Courtesy/NerdWallet.com

Getting married is not only one of life’s most exciting experiences, with an average cost of more than $25,000, it’s also one of the most expensive. According to a new NerdWallet study, residents of Los Alamos County may be better off – they live in the second most affordable place to have a wedding in the nation.

Everyone knows weddings are expensive, but they don’t have to be. There’s a lot you can save on the details — such as the venue, flowers and even Save the Date cards — leaving more room in your budget to spend elsewhere.

We created an interactive tool to compare a range of factors and costs for locations across the U.S. To use our tool, enter a county or ZIP code in the spaces below for a side-by-side cost comparison. Adjust the sliders to see how spending more or less on any of the different categories changes your costs. Napa or Sonoma? Destination wedding or down the street? You decide.

With nearly 2.2 million unions last year, the wedding industry in the U.S. has a market value of $54.3 billion, making the event momentous and expensive.

September is one of the most popular months for weddings, so in honor of those nuptials, we crunched data from our friends at The Wedding Report and found the average wedding in the U.S. can cost well over $25,000.

There are some interesting takeaways when looking strictly at the raw numbers:

• Southern states: All of the 10 least expensive counties for weddings are in Missouri, Kentucky or Mississippi.

• Costly coasts: At the other end, the 10 most expensive counties to get married are in New Jersey, New York or California.

• Double down: The most expensive places to get married (Hunterdon or Somerset counties in New Jersey) are almost double the cost of the average wedding in Hickory County, Missouri, the cheapest county in our study.

So how much should you spend?

But a dollar might not be a dollar when it comes to looking at wedding costs against yearly income. Will you overspend or enter married life feeling thrifty?

To find the true cost of a wedding across the U.S., we calculated total wedding costs as a percentage of median household income in 2,870 of the nation’s counties, which resulted in some interesting findings:

• Most affordable: Five of the 10 most affordable counties for weddings belong to Virginia, where relatively high median household incomes mean wedding bills are a smaller percentage of a couple’s paychecks.

• Least affordable: Five of the 10 least affordable counties are in Kentucky because low average incomes in the state mean higher true costs.

• Holy matri-money: There are 500 counties in the U.S. where couples will spend more on their weddings on average than they will make in an entire year.

• Going big in Texas: Couples spend as much as 161 percent of their combined income on their wedding in Brooks County, Texas (the least affordable county for weddings), which is four times less affordable than the true cost of a wedding in Loudoun County, Virginia (the most affordable).

Read more here.

20 Most affordable counties for a wedding