Limiting Attendance and Running a Waiting List

When space is tight, a small-group dinner, a retreat, a class with a fixed number of seats, you can cap how many people register. Once the seats fill up, everyone after that joins a waiting list, and you decide who gets let in.

Before you begin

You need the Admin or Staff role.
The event must use Register as its response type. The attendee limit only appears once registration is turned on. See Registration and RSVPs.

Setting an attendee limit

Open the event and go to the Edit page.
Find the Registration section. Scroll to Registration, where you manage how people respond plus capacity and sign-up details.
Turn on Limit attendance. Switch on Limit attendance. For a repeating event, choose the date at the top first: the limit can differ by date.
Enter your number. In the Max attendees box that appears, type the most people you want to let in.
Save your changes. For a repeating event, choose This date, This and following dates, or All dates, then click Save changes.

What visitors see when it fills up

On the public event page, a small capacity bar shows how many have signed up against your limit, for example "12 registered" on one side and "40 max" on the other.

Once every seat is taken:

The sign-up button changes from Register to Join the waitlist.
Anyone who joins sees the message "You're on the waitlist! We'll notify you if a spot opens up." They can leave the waitlist from that same confirmation any time until the event is over.

Whole parties stay together

Churchday counts people, not sign-up rows. If someone registers themselves plus two family members and brings a guest, that is four people against your limit, guests count toward capacity too, not just the person who filled out the form.

A group is never split down the middle. If there are two seats left but a party of four tries to register, the whole party joins the waiting list together. When enough room exists for everyone, the whole party is confirmed together.

Letting people in from the waiting list

Open the event and click the Attendees tab.
Check the Waitlist card. A Waitlist stat card at the top shows how many people are waiting.
Let someone in. On any waitlisted row, open the Waitlist badge and choose Let them in. Confirm, and that person moves from the waiting list to confirmed. If they're waiting for every week from a date on, choose Just this date (the default) or Every week from that date.

When you let someone in, Churchday emails them to say a spot opened up, so you don't have to reach out separately.

Good to know

Lowering a limit keeps existing attendees in place, even when the new limit is below the current count. New sign-ups follow the new limit.
Every-week sign-ups respect each date's limit. On a repeating event, someone who signs up for every week is put on the waiting list for any week that's already full, and stays signed up for the rest. They see those weeks before registering, and once they're signed up, a week that fills later never takes their spot. Their waitlisted weeks show on that date's Attendees tab like any other waitlist, and Let them in works the same way.
You can email the waiting list on its own. On the event's Notify tab, set To to Waitlist only. That matters when an event stays full: the people waiting won't hear otherwise, and a general update sent to everyone reads as though they have a spot. See Sending reminder emails.
Raising the Max attendees number later does not pull people off the waiting list automatically. Let each person in from the Attendees tab when you're ready.
If you leave Limit attendance off, the event has no cap and no waiting list, everyone who signs up is confirmed.
The capacity bar shifts to a warning color as you near the limit, so a nearly full event is easy to spot at a glance.