Wedding Reception Run of Show Template
For wedding planners, DJs, MCs, and venue coordinators
Just under five hours of reception. The order here is chosen so nobody is blocked: the kitchen plates while people are seated, toasts happen when everyone has a full glass, and the formal dances land before the room disperses.
Weddings are where a shared timeline earns its keep, because five different vendors each hold a piece of the day and none of them work for each other.
The rundown
| # | From | Length | Cue | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +0m | 60 min | Guests arrive, cocktail hour | Background set, bar open, no mic |
| 2 | +1h | 10 min | Guests seated | MC invites the room to find places |
| 3 | +1h 10m | 5 min | Grand entrance | Entrance track cued, photographer front and centre |
| 4 | +1h 15m | 5 min | Welcome and blessing | Handheld mic to whoever is speaking |
| 5 | +1h 20m | 60 min | Dinner service | Kitchen owns this block; music low, no announcements |
| 6 | +2h 20m | 15 min | Toasts | 3 speakers, 4 min each, mic stays with the MC |
| 7 | +2h 35m | 5 min | First dance | Floor cleared, lighting change, exact track confirmed |
| 8 | +2h 40m | 8 min | Parent dances | Two songs, fade early if the floor is thin |
| 9 | +2h 48m | 10 min | Cake cutting | Photographer and videographer both need warning |
| 10 | +2h 58m | 90 min | Open dancing | DJ owns the room; bouquet toss around the halfway point |
| 11 | +4h 28m | 5 min | Last dance | MC calls everyone to the floor first |
| 12 | +4h 33m | 10 min | Send-off | Sparklers or confetti staged 10 minutes early |
The From column is an offset from your start, not a fixed time. Pick a start and the clock times follow.
Take it with you
Copy gives you tab-separated text, which pastes straight into Google Sheets or Excel as proper columns. The same clipboard pastes into PilotCue's importer, so you can start in a spreadsheet and move later without retyping anything.
Opening it in PilotCue creates the event with these cues already in it. Free to run, and the crew, backstage, and speaker screens are free on every plan.
The photographer is on your timeline whether you share it or not
Cake cutting, first dance, and the send-off are the three moments a photographer cannot re-shoot. If they hear about them thirty seconds ahead, you get a picture of the back of someone head.
Send the timeline to every vendor a week out, and give them something live on the night. The difference between "cake is around nine" and a screen counting down to it is the difference between a photograph and a memory.
Protect the dinner block
Dinner is the one hour where the kitchen, not the MC, owns the room. Announcements during service make cold food and irritated staff, and they do not land anyway because half the room is eating.
Stack the talking either side of it: welcome before, toasts after. That also means the toasts happen when every glass is full, which is the whole point of a toast.
Toasts need a number and a microphone owner
Toasts are the single most reliable overrun at a wedding. Three speakers at four minutes is fifteen minutes on the sheet. Three speakers with no brief is forty, and you have just taken half an hour off the dance floor.
Tell each speaker their length in advance, and have the MC physically hold the microphone between speeches. Whoever holds the mic controls the length, and it should never be the speaker.
Work backwards from the hard stop
Almost every venue has a curfew, and the send-off is the item that gets crushed when the evening drifts. Build the second half backwards from the time the music must stop, not forwards from dinner.
If the bar closes at 23:30 and the send-off needs ten minutes staged in advance, the last dance starts at 23:15. Everything before it flexes; that does not.
Questions people actually ask
- How long should a wedding reception be?
- Four to five hours is typical, of which roughly ninety minutes should be open dancing if the party matters to you. The most common mistake is letting the formalities run long and leaving forty minutes of dance floor.
- What order should wedding reception events go in?
- Cocktail hour, seating, grand entrance, welcome, dinner, toasts, first dance, parent dances, cake, open dancing, last dance, send-off. The logic is that talking happens either side of dinner and the formal dances land before the room scatters.
- Who should hold the run of show on the night?
- The planner if you have one, the MC or DJ if you do not. One person calls the moves and everyone else needs visibility of the same timeline, especially the photographer and the kitchen.