How Much Does it Cost to Get Your Wedding Dress Dry Cleaned?

Many brides choose to re-sell their used wedding gowns after the “Big Day”. But making sure your dress is clean and ready to go to a new bride is essential to the selling process. When choosing how to clean your wedding gown, dry cleaning is the safest and most affordable way to prepare your dress to be sold. But how much will it actually cost to dry clean your wedding dress?

How long does dry cleaning take?

Dry cleaning a wedding gown could take anywhere from a few days to a month depending on how many layers are on your dress and how busy the dry cleaning shop is. If you’re lucky and the shop isn’t busy, a quality dry cleaning for a wedding gown should take two- three days.

Making sure that you take your gown to a well-known cleaning and preservation company is the most important part of the cleaning process. Taking your gown to your local dry cleaning company runs the risk of having the company itself shipping off your gown to a wholesale dry-cleaning company.

Finding a company that dry cleans wedding dresses in their own shop is the safest way to go.

How should you transport your gown?

Transporting your wedding dress can be a tricky part of the dry cleaning process. You have the option to ship your gown to the shop or pack it in a container and bring the gown into the shop yourself. Although each option is different from one another, they have their own individual advantages.

Shipping your gown

Most brides would use this option as a last resort because trusting a shipping company with something so important and invaluable is honestly terrifying. But, at the same time, if the dry cleaning shop is far enough away from where you live, shipping takes the hassle out transporting your gown yourself.

Packing your gown in a container

The only risk with this option is wrinkling your gown more than it might already be, but if you’re taking it to the dry cleaner already, it shouldn’t matter too much. Packing your gown in a thin plastic bag or a garment bag is a foolproof way to transport your gown from your home to the dry cleaners. Folding layers of tissue paper in the dress folds would help to alleviate some of the damage that could possibly happen during the transportation. Check out our recommended Garment Bag.

The cost of dry cleaning:

Dry cleaning a wedding dress through a high-end dry cleaner can run you around $100. That’s just base line, though. If you have other special requirements, the price is likely to increase.

Wedding gown dry cleaning should never cost you more than $200; you’ll know that you’re not getting the best deal if you’re paying more than that; including upgrades and any special treatment your dress may need.  Most dry cleaning services offer flat rate prices for your entire dress, but some places will charge you extra if they find that they have more work to do than average.

Wedding dresses made of lace or that have heavy beading could be the exception, some companies will charge as much as $500 for gowns made out of this material.

If you opt to have your dress professionally boxed up instead of just bagged, this will also cost extra, around $50- $125. The most expensive part of the dry cleaning process is pulling the oils out of the dress; dirt and grass stains are usually included in the base rate price. Pulling oils out of wedding gown can typically run you anywhere from $15-$50 extra.