The article
This is usually the first fork in the road once a couple decides they want lighting at all: buy or rent the gear and put it up yourselves, or hire a company to design and install it. Both are real options.
The honest answer to “which is cheaper” is that it depends on your site and your own time, not just on the lights — so this is a comparison of what each path actually involves, not an argument for one over the other.
What renting your own lights actually means
Renting means you’re responsible for everything between the truck and the first guest walking in: figuring out anchor points, getting fixtures up safely at whatever height the space requires, running and hiding cable, testing everything before dark, and taking it all down afterward — usually on a tighter turnaround than you’d like, since venue load-out windows don’t care whether you’re tired from your own wedding.
It works well for a simple site: a single string run across a small patio, a couple of uplights on a wall you can reach from the ground.
It gets harder fast once the site isn’t simple. Long spans need a center support, not just two end points. High ceilings and tall trees mean ladder or lift work most people aren’t set up to do safely.
And a rented kit doesn’t come with a plan for the venue’s specific rules about what can be attached to what — you’re the one finding that out, ideally before the day, not during load-in.
What a hired install replaces
A hired install isn’t just “someone else does the labor.” It replaces the planning work too: a site visit to check anchor points, power and access before anything is bought or brought; a written plan showing what goes where and when; someone accountable for load-in fitting inside the venue’s window; a final check before guests arrive with spares on hand for anything that fails; and strike handled on the venue’s schedule instead of yours.
The tradeoff is that you’re paying for that planning and labor, not just for the fixtures.
The honest tradeoff: time and risk, not just cost
The real comparison isn’t gear price against install price — it’s your own time and risk against someone else’s.
Setting lighting up yourself costs hours you could be spending on everything else a wedding requires in its final weeks, plus the risk of a problem showing up on the day with nobody whose job it is to fix it. A hired crew removes that time and that risk, in exchange for handing the physical work to someone else.
Guest count and site complexity shift this balance more than anything. A small backyard event with one string run and a couple of uplights is a reasonable DIY project for someone comfortable with a ladder.
A full venue — bistro lighting over a large courtyard, uplighting on multiple walls, a tented ceiling look, path lighting for a hundred-plus guests — is a different scale of project, and the planning and safety questions multiply with it.
Where “which is cheaper” actually gets decided
Whether renting or hiring costs less in the end depends on things that are specific to your event: how much gear the site actually needs, how many hours the setup and teardown take, whether you’d need to buy or rent a ladder or lift you don’t already have, and what your own time is worth to you in your wedding’s final weeks.
None of that is answered by a single number, which is why this piece doesn’t give one — the honest way to answer it for your event is to walk the site and compare what each path would actually take.
When DIY rental makes sense
DIY rental fits a small, straightforward site: low anchor points, short spans, an open layout with no venue restrictions on fixing things to walls or structures, and enough time in your schedule that setup and teardown don’t compete with everything else happening that week.
When a hired install makes more sense
A hired install fits when the site is larger or more complex, when a venue has specific rules that need to be worked out ahead of time, when the timeline has no room for a setup problem to eat into other preparations, or when you’d simply rather not spend part of your wedding week on a ladder.
Getting a plan either way
Whichever way you go, start from the site, not the gear. If you want the planning and installation handled for you, see our wedding and event lighting page for how we run a site visit and build the schedule around the venue.
For the full breakdown of what lighting an outdoor event typically needs — string lighting, uplighting, path lighting, power and a weather plan — see our outdoor wedding lighting guide.
Written by Michael Preston, Glow Forward Holiday Lighting. More from the blog