When is wedding season in Texas?

Month by month, 12 Texas counties

100 is an average month. Every figure is a count of marriage license applications filed with a county clerk, by application date.

The busiest weeks of the year

A median week across these counties carries 1,199 filings. These were the six heaviest and the three lightest of the 51 full weeks in the window.

Which day of the week couples file

Monday and Friday take 47.6% of all filings between them, and the whole weekend takes 2.7%. Read this as a clerk's-window pattern rather than a wedding-day one — county offices open on weekdays, and in Texas the ceremony can fall up to 90 days after the license is issued.

The weekday split and the weekly table are computed from day-level records and were last regenerated on September 22, 2026 (62,469 filings). The month table above is recomputed on every page rebuild. Regenerate with scripts/gen-wedding-season-snapshot.mjs.

Why this disagrees with Zola and The Knot

Ask the question and you get three different answers from three wedding publications. Zola names September–October. The Knot names October and June, at 16% each. Carats & Cake names May and September from a sample of 2,181 weddings. None of the top-ranking pages we checked for this query cites a source for its figure at all — no sample size, no method, no data table — and they contradict each other, which is itself the tell.

The structural problem is not that their numbers are careless; it is who they sampled. A wedding publication measures its own vendor clients and survey respondents: couples who hired a planner, photographer or venue and filled in a questionnaire. That sample excludes, by construction, every couple who walked into a county clerk's office and married at the courthouse — and in 12 Texas counties that is 63,791 licenses a year of people nobody surveyed.

We are not claiming to measure ceremonies better than they do. We are measuring something different and saying so: licenses filed, by application date, from the public record, in counties we name, over months we name, with the ones we excluded listed. That is checkable, and theirs is not.

Method, and what this does not say

• Eleven counties, not Texas. 63,791 filings across 12 counties — Harris County, Collin County, Montgomery County, Hidalgo County, Williamson County, Bell County, Nueces County, Hays County, Smith County, Brazos County, Taylor County, Wilson County. Texas as a whole recorded about 181,295 marriages in 2023 per Texas DSHS.These 12 counties are what this page measures — do not read any number on it as a figure for Texas as a whole.
• Filing dates, not wedding dates. Texas has a 72-hour waiting period and a 90-day validity window, so a ceremony can fall in a later month than its license.
• A completeness gate, applied before anything is counted. A county enters the aggregate only with twelve complete months whose weakest month is at least 40% of its median month. Aggregating raw instead produced a spring peak, and the reason was reporting holes, not weddings.
• 66 Texas counties excluded, each named below. Including big ones. Tarrant and Travis are both out.
• Recomputed, not remembered. The month table is rebuilt from the database on every page rebuild, so if a series fills in or develops a hole, the published numbers move with it.

The 66 Texas counties we excluded, and why

These are counties whose filings we hold but whose monthly series cannot carry a seasonality claim. Their own county pages still show everything we have for them.

Texas wedding season FAQ

Doing this in Houston?

Harris County is the largest set of filings in this page — 31,459 of the 63,791. We have a separate page on what a courthouse wedding there actually costs, who performs it, and how to book, with every fact cited to Harris County's own pages.

Marriage licenses by Texas county

Every Texas county we cover, busiest first. Each page holds how to apply, the fee, and the filings themselves.

All Texas marriage records →