Royal wedding 2018: How popular is your wedding date?

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Wedding graphic

Your wedding day may hold a special place in your heart, but how many others do you share it with?

As the royal wedding approaches, we've delved into the data on millions of marriages across 20 years to find the day of the year with the most love.

Use the calculator below to find out how popular your wedding day was, or be savvy and find the best day to beat the crowd.

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If you cannot see the interactive calendar, click here.

Clearly the summer is a hot time to marry, and the royal wedding is not on an especially popular day, but what else is there to know?

People are superstitious

There are some obvious spikes in wedding day popularity. Valentine's Day is way above average for February and is the seventh most popular day in the year, in spite of the weather.

Also significantly above the February average is 29 February, which only occurs in leap years.

As the chart below shows, the 13th of any month is a very unpopular day.

The 13th is unpopular if it falls on any day of the week, but when it falls on a Friday there are half the number of marriages compared with other Fridays, on average.

The most noticeable shift over the years has been the decline in the number of people getting married (there were 38,463 fewer weddings in 2015 than in 1995), but the timing of weddings has also changed.

While weekends remain the most popular time to wed, only 58% of weddings took place on the weekend in 2015 compared with 67% in 1995.

Sundays are surprisingly unpopular. While most people have the day off, they will usually have to be up early on the Monday morning.

Design and development by Prina Shah and Joe Reed.