RSVP Statistics: What 19,711 Real Responses Tell Us About How Guests Reply

When you are planning an event, two questions decide almost everything else: how many people will answer, and how many of those will say yes. Real numbers for either are surprisingly hard to find.

So here they are. Every figure carries the sample size it rests on, and the limitations are stated plainly at the end.

1. About half of invited guests reply at all

Sample A · 6,191 invited guests

Invite 200 people and about 100 will answer — not 180. A lot of planning starts from the wrong half of that.

The spread is wide, and worth more than the average. A quarter of events landed below 41.1%; a quarter came in above 71.0%. Small, tightly connected guest lists genuinely do approach total response — two events in the sample exceeded 97%, and we checked those individually to confirm the responses were real guest submissions rather than host data entry. Large, loosely connected lists do far worse.

So "about half" is the planning baseline, not a law. The lever that moves an event up that range is whether guests are contacted individually and reminded, rather than shown a link and left to remember.

2. Nearly three in ten replies are declines

Sample A · 2,915 verified invited guests who replied

Among invited guests who answered, 69.7% accepted, 28.2% declined and 2.1% said maybe. The tiny "maybe" share suggests that when guests are given a clear choice, they take it rather than defer.

Read this together with the previous figure, because the two are easy to confuse. Of 200 invitations, roughly 100 people reply; of those, about 70 accept and 28 decline. The other 100 never answer either way — and they are not all quiet declines. Some are, some simply never saw the message.

Yes 69.7% No 28.2% Maybe 2.1%

3. Guests who reply, reply fast

Sample A · 1,906 invitation-matched replies

The median guest replied 3.7 hours after the invitation was sent. A quarter replied within 17 minutes. By 24 hours, 62.3% of everyone who would eventually reply had already done so.

This reframes what a reminder is for. If most people who intend to answer do it on day one, a guest still silent after 48 hours has not been mulling it over — they have lost the message. A reminder is a recovery mechanism, and the useful moment to send one is earlier than most hosts assume.

These are within-channel timings measured on different guest pools, not a head-to-head channel comparison. The email sample is small (82 matched replies), so treat it as indicative.

4. More than nine in ten guests RSVP on a phone

Sample B · 19,096 measured submissions

Only 8.5% of RSVPs were submitted on a desktop screen. This is the least surprising figure on the page and probably the most consequential: an RSVP form that is awkward on a narrow screen is not a minor inconvenience for a minority, it is the default experience.

It also has to survive being opened inside a messaging app's built-in browser rather than a full one, which is where a large share of invitation links are actually opened.

5. The average acceptance is two people, and rarely includes children

Sample B · 16,812 accepted RSVPs

Just 8.7% of accepted RSVPs included any children. For most events a children's headcount is a small planning category rather than a major one, though this varies sharply by event type.

The adult average sitting just under two reflects how invitations are issued in practice: mostly to couples and pairs rather than to individuals.

6. Replies peak at 7pm local time

Sample B · 19,711 responses

The 7pm hour accounts for 8.2% of all responses, with 8pm close behind at 7.6%. The quietest stretch is 1am to 5am, together under 2%.

8.2%

7.6%

12am 6am 12pm 6pm 11pm

View as table

Local hour	RSVPs	Share
12am	280	1.4%
1am	101	0.5%
2am	73	0.4%
3am	43	0.2%
4am	53	0.3%
5am	110	0.6%
6am	198	1.0%
7am	451	2.3%
8am	804	4.1%
9am	1,074	5.4%
10am	1,096	5.6%
11am	1,197	6.1%
12pm	1,158	5.9%
1pm	1,122	5.7%
2pm	1,127	5.7%
3pm	1,121	5.7%
4pm	1,041	5.3%
5pm	1,212	6.1%
6pm	1,276	6.5%
7pm	1,617	8.2%
8pm	1,504	7.6%
9pm	1,275	6.5%
10pm	1,180	6.0%
11pm	598	3.0%

Because this is computed in each guest's own local timezone rather than a single server clock, the pattern holds regardless of how the guest list is spread geographically.

7. Most guests reply more than a month ahead — and a few reply too late

Sample B · 19,361 responses with an event date

The median RSVP arrives 33 days before the event, and 53.7% land more than a month ahead. At the other end, 1.2% arrive on the day itself.

Late replies are not evenly distributed noise. They are a specific failure — an invitation surfacing too late to act on — and they mean a form that closes hard at a deadline silently discards a real, if small, slice of genuine responses.

8. Delivery and read rates by channel

Sample A · 7,017 invitation messages

SMS has no read-receipt mechanism, so its read rate is unmeasurable rather than zero — a distinction worth making, because the raw data reads as though SMS is never opened. Email "opened" depends on tracking-pixel loads and is systematically undercounted wherever image loading is blocked, which is now the default in most email clients.

Full method

Some questions need to know who was asked. Others only need to know who answered. Mixing those two up is how most RSVP statistics go wrong, so we keep them apart throughout.

Sample A — invited guests (6,191 people). Events that sent their invitations through QuikRSVP, so we hold the actual invite list. This is the only sample where a rate means anything, because it is the only one with a denominator. It carries the response rate, the decline rate, reply speed and delivery rates.

Sample B — all responses (19,711 across 1,037 events). Every guest-submitted RSVP, however the guest got the link. No denominator, so no rates — but far larger and far less skewed, so it carries device, party size, submission timing and how far ahead people reply.

Applied to both:

• Guest-submitted only. 1,215 rows entered by hosts on a guest's behalf were excluded. They record a decision, not a guest's behaviour.
• Server timestamps only. Reply-speed figures compare server-recorded send time to server-recorded submission time. No client clock is trusted anywhere.
• Per person, not per message. A guest who receives an invitation and two reminders counts once.
• Replies must follow their invitation. Guests who had already RSVPed before the host messaged them — 313 people — are excluded from both sides of the rate. Without that check, hosts sending details to already-confirmed guests scored response rates of 96–99%.
• Reminders are not invitations. Campaigns whose audience was built from people who had already replied are excluded from the invite list, for the same reason.
• Cross-checked. The response rate was measured two independent ways: our own delivery tracking, and a direct join from invite lists to response records. They agree within 0.9 points — 47.9% against 47.1%. We report the lower, more conservative figure.
• Aggregate and anonymized. No individual guest, host or event is identifiable from any figure on this page.

Limitations

• We usually do not know how the link reached the guest. Only 16.6% of responses carry a delivery path we recorded. For the other 83.4% the host shared the link themselves — forwarded in a chat, posted to a group, printed on a card — and we see the reply without seeing the invitation. This is exactly why rates come only from Sample A.
• Response rates are floors. Some guests reply through a forwarded link carrying no identifying information and cannot be matched back to their invitation, so the true rate is somewhat higher than 47.1%.
• Geographic skew. Israel is the largest single group at roughly a quarter of timezone-tagged responses, followed by the United States and Germany. Responses span six main languages — English 54%, Hebrew 14%, Spanish 11%, French 9%, German 7%, Portuguese 3% — but this is our customer base, not a representative global sample. We have deliberately omitted a weekday breakdown, since the working week differs across it.
• Event mix. Weighted toward weddings and community events. Corporate and ticketed events behave differently and are underrepresented. One 1,439-invitee organizational send responded at 12.4% and pulls the pooled average down, which is why we report the median event alongside it.
• Sample A is much smaller than Sample B. 6,191 invitees against 19,711 responses. Rates are less precise than the descriptive figures, and reply-speed by channel rests on smaller subsamples still — 82 matched email replies is indicative, not conclusive.

Citing this research

These figures are free to quote and reuse with attribution. If they are useful to you, a link back is appreciated.

We refresh this page as the dataset grows, so figures may change between visits. The "updated" date at the top always reflects the most recent run. If you are a journalist or researcher who needs a cut we have not published, get in touch.