Seating 100 guests: a worked example

One hundred guests, ten tables, one room. This is the whole job from a blank floor plan to a finished chart, with the arithmetic shown and the awkward bits left in.

Advice about seating charts tends to stay abstract. This page does the opposite: one plan, start to finish, with real numbers. The wedding is invented, but the problems are the ones that actually turn up.

The starting facts

One hundred people in the room, including the couple. The venue is a rectangular function room with 6ft rounds, a dancefloor at one end, a bar along the right-hand wall, double doors at the back, and one structural pillar about a third of the way down the left side. The venue says ten tables plus a top table is comfortable, twelve is a squeeze.

Ten rounds seating ten gives 100 seats. The couple will sit at a sweetheart table, so 98 guests go into those ten tables. That leaves two spare seats: not much slack, but enough for one late yes.

Step 1: The groups

Before any table is placed, the 98 guests get sorted into groups of people who already know one another.

Two useful things become obvious immediately. The groom's immediate family is 8, not 10, so that table has room for two people who sit naturally with them. And the bride's extended family is 20, which is exactly two full tables. Half the plan has written itself.

Partners and plus ones are counted inside their host's group, not as a separate block. A plus one seated at the "plus ones table" is a plus one who spends the evening with strangers.

Step 2: The floor plan

The sweetheart table goes at the dancefloor end, facing down the room, so everyone can see the couple during the speeches. Tables are then numbered outwards from there.

• Tables 1 and 2, the two sets of parents, sit closest to the sweetheart table, one on each side. Nobody has to ask who they are.
• The pillar sits between the far left corner and the dancefloor, so the table in that corner is the one nobody should have to sit at for the speeches. It goes to a group who will be up dancing anyway.
• The band's speakers are at the dancefloor end. Older guests go towards the back doors, where conversation is possible.
• The table nearest the bar gets the group most likely to be standing at it.

In the planner this is ten round tables dragged into two rows of five, with the sweetheart table added as a small rectangle at the top. You cannot drop the venue's own floor plan in as a background image, so keep their PDF open beside you and copy the shape by eye. Twenty minutes, including moving everything 30cm to the left twice.

Step 3: The tables

Notice how the two odd numbers solved each other. The groom's immediate family was two short of a table, and his extended family was two over, so the two eldest relatives moved up to table 2. The bride's friends were four over a table, and the six shared friends were four short of one, so they became table 8 together, which is the most likely table in the room to make new friends.

Step 4: The difficult people

Four decisions took longer than the other 94 seats combined.

The bride's parents are divorced. Both remarried, both invited, and they do not want to share a table. With a sweetheart table there is no top table to fight over, so table 1 goes to her mother and stepfather with the siblings, and her father and stepmother anchor table 3 with his side of the extended family. Equal distance from the couple, equal visibility, no shared tablecloth. There is more on that arrangement in this guide.

A guest uses a wheelchair. She goes on table 6, nearest the back doors, with one chair removed rather than squeezed in, and a clear run to the doors and the accessible toilet.

Two former colleagues fell out badly. Table 10 has eight people and two spare seats, so he swaps places with one of the shared friends on table 8, where he already knows two people. This is the kind of judgement no tool makes for you: tablout has no "must not sit together" rule, so you place those two yourself, first, and let the software fill in around them.

One friend knows almost nobody. He goes on table 8, next to the most sociable person on the guest list, not next to the empty seat.

Step 5: Pinch points

• The pillar table. Table 4, the bride's cousins, gets the corner behind the pillar. They are in their twenties, will spend the speeches standing anyway, and are closest to the dancefloor.
• The table of eight. Table 10 looks emptier than the rest. Leave it. Once the room is full and the chairs are pushed about, nobody notices, and those two seats are your only slack.
• Children. Three children on this list, all under eight. They stay with their parents on tables 3 and 6, not on a children's table of three, which is a very small party.
• Late changes. Two cancellations the week before came off tables 5 and 7. Both tables simply went to nine. Nothing else moved.
• Suppliers. The photographer and the band eat in the side room, so they are not on this plan. Worth confirming with the venue rather than assuming either way.

Step 6: Check and print

Read the plan back as a guest. Every couple together, every plus one beside the person who brought them, no one stranded in a group they do not belong to, no table facing away from the speeches, every name spelled the way that person spells it.

Then export. A PNG of the floor plan for the venue and caterer, who care about where the tables sit. A CSV or TXT guest list for whoever is writing place cards. And a poster for the entrance, sorted by table or as an A-Z index of names, which for 100 guests is the easier of the two for arriving guests to read. The poster preview is watermarked; the print-ready file is a one-off €9.99. If you are still deciding between a poster and escort cards, compare them here.

Save the project file before every big rearrangement. There is no undo, and the browser holds one plan at a time, so a saved .tablout.json is your only way back to the version you liked.

Common questions

How many tables do I need for 100 guests?

Ten 6ft rounds of ten, or thirteen 5ft rounds of eight, plus a head or sweetheart table. Ten of ten leaves the most floor space for the dancefloor and bar.

Should 100 guests have a head table or a sweetheart table?

Both work at this size. A sweetheart table takes far less floor space than a head table and sidesteps the question of who sits at the top, which is useful when parents are divorced. The wedding party then needs seats on the guest tables. A head table gives them a base of their own.

How long does it take to seat 100 guests?

About two hours for a first draft if the guest list is already grouped, spread over an evening. Expect two or three rounds of small changes in the fortnight afterwards.

What if a whole group cancels at the last minute?

Remove the table rather than redistributing everyone. A room with nine tables instead of ten looks deliberate; a room with ten half-empty tables does not.

Do I need to seat people who are only coming to the evening reception?

No. Evening-only guests arrive after the meal and do not need assigned seats, but do check the venue is leaving enough chairs around the edges of the room for them.