This Tool Will Tell You The Best Day To Get Married In Every City, Based On Weather Data

Rain on your wedding day is supposed to be good luck, but no one actually wants their wedding to be filled with bad weather. It makes it harder for your photographer to snap great pictures of you, your guests might damage their nice clothing and shoes trudging through muddy grass, and it could even ruin your plans altogether if you have an outdoor ceremony or reception planned. But how do you know if it'll rain on your wedding day? It's not like you can check forecasts when you're booking a venue several months out, and booking a venue is one of the first things you do after getting engaged. If you're worried about rain on your wedding day, Bloomingdale's The Best Day For Your Big Day tool uses weather data from 1,000 U.S. cities to determine the perfect day for a wedding, and it could end up saving brides and grooms a lot of stress.

How do you decide if your wedding weather will be comfortable for all of your guests? Someone in California or Florida may hate it when temperatures drop below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but northerners would almost certainly be fine. Bloomingdale's worked around this by using data from a number of sources, including NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The interactive tool also assumes that the comfortable average temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and a good weather day has low humidity, no rain and low cloud cover.

According to Brides, the most popular wedding dates for 2018 are all in August, September and October, when temperatures are typically milder and rain is less of a concern. But I wanted to try the tool out for myself to see if popularity correlated with perfect weather. According to the Bloomingdale's tool, I should get married on Nov. 3, 2018 if I have my wedding in Tampa, Florida, which is where I currently live.

Things change drastically as you play around with cities. For example, a New York City couple should get married on June 17, 2018, while a couple in Seattle should get married on June 10, 2018, making summer a popular choice for cities with harsher winters. Meanwhile, someone in Phoenix should wait until April 13, 2019 to tie the knot. I'm sweating just thinking about a summer wedding in Arizona, so waiting until spring makes sense.

If you don't use this tool for help picking a wedding date, you can still look at the average weather on any day of the year. For example, the day I actually got married is 10 degrees below the optimal temperature on average, has high humidity and is traditionally cloudy. Even though it felt like a beautiful day, it wasn't very sunny and was super humid, so if I'd had this calculator beforehand, I may have made a different decision. But if it does rain on your wedding day, everything will be fine. You'll still get to marry the person you love.

If you're set on having an outdoorsy wedding in a forest or at the beach, you'll probably be checking the weather obsessively, and the Bloomingdale's tool can save you the heartache of having to reschedule everything. When you pick a day that's usually temperate, you reduce the risk of getting rained out.

And even if the weather is perfect, know that something else will inevitably go wrong, like vendors not showing up or guests being late. That's why having a sense of humor about the whole thing can keep you from unnecessary stress — otherwise, you'll be freaking out during the wedding planning process. It's supposed to be about love and happiness, nice weather or not, so try to take it all in stride.