But Watson also believes that Vermont’s brand as a destination for marriage has soared in recent years.
“Vermont came back onto the map when Covid happened,” she said.
For one thing, there was lots of space to be had in Vermont, Watson said. Venues could accommodate socially-distanced events, and urban households could escape Covid-stricken population centers. City dwellers were moving to Vermont in droves, Watson said, which she thinks helped lift the state’s profile in some parts of the country.
Thousands of people poured into the state in 2020 and 2021 — a well-documented and unusual spike in migration. And largely due to forced postponements, the state experienced a rush of weddings of all kinds in 2022.
Newton Wells, the 30-year head of wedding DJ company Peak Entertainment, said that like Watson, his clientele is roughly 80% out-of-staters. Overall, less than 40% of Vermont weddings are between two out-of-state residents, according to the Vermont Department of Health.
While Wells serves locals and visitors alike, the financial realities are often different between the two groups, he said.
“It’s funny, we end up working for a lot of people doing weddings that there’s no way a Vermonter could afford,” Wells said. “And that’s okay.”
An ‘economic flywheel’
Amy Spear, who leads the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, agreed that for various reasons — including limitations on international travel — the pandemic had “definitely reintroduced Vermont to millions of people.”
That kind of brand elevation for the state can create an “economic flywheel,” she said.
But like in the wedding industry, success in Vermont’s broader travel sector has not been equal among business models. Broadly speaking, Spear said, tourism outfits with low and mid-tier pricing have struggled more often in recent years.
“Those that are in the higher end of the market are doing really well,” Spear said. Across the economy, she said, “We’re seeing higher income households continue to spend on premium experiences.”
For Companion, this trend, represented so well in the wedding industry, is a function of broad patterns of economic inequality across the country.
“Wealth and income gains have accrued disproportionately to high earners and asset holders over the past several years,” Companion said in an emailed statement. “The pool of couples (and, often, their parents) ability to spend over $100,000 on their weddings has expanded even in periods when the broader middle of the market felt the squeeze of inflation and economic uncertainty.”
For Vermont’s network of wedding professionals, more and wealthier visitors is good news.
Weddings are “one of Vermont’s most collaborative industries,” according to Spear. “One wedding can involve, you know, 20 or 30 different local businesses” from stylists to caterers to unsuspecting local cafes.
Drawing on the same industry databases, Companion estimated that the roughly 4,500 Vermont weddings in 2025 generated about $180 million in direct revenue. But guests’ indirect spending on things like lodging, food and fuel could have amounted to an additional $155 million by itself, her report said.
In a smaller-scale pattern that Watson believes to be a one-off, this year has been somewhat slower across the wedding industry, she said. Economic uncertainty has made people “afraid to spend,” she theorized.
But Watson isn’t worried. People are planning ahead less and less when it comes to getting married, she said — requests may still arrive between now and peak ceremony times in the fall. And in any case, she added, bookings for next year are already abundant.
