October — and May is the slowest month of the year, which is the opposite of the usual answer. We counted the 62,469 marriage licenses actually filed with clerks in 11 Texas counties over the twelve complete months from September 2025 to August 2026. Not a survey, not our customers — the public record.
100 is an average month. Every figure is a count of marriage license applications filed with a county clerk, by application date.
| Month | Filings | Index |
|---|---|---|
| October · peak | 6,561 | 126.0 |
| March | 5,944 | 114.2 |
| December | 5,558 | 106.8 |
| November | 5,371 | 103.2 |
| August | 5,336 | 102.5 |
| September | 5,310 | 102.0 |
| February | 5,122 | 98.4 |
| July | 5,105 | 98.1 |
| June | 4,910 | 94.3 |
| April | 4,561 | 87.6 |
| January | 4,542 | 87.2 |
| May · slowest | 4,149 | 79.7 |
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.
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.
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 11 Texas counties that is 62,469 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.
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.
| County | Why it is excluded |
|---|---|
| Tarrant County | weakest month (150) is 14.6% of its median month (1,030.5) — under the 40% completeness floor, so the series has a reporting hole |
| Bexar County | only 9 of 12 complete months on file |
| Dallas County | only 9 of 12 complete months on file |
| Travis County | only 11 of 12 complete months on file |
| Denton County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Cameron County | weakest month (47) is 17.4% of its median month (269.5) — under the 40% completeness floor, so the series has a reporting hole |
| Fort Bend County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Hays County | weakest month (13) is 9% of its median month (144.5) — under the 40% completeness floor, so the series has a reporting hole |
| Jefferson County | weakest month (39) is 27.6% of its median month (141.5) — under the 40% completeness floor, so the series has a reporting hole |
| Galveston County | only 8 of 12 complete months on file |
| McLennan County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Johnson County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Potter County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Randall County | only 6 of 12 complete months on file |
| Grayson County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Chambers County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Kendall County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| Midland County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Medina County | only 5 of 12 complete months on file |
| San Patricio County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Anderson County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Matagorda County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Jim Wells County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Rusk County | only 9 of 12 complete months on file |
| Bee County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Milam County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Grimes County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
| Gillespie County | only 2 of 12 complete months on file |
In the eleven Texas counties whose filing records are complete enough to measure, October is the busiest month for marriage licenses — 6,561 filings, an index of 126.0 where 100 is an average month. May is the slowest at 79.7. That is the opposite of the usual answer: wedding publications built on vendor surveys tend to name late spring or September.
If you want company, October. If you want a quiet courthouse, a free Saturday and a vendor with availability, May — it is the slowest month of the twelve we measured, 20% below an average month. We are counting how many couples marry, not ranking the weather.
May is the slowest month in our data: index 79.7 against an average of 100. Several wedding publications name May or late spring as a peak; those figures come from surveys of the publications' own vendor clients, which by construction excludes every couple who married at a courthouse. Ours counts licenses filed with county clerks, which includes them.
Marriage licenses in these counties are filed overwhelmingly on weekdays — Monday (24.2%) and Friday (23.4%) lead, and Saturday and Sunday together account for just 2.7%. That is a clerk's-window pattern, not a wedding-day pattern: county offices are open on weekdays. The wedding itself can fall up to 90 days later.
No, and it should not be read that way. It covers 11 Texas counties with 62,469 filings over twelve complete months. Texas as a whole recorded about 181,295 marriages in 2023 according to Texas DSHS. 28 of the Texas counties we hold are excluded here because their monthly series is incomplete or has a reporting hole, and each is named below.
Harris County is the largest set of filings in this page — 30,966 of the 62,469. 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.
Courthouse wedding in Harris County (Houston) →Every Texas county we cover, busiest first. Each page holds how to apply, the fee, and the filings themselves.