Ren Hollis

Florida micro wedding & elopement venues

Start with the cheapest wedding in Florida: $100, at a chapel in Jacksonville, on a weekday. This guide runs from there to $12,000 — every price published by the venue itself.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about small weddings in Florida: the venues are not hiding. They're just not on the big directories, because a 12-person wedding doesn't move a directory's numbers. So I went looking the slow way — venue by venue, website by website — and wrote down only what each place publishes about itself: how many guests its small wedding actually allows, whether outside catering is welcome, and what it charges, if it dares to print that.

Thirty-eight venues made the list. A garden estate in Seffner that caps elopements at 15 and prints both its prices. A Tampa lawn where an elopement costs $250 and the FAQ says you can bring your own food. A Miami chapel that prices by the seat — $777 for two, $2,222 for twenty-two. And yes, a handful of places stretching the word “micro” to cover 55 or 65 guests; they're in here too, flagged, because their packages are real even if their vocabulary is generous.

How to read this guide: a fact is a fact — guest counts, prices and policies are what the venues published on October 30, 2026, and each venue page links to the venue's own site so you can check me. Everything else is my opinion, and it's labeled by being obviously opinionated. Where a venue publishes no price, the page says “prices not published” instead of guessing. No venue paid to be listed. No venue can pay to change a number.

The lay of the land

Tampa Bay is garden country — estates, oak lawns, a bayfront mansion selling 30-minute elopements for $400. Orlando & Central Florida is where the chapels are, especially Winter Park, which seems to collect small wedding venues the way other towns collect coffee shops. South Florida runs on restaurants and resorts: private rooms on the water in Fort Lauderdale, printed small packages in Key West, one very candid chapel in Miami. North Florida holds both extremes of the whole guide — Jacksonville's $100 express ceremony and St. Augustine's inn weddings priced like the historic treasures they are.

Pick your region, or browse the lot:

Tampa Bay — 9 venues

Orlando & Central Florida — 11 venues

South Florida — 9 venues

North Florida & the Space Coast — 9 venues

So what does a small Florida wedding actually cost?

For calibration: the average American wedding runs $33,000 and the average venue $12,200 (The Knot's Real Weddings Study). Almost nothing in this guide lives in that world. Chapel ceremonies run $100–$600. Garden and inn packages cluster between $300 and $2,500. A packaged micro wedding with a reception — food, a room, the works — runs roughly $3,500 to $12,000 depending on what's genuinely included. The five cost guides do the full math, including the unglamorous parts (minimums, “++”, weekend surcharges):

The legal part, in one breath

Florida makes this easy. The license costs $86 from any county Clerk of Court — $61 if you both take a premarital course first. You apply together, in person, with photo ID; there's no blood test and no residency rule. Florida residents wait 3 days for the license to take effect (the course waives that too, and non-residents never wait). The license is good for 60 days, the ceremony must be in Florida, and your officiant can be clergy, a judge, a clerk — or a Florida notary public, which is why this state has an elopement officiant on every corner. Many clerks will even perform the ceremony for $30. The full walkthrough is in the elopement cost guide.

Three questions to ask every venue on this list

  1. What is the minimum spend for a group our size, on our date? Per-person prices lie politely; minimums don't.
  2. Is outside catering allowed? The venues that say yes in writing — and a few on this list do — can halve your real budget.
  3. What is NOT in the package price? Tax, service charges, weekend surcharges, extra hours. The honest venues publish some of these. Ask about the rest.

Facts checked October 30, 2026 against each venue's own website. Prices and packages change, and when a venue's site and this guide disagree, the venue is right and I'm out of date. Run a small Florida venue that belongs here? The listings are free and always will be — what gets you in is publishing your numbers.