How Much Does it Cost to Dry Clean Your Wedding Dress?

Many brides find themselves not needing their wedding gowns after the “big day”, choosing to resell them instead. Before listing it for sale, you will surely want to ensure it is clean and ready to go to the new bride.

When it comes to cleaning the wedding gown, the most affordable and also the safest approach is using dry cleaning services. But how much does it cost to dry clean your wedding dress?

How Much Does it Cost to Dry Clean Your Wedding Dress?

The cost to dry clean your wedding dress is anywhere between $100 and $300 or more, depending on several important factors like the experience of the dry cleaners, the purchase price of your dress, as well as the equipment used.

When dry cleaning a wedding dress at a high-end dry cleaner, you will spend around $150, as long as you don’t have other special requirements.

As a general rule, as long as you don’t have an especially expensive wedding dress, you should never spend over $300 for dry cleaning services. You’ll most likely overpay if you are charged more than this, even if you need special treatments or opt for some upgrades.

Even though some dry cleaning services charge you extra if they notice they have more work than they should, most places will have flat rates for the entire dress.

An exception is wedding dresses that have heavy beading or those made of lace. Some companies charge up to $500 for gowns made from these materials as their cleaning is a lot more complicated.

You might also be charged an additional $50 to $100 to have your dress professionally boxed up instead of getting it bagged.

Pulling the oils out of the dress represents the most expensive part of the whole dry cleaning process. When it comes to grass stains and dirt, these are usually included in the base price. If you need to have oils pulled out of the wedding dress, expect a price increase of $20 to $75 or so.

Additional costs for wedding dress dry cleaning services

There are several add-ons and circumstances that would add charges to the flat rate of the wedding dress cleaning service. These include:

You might also like our articles about the cost of dry cleaning a blanket, a leather jacket, or a suit.

Restoration Add-on

One of the most important factors that increase the cost of having the wedding dress dry-cleaned is the restoration add-on, although this would be needed only if your dress is badly stained, soiled, or over 20 years old.

Companies that offer restoration add-ons on top of the basic services would go through several steps and care measures to remove yellowing and deep staining. This is to ensure that vintage gowns come back to life and look perfect for the big day or to be sold to a new bride.

Each wedding dress stain will have to be processed thoughtfully and carefully as the wedding dress is often made of up to 10 different materials and each material is treated differently.

Rush Processing

Some people need to have their dress dry-cleaned faster. For them, the rush processing option is the best way to have their dress taken to the front of the queue, and this usually comes with a very small fee. This is especially helpful when you go to a very crowded shop, you have a wedding coming up and you notice a last-minute stain or yellowing on the dress.

With rush processing, you can shorten the time it takes to have your dress cleaned from 6 to 8 weeks to just 14 days, or sometimes, even two or three days.

How long does it take to dry clean a wedding dress

It can take anywhere between several days and a month to dry clean a wedding dress, depending on how busy the dry cleaning shop is and how many layers the dress has. A quality wedding dress dry cleaning can take even as little as two to three days if you’re lucky enough to find a shop that isn’t busy.

The most important job you have in the cleaning process is to make sure that you take the dress to a well-known, professional cleaning and preservation company. When you take the dress to the dry cleaning company, you risk having the company ship it to a wholesale dry-cleaning company it works with.

The safest approach would be to find a company that dry cleans wedding dresses inside its shop.

Why Do People Have Their Wedding Dress Professionally Dry Cleaned?

First off, you should understand that wedding dress cleaning is different from wedding dress preservation. These are not only different services but also have different goals when it comes to visible results.

The simple explanation is that wedding dress preservation is for dresses that need to be stored for the long term with no plans to re-wear them or handle them in the near future, while wedding dress cleaning is usually for dresses that will be worn in the near future.

Most people choose to have the wedding dress cleaned and not preserved, as preservation will be more expensive.