What should a cancellation and postponement policy say?

Why this is decided at booking, not at cancellation

A cancellation conversation is the worst possible drafting environment: someone is grieving a wedding or panicking about a calendar, money is already paid, and both sides are reading the same silence in their own favor. Every question this page raises is cheap to answer at booking and expensive to answer after, which is why the cancellation and postponement clause is not boilerplate but one of the few clauses you will someday read aloud on a phone call. The recurring forum disasters in our research register, the cancelled wedding with the demanded refund, the photographer whose own emergency met a contract that never contemplated one, are almost all failures of drafting order: the event arrived before the answer did.

Direction one: the client cancels

The clause must answer three questions with numbers in them. What happens to the booking fee: per the retainer chapter, it was earned reserving the date, it is not returned, and its enforceability as an agreed remedy varies by state. What happens to other payments already made: commonly returned, minus the booking fee, when cancellation lands far out. And does notice change the answer: a tiered structure is the honest one, because a cancellation a year out costs you a resellable date while one a month out costs you the date entirely; many photographers make later cancellations owe a portion, sometimes all, of the remaining balance on that logic.¹ Whatever tiers you choose, write dates the couple can compute, respond to the actual cancellation with sympathy first and the clause second, and never improvise a discount off your own contract under tears on the phone; if you choose grace, choose it deliberately, in writing, once.

Direction two: the client moves the date

A postponement is a cancellation of one date and a request for another, and the clause should say exactly that, kindly. The workable structure practitioners converge on: one date change accommodated without penalty if you are available on the new date, payments and booking fee carrying over; if you are not available, the cancellation clause governs, because from your calendar’s perspective that is what occurred. Put a horizon on it, a new date within some stated window, so a postponement cannot become an indefinite unpriced option on your services, and state that the price is the price current at rebooking if your rates have since changed. Availability is the honest hinge: you cannot promise a random future Saturday, and the clause should promise the accommodation, not the miracle.

Direction three: you cannot appear

Someday it will be you: illness, injury, a family emergency, a dead car on a rural highway. The clause writes your obligations in advance, and the standard honest structure has two tiers. First, best efforts to provide a substitute: a competent replacement photographer you arrange, shooting under your contract, with you handling the editing and delivery, and the couple’s approval sought if time allows. Second, if no substitute can be arranged, a full refund of everything paid, including the booking fee, because the reservation you were keeping went unkept. Say both tiers plainly in the contract, and build the substitute capability before you need it, which is a professional network question the second shooter chapter touches: the photographers you can call at 6am are an asset you assemble in advance. What limits your exposure beyond the refund is the limitation of liability clause from the contract chapter, and how far such a clause reaches is, again, a state question.

Direction four: the events nobody chose

Venues flood, storms close highways, public emergencies cancel gatherings. Contract law has long carried doctrines for promises made genuinely impossible by outside events, and modern contracts usually address it directly with a force majeure clause: a provision excusing performance when events beyond either party’s control, of kinds the clause names, prevent it.² Two drafting honesty points. The clause should say what happens to money, not just that performance is excused, the common structure being rescheduling first, refund of unearned amounts if rescheduling fails. And it should be written to protect both sides symmetrically, because a clause that excuses only the photographer reads exactly as one sided as it is. How such clauses and the underlying doctrines are read varies by state, which is the second flag at the top of this page.