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Our ceremony is from 7:30 to 8:15. We're doing all our pictures beforehand, so we won't have a cocktail hour. The reception will be from 8:15 (it's literally a five minute WALK from the ceremony) to midnight. Our exit is at 11:30. The venue required that guests leave by midnight and that it be cleaned up by 1 am.
It really depends on your area and what the norm is. We are also planning NYE, so we're starting late, late late, as in 8 pm ceremony and reception ending at 2am. We're in Philly though where it's not totally absurd for weddings to go late. We planned for a late night since fireworks begin at 12 and are the REAL start of the party as far as we are concerned. We are required to have stopped serving alcohol by then so the bar will be closed, and the older family member will be ok with going home.
I personally think 10:30 is fine though.
We are starting at 8pm and ending at about 12pm-1am, we have to be cleared out by 2am
Cocktail Hour: 6:30-7:30
Reception: 7:30-11:30
We are having ours at The W Union Square so in the hotel there is a lounge that we will likely hit up after for everyone that wants to keep partying!
Do you have any "after party" type plans you could set up?
Cocktail reception starts at 5:30 and we have to be out of there by 1!
Right now this is the timeline: our ceremony start time is 5:30 pm with guests expected to start arriving at 5 (Italian families show up way to early for everything). Cocktails and hors d'ouevres will be from 6-7:30, dinner from 7:30-9:00 and dancing from 9-midnight.
If you're concerned about ending the party too early, why don't you plan to afterparty at a bar somewhere? All the youngin's will be up for it and the older guests will be free to leave. A lot of older guests will end up leaving early anyway if the reception goes late. I don't expect a lot of my older family members to stick around until midnight.
Our cocktail hour will start at 5 ish and go to 630ish.
Dinner 630 to 8
Dancing 8 to 1030
No after party plans yet
Cocktail hour starts around 6 PM
Reception/dinner starts at 7 PM
Ends at 11 PM
I think I'm the only one doing an afternoon wedding! We're starting around 12:30 and ending around 7:30pm - I will have better things to do after the wedding :D
Most of our family lives 2 hrs away so we wanted to give people enough time to get home if they wanted to
The more I think about it, the more I think I might ask FI and our vendors (and our parents... isn't it lovely how many people's feelings have to go into EVERY wedding decision? 
) if it would be okay to just push everything an hour later. So, 5pm ceremony, 6pm cocktail hour, 7-11:30 reception. That sounds like a good time, right?
I didn't want to do an afterparty because - well, lots of reasons, the main gist of it being that we don't want to stress about planning yet another event where we'll worry about people having a good time at the end of our wedding day. