Beach Wedding Venues in Los Angeles: Costs, Permits and the Light
We photograph and film weddings on this coast, from Zuma down to Point Fermin. The pattern repeats. Couples fall for a stretch of sand in a photograph, then discover the city that owns it will not issue a ceremony permit, or that the venue with the ocean view sits on a bluff a hundred feet above the water. This page sorts the Los Angeles coast by what each venue actually charges and what each city actually allows. It also covers how each site behaves on camera at six in the evening.
Quick Answer:
A beach wedding in Los Angeles splits into three price bands. Public sites run cheapest: Point Fermin Park in San Pedro rents at $544 for a two-hour ceremony, and Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey starts at $75 per hour. Municipal venues sit in the middle: the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica runs $900 to $4,000 per event, Point Vicente Interpretive Center charges $458 per hour after 5 p.m. Private beach clubs and resorts top the range, with Malibu West Beach Club at $5,650 to $10,450 depending on date and guest count. Los Angeles County beaches need a Special Event Use Permit applied for no earlier than 90 days and no later than three weeks before the date. Santa Monica State Beach issues no ceremony permit at all and works first come, first served. The average Los Angeles wedding runs $44,740 across all venue types.
In this article
- Which Los Angeles beach venues publish their prices
- Which coastal venues quote by proposal only
- What a beach wedding in Los Angeles costs in total
- Do you need a permit to get married on the beach
- When the coast actually looks good on camera
- How we photograph and film a beach wedding
- Frequently Asked Questions
Which Los Angeles beach venues publish their prices?
Five coastal sites in Los Angeles County put real numbers on a public page. Between them they cover every guest count from twenty to two hundred and fifty, and every budget from a few hundred dollars to five figures before catering. Published pricing also tells you something about how the venue operates. Sites that print a rate card tend to run on fixed hours and clear rules.
Malibu West Beach Club
A private members club on Pacific Coast Highway with an upstairs clubhouse and direct beach access below. The published rate card runs from $5,650 for 99 guests or fewer on a Monday through Thursday, up to $10,450 for 171 to 250 guests on a Saturday between April and October. Between November and March the Saturday premium disappears and weekend dates hold at the Friday and Sunday rate. The fee covers a twelve hour rental period, banquet area, deck, gourmet kitchen, a private suite, security, tables and chairs, and required cleaning. Additional hours run $100 each, setup and breakdown of tables and chairs are $150 apiece, and a $1,000 damage deposit is due sixty days out.
Best for: couples who want the ceremony on sand and dinner under a roof forty steps away, without moving guests by shuttle.
Photo and film note: the rental includes seven parking spots. Everything else parks along PCH or in an offsite lot, which means our gear moves on foot across a highway. We arrive earlier here than almost anywhere else in Malibu, and we build the timeline so nobody is carrying a light stand while the first look is happening.
Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica
A public beach house on the sand at 415 Pacific Coast Highway, operated by the City of Santa Monica, built around the pool from the old Marion Davies estate. Rental runs $900 to $4,000 per event depending on day, time, season and space, with a ceremony fee of $0 to $450 on top. Capacity caps at 120 seated indoors and 110 outdoors. Weekday access runs 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., weekends 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., and between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekend access narrows to 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Beer and wine only. No hard spirits. No bar service outdoors. Any outdoor space has to be booked alongside an indoor one.
Best for: a 100 guest wedding that wants a real building on the sand at a public price.
Photo and film note: the summer weekend start time of 7 p.m. is the detail that changes everything. In late June the sun sets around 8 p.m., so a 7 p.m. start gives us roughly an hour of usable daylight before the pool deck goes dark. Couples who want portraits in warm light book a first look before the guest arrival window, or move the wedding to September when sunset lands closer to 7 p.m.
Point Vicente Interpretive Center, Rancho Palos Verdes
City owned, on the bluff above Point Vicente Lighthouse, with the Pacific on three sides and grey whales passing below in winter. The city rental brochure lists $422 per hour before 5 p.m. and $458 per hour after, with a ten hour minimum on Friday and Saturday and eight hours on Sunday. A full ten hour event comes to roughly $5,680 including the $500 refundable security deposit, and a Sunday runs about $4,805. Capacity is 150 guests between the Sunset Room and the adjoining patio. Events run between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Liability insurance bought through the city costs $85 for up to 100 guests, or $148 with alcohol.
