Banns or giving notice — which do you need?

Two systems doing the same job

Banns and giving notice exist for the same reason. Both are a public announcement that you intend to marry, held open long enough for anyone with a legal objection to raise it. What differs is who runs the announcement, and where.

Banns belong to the Church of England. The Church of England describes them as “an announcement in church of your intention to marry and a chance for anyone to put forward a reason why the marriage may not lawfully take place”.

Giving notice belongs to the civil system. GOV.UK puts it plainly: “You must sign a legal statement at your local register office to say you intend to get married or form a civil partnership. This is known as ‘giving notice’.”

You almost never need both. Which one you need depends on the building you are marrying in and who is conducting the ceremony.

If you are marrying in a Church of England church

Banns are the usual route. The Church of England says most of its marriages require banns to be published before the wedding can take place, and sets out the timing: “You must have your banns read out in church for three Sundays during the three months before the wedding. This is usually done over three consecutive Sundays but does not have to be.”

They are read in more than one place if you live apart. From the same page: “Banns need to be read in the parish where each of you lives as well as the church in which you are to be married, if that is somewhere else.” So a couple living in two different parishes and marrying in a third will have banns read in three churches.

You do not need to arrange them a year out. The Church of England’s legal requirements page says you will not need to arrange banns until about four months before the date.

If you are marrying anywhere else

Register office, hotel, barn, stately home, mosque, synagogue, gurdwara, Catholic church: the civil notice applies. You each sign a legal statement in person at your local register office, and it is displayed publicly for a set period before the marriage can go ahead.

Three things on the GOV.UK notice page catch people out.

• Twenty-nine days, minimum. “You must give notice at least 29 days before your ceremony.” The worked example on the same page: give notice on 1 May and the earliest you can marry is 30 May.
• Twelve months, maximum. “You must hold your ceremony within 12 months of ‘giving notice’.” So notice cannot be given as early as most venues take deposits.
• The venue has to be decided first. The ceremony page is explicit: the legal statement “must include details of the final venue for your ceremony”.

You also need to have lived in the registration district for the past seven days, and if you live in different districts you give notice separately, in your own. Find your register office to book the appointment.

Where one of you is subject to immigration control, the waiting period can be longer. A 2015 MoneySavingExpert thread flagging the change from 15 days to the current period sets out the extension: “Where a proposed marriage or civil partnership involves a non-EEA national who is subject to immigration control the notice period may be extended to 70 days.”

Catholic and other religious weddings

Banns are a Church of England procedure, so a Catholic wedding normally runs on civil notice instead. GOV.UK says a religious wedding can take place at any registered religious building, and that “an authorised person, such as a religious minister, must attend the ceremony and sign the ‘marriage schedule’ or ‘marriage document’”. If your building has no authorised person, you need to book a registrar, which costs £114.50.

That single question — is there an authorised person here — decides whether you are booking a registrar as well as a priest. Ask it early, and ask the building, not the caterer.

Why nobody can tell you which one you need

This is not a knowledge gap in one couple. It is a knowledge gap in the whole conversation. The clearest artefact is a UKbride thread from March 2019 titled Brides Bands v giving notice, where one plain question drew 63 comments from married women who flatly contradicted each other.

“I’m getting married in church and the bands are being read there, but I’m told I also have to ‘give notice’ at a registry office to make the wedding legal. Can anyone confirm this and explain what I have to do in plain English, I’m getting so confused.”

Kirstine Blackwell, opening the thread — UKbride, March 2019

The replies, in the same thread, in order: “Having the bans read in a church is the same as a notice of marriage in a registry office so u shouldn’t have to do both”. Then: “I rang my local registry office team to ask them, as we are getting married in churvh, and they said I had to give notice through them, otherwise it wouldn’t be a legally binding marriage.” Then, from someone marrying in a Catholic church: “I’m getting married in a Catholic Church and I have had to give notice but no bans are being read.” And finally the one-line version that is right more often than it is wrong: “Registry Office wedding = Give notice, Church = Banns.”

Every one of those answers is true for the person who wrote it. They are describing different weddings.

It gets worse when couples ask the councils directly. On a separate thread about whether booking a registrar and giving notice are the same thing, one poster wrote: “I tried looking it up on the registry office websites but it didn’t really help. Maybe I should email them and ask, but then which reg office should I email?” Two posters in that thread received opposite answers from their own councils, and one replied: “that’s madness that they’ve given completely opposite info to us both”.

So: read this page, then check it against the person actually marrying you. That is not a disclaimer, it is the method.

The banns certificate, which stops weddings

If your banns are read in a parish other than the one you are marrying in, that parish issues a certificate proving they were called, and you hand it to the vicar conducting your wedding. It is a real, chargeable document: the Church of England’s cost of church weddings page lists “Certificate of banns from the other parish: £20” as its own line in the national fee, alongside £39 for each publication of banns.

Which parish reads your banns is not up to you, and the boundary is a line on a map rather than a matter of preference. One UKbride poster found out the hard way:

“Our normal church is 1.2 miles away but our local church is 0.9 miles away so nearer and has to be your nearest church, I’m really sad… All for 0.3 miles but apparently the law.”

UKbride, on being sent to a different church for banns

Church clocks also run on their own schedule, and the schedule is set by the diocese rather than nationally. On a Mumsnet thread about booking a church wedding, one poster gives the attendance rule as “regular attendance for six months before the date of your wedding” and another, a member of clergy, says “It’s 3 visits in the 6 months prior to the wedding in our diocese”. Elsewhere a UKbride poster works out what that means in practice: “in effect if you use this route you need to start going to church 9 months before to qualify the 6 month thing, apply then have banns read”. Ask your own vicar. Nobody else’s answer is binding on your parish.

What to do this week

1. Name the building. Church of England church, or anything else. That single fact decides which system you are in.
2. Ask the person marrying you, in writing. A vicar, a priest, an imam, a celebrant or the register office. Ask which of banns, notice, or a licence applies to you, and by when.
3. If it is notice, count backwards. At least 29 days before the date, no earlier than 12 months before, venue decided, appointment booked, and each of you in your own district.
4. If it is banns, ask about the certificate. If you live in a different parish from your wedding church, find out who reads your banns and how the certificate reaches the vicar.
5. Write down the answer where both of you can see it. This is the single thing every confused thread has in common: the answer existed, in one person’s inbox.