Survey ranks New Jersey a top 10 state for wedding industry

The COVID pandemic did a number on weddings across the country but that number has grown bigger and better for 2022.

An unprecedented 2.5 million weddings are set to take place this year, which is a boom not seen since 1984. Great news if you're in the wedding business.

The wedding industry is rebounding in a big way and in a recent survey taken by rarecarot.com, New Jersey is the 10th best state to be in the wedding industry. They looked at the average salaries of event planners, bakers, jewelers, and florists.

What, no DJ's? As a former wedding jock, I can tell you that it's also a great business to be in if you have any kind of personality and knowledge of music. But I digress.

New Jersey came in 10th for annual salaries in these wedding-related fields with the average event planner in the Garden State bringing home $63,610 per year; jeweler earning $47,670; florist earning $37,290; photographer earning $53,060; and baker earning $37,950.

New York turned out to be the best state when it comes to the event planner salary at $78,490, which is the highest in the country. Colorado has the hottest spot for wedding planning where for every 100,000 jobs there are 128.9 people who earn a living organizing the logistics around weddings, conventions and other milestones.

In New Jersey, for every 100,000 people, there are 54.8 people in event planning. When it comes to baking in New Jersey, for every 100,000 people there are 127.8 in some form of the business. Vermont has an employment rate of 261.7 per hundred thousand jobs. Salary wise though New Jersey pays bakers an average of $37,950 per year.

Raracarot.com's methodology from their site

"We used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine where the wedding industry is booming. We chose five occupations central to the industry – event planners, jewelers, florists, photographers and bakers – and identified their average annual pay and employment per 1,000 jobs, a rate we converted to measure employment per 100,000 jobs. The data is from May 2021, the most recent state-level data. Washington, D.C., was excluded from the analysis to avoid unfair comparisons between city and state employment data."

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Steve Trevelise only. Follow him on Twitter @realstevetrev.