Best for: 120 to 150 guests who want ocean on three sides and a hard cost they can calculate before the first site visit.
Photo and film note: this is a bluff, not a beach. The water is a view, not a surface you walk on. The compensation is the horizon line, which sits low and clean behind the ceremony with nothing built in the frame. Wind off the point is constant, so we run audio from a directional mic close in and keep a second recorder on the officiant.
Burton Chace Park, Marina del Rey
A county park surrounded on three sides by the main channel of the marina. The county reservation application prices the Community Room at $75 per hour for the first four hours with 1 to 100 guests, rising to $85 per hour for 101 to 175, on a four hour minimum. Security deposit is $200 or $250 by guest count, kitchen use is a flat $55, and the outdoor picnic shelters and pergolas rent at $85 for four hours. Chairs cost $1.50 each with a maximum of 50, and tables are $5 each with a maximum of 2. Alcohol adds a $185 license plus 15 percent of sales, and the county takes 15 percent of gross receipts. Outdoor areas close at 7 p.m. Insurance runs $1 million general liability with $2 million aggregate.
Best for: a small marina ceremony on a genuinely low budget, where masts and water matter more than a room.
Photo and film note: the 7 p.m. outdoor cutoff removes the best light of the day between April and September. We shoot this park early evening in October and November, when 6 p.m. is already golden and the marina lights start reading before the permit expires.
Point Fermin Park, San Pedro
A clifftop park at the end of the peninsula with the 1874 lighthouse and open water to the south. Ceremony rental is $544 for two hours with up to 200 guests, and alcohol is not permitted anywhere in the park.
Best for: a large guest count on a small ceremony budget, with the reception somewhere else entirely.
Photo and film note: two hours is a ceremony and a short portrait window, nothing more. We plan the family group list in advance here and shoot it in a fixed order, because the clock is a permit condition.
| Venue | Published cost | Capacity / hours | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Malibu West Beach Club, Malibu | $5,650 to $10,450 by date and guest count | Up to 250 guests, 12 hour rental | Ceremony on sand and dinner indoors on the same property |
| Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica | $900 to $4,000 per event, plus $0 to $450 ceremony fee | 120 indoors, 110 outdoors; summer weekends 7 to 11 p.m. | A 100 guest wedding in a real building on the sand at a public price |
| Point Vicente Interpretive Center, Rancho Palos Verdes | $458 per hour after 5 p.m.; about $5,680 for 10 hours | 150 guests, events 5 to 10 p.m., Fri to Sun | Ocean on three sides from a bluff, with a calculable cost |
| Burton Chace Park, Marina del Rey | $75 per hour, 4 hour minimum; outdoor areas $85 for 4 hours | 175 in the Community Room; outdoor areas close 7 p.m. | A small marina ceremony on the lowest budget on this list |
| Point Fermin Park, San Pedro | $544 for a two hour ceremony | 200 guests, 2 hours, no alcohol | A large guest count where the reception happens elsewhere |
Which coastal venues quote by proposal only?
The larger resorts and the historic sites do not print prices. That is normal at this tier. It does mean your first real number arrives only after a site visit and a guest count. Ask for the food and beverage minimum by day of week before you ask for anything else, because at this level the minimum is the price.
Terranea Resort, Rancho Palos Verdes
A 102 acre oceanfront resort on the site of the old Marineland. The venue list runs from Catalina Point at 1,900 square feet for up to 22 guests, through Ocean Lawn at up to 350, up to the Palos Verdes Grand Ballroom and Terrace at 18,000 square feet and up to 2,400 guests. Nothing on the site carries a published rate.
Best for: a two hundred guest wedding where guests stay on property for the weekend and nobody drives PCH after dinner.
Photo and film note: Catalina Point is the small ceremony site people book for twenty guests, and it is the one worth protecting in the timeline. It faces west over open water with no structures behind it, so a 22 person ceremony there at the right hour needs no decor at all.
Adamson House, Malibu
The 1929 Spanish Colonial house at Malibu Lagoon, famous for its Malibu Potteries tile, sitting between the lagoon and Surfrider Beach. Weddings are contracted through California State Parks and scheduled from April through October only. All events are held outdoors, on the sycamore lawn, the front courtyard, or the rear lawn by the star fountain. An optional docent open house of the interior during cocktail hour costs $500. There is no on site parking.
Best for: couples who want tile, garden and ocean in one frame, on a venue calendar that runs summer only.
Photo and film note: the house interior is a museum and is closed to the event unless you buy the open house. Plan getting ready somewhere else. The rear lawn faces the water and the star fountain reads well after sunset with practical light, so we keep a small portrait window after dinner starts.
Duke’s Malibu
The beachfront restaurant on PCH at the eastern end of Malibu, with the Barefoot Bar directly over the sand. It reopened on March 12, 2026 after the January 2025 Palisades Fire and a February 2025 mudslide that pushed mud and water into the building and took crews about two months to clear before the rebuild. It came back on limited hours, four days a week.
Best for: a rehearsal dinner or a small reception where the water is at eye level from the table.
Photo and film note: worth calling to confirm private event availability before you build a timeline around it. The reopening schedule is still narrower than it was before the fire.
Wayfarers Chapel is closed, and this matters for your shortlist
Lloyd Wright’s glass chapel above Portuguese Bend is gone from the market. It was professionally dismantled in May of 2024 because of an ancient landslide reactivating beneath it, the materials are catalogued and in storage, and the organization has identified a prospective parcel elsewhere in Rancho Palos Verdes. First phase reconstruction is hoped to begin by the fall of 2027, against a rebuild estimate of $25 million. There is no public access to the original site. Any 2026 listicle that still recommends it was written by someone who did not check.
What does a beach wedding in Los Angeles cost in total?
Budget the venue, the permit, the license, and the vendors as four separate lines, because the beach hides costs in the last three. The average Los Angeles wedding runs $44,740, which is 26 percent above the national average, with venue spend averaging $16,400 across a range of $4,880 to $20,000. Photography averages $3,180 and videography around $2,760 in the same dataset.
Those photo and film averages describe the whole market, including single shooter coverage of three hours. They are not the number for a full day on the coast with two people and a finished film.
The paperwork is small and fixed. Los Angeles County charges $91 for a public marriage license, $85 for a confidential license, $35 for a civil ceremony at a county office, and $20 if you need the county to provide a witness.
Where beach budgets go wrong is the invisible layer. A public beach with no walls needs rented chairs, a sound system, restrooms, shade and a parking plan, and none of that comes with the sand. A $544 permit at Point Fermin turns into four thousand dollars of rentals by the time two hundred people have somewhere to sit. The private clubs look expensive on the rate card and often close the gap once tables, chairs, security and cleaning are counted inside the fee.
Do you need a permit to get married on the beach in Los Angeles?
It depends entirely on which agency owns the sand, and the rules contradict each other across a few miles of coastline. For Los Angeles County beaches, the Special Event Use Permit must be applied for no earlier than 90 days, and no later than 3 weeks before the date, and the county states plainly that submitting an application does not guarantee your date or location.
City by city, the picture changes:
Santa Monica State Beach operates first come, first served with no reservation system for ceremonies. Nobody can hold a patch of sand for you. If a volleyball tournament sets up where you planned to stand, that is the outcome.
Hermosa City Beach does not permit wedding ceremonies at all. Photography only.
Manhattan Beach allows sand ceremonies with a permit and bans amplified music before 10 a.m.
Torrance charges $250 for residents and $500 for non residents at Miramar Park, capped at 100 guests.
Point Fermin Park in San Pedro allows up to 200 guests at $544 for two hours and bans alcohol.
Two rules apply almost everywhere on open sand. Amplified live music is generally prohibited, and tents or canopies above 10 by 10 feet trigger a separate permit. Tables, chairs, aisle runners and small arches usually pass without one.
The practical order is this. Pick the beach, call the agency that owns it, then set the date. Doing it in the other order is how couples discover in week three that their beach is the one beach in the county that says no.
When does the coast actually look good on camera?
Not in June, and this is the single most useful thing on this page. The marine layer sits over the Los Angeles coast during May and June, sometimes as late as August, and in 2024 it started as early as April. On those days the sky is flat white from morning until the clouds burn off around midday, and within a mile or two of the water they sometimes do not burn off at all.
Flat light is not a disaster for photographs. Skin renders beautifully under a marine layer and nobody squints. What disappears is the thing couples booked the beach for: the low orange sun on the water behind them. If sunset frames are the point, September and October are the months. A February wedding will out shoot a June one on light almost every time.
Three coastal conditions shape how we work regardless of month. Wind runs onshore in the afternoon and drops near sunset, which is why we schedule vows late. Sand reflects light upward, which fills shadows under the eyes and makes midday ceremonies more forgiving here than in a garden. Salt spray reaches lenses farther inland than people expect, so we carry more cloths than glass.
How we photograph and film a beach wedding in Los Angeles
We are Arrakis Films, a photo and film team working out of New York and Los Angeles. Andrew photographs and Roma films. On the coast that pairing matters more than usual, because the two of us can split a ceremony that has no aisle, no fixed seating and one clean angle without stepping into each other’s frame.
Audio is the part of a beach wedding that goes wrong quietly. At a venue with a sound system we record from two independent sources: a feed off the venue’s board for the ceremony and the speeches, and a directional mic on camera. On open sand there is no board to feed from, so we discuss lavalier mics in advance, available on request, and we place them before the wind picks up. A film with beautiful light and unusable vows is a film nobody watches twice.
Aerial drone footage is included in our packages, weather and airspace permitting, and a good share of this coast is flyable. Cinematic color grading and licensed music are included as well.
Our six hour packages start at $3,500 for photography and $3,200 for film with one shooter, and $5,900 for both together. Eight hour coverage with two shooters runs $4,800 for photography or $4,800 for film. A full speeches edit is included from eight hours, a full ceremony edit from ten. Super 8 film and Hasselblad 503 medium format are included on ten hour coverage and available as a $900 add on at six and eight hours.
Delivery runs on three clocks. Teaser trailer at two weeks. Full photo gallery at thirty days. Film at six months. Gallery access runs six months with unlimited high resolution downloads and full print rights.
For a two person ceremony on the sand with no reception, our elopement coverage is four hours: $1,900 for photography, $1,900 for film, $3,600 for both. On elopements we record vows on lavalier mics because a coastal ceremony picks up wind. We handle the permit process, and the permit fee is billed to you at cost. Photographs and film are both delivered within one month.
Talk to us
If you have a beach on your shortlist and you want to know how it behaves on camera at your ceremony hour, tell us the date and the site. We shoot this coast regularly and we will tell you plainly whether the light works at that hour, what the audio problem will be, and what we would move in the timeline.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. Santa Monica State Beach handles ceremonies first come, first served with no reservation system, so the city issues nothing to hold your spot. That cuts both ways. There is no fee and no paperwork, and there is also no guarantee the sand you scouted will be empty on the day. Arrive early and have a second location in mind.
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The venue line runs from $544 for a two hour ceremony permit at Point Fermin Park up to $10,450 for a Saturday at Malibu West Beach Club in high season. Add a $91 public marriage license and, on public sand, the full cost of chairs, sound, restrooms and shade, because none of it comes with the beach.
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The window is narrow. The county requires the Special Event Use Permit to be applied for no earlier than 90 days, and no later than 3 weeks before the event date. You cannot lock a county beach a year out the way you lock a ballroom, and the county states that applying does not guarantee your date or location.
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No. The chapel was dismantled in May of 2024 after a landslide destabilized the site, and there is no public access to the property. The materials are catalogued and stored. A prospective new parcel in Rancho Palos Verdes has been identified, with first phase reconstruction hoped to begin by the fall of 2027.
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September and October. The marine layer that produces flat white skies sits over the coast through May and June and sometimes into August, which removes the low sun couples picture when they book a beach. Early autumn gives warm water, clear evenings and sunset near 7 p.m., which lines up with most ceremony start times without any schedule gymnastics.
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Only at venues licensed for it. Point Fermin Park bans alcohol outright. The Annenberg Community Beach House permits beer and wine but no hard spirits, and no bar service outdoors. Burton Chace Park requires a $185 alcohol license plus 15 percent of sales. Open public sand across Los Angeles County generally prohibits alcohol entirely.
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Mostly only the ceremony. Public beach permits are written around short ceremonies. They cap structures at 10 by 10 feet and generally prohibit amplified live music. Dinner and dancing need a licensed venue, which is why the workable format is a ceremony on the sand and a reception at a club, hotel or park building within a few minutes’ drive.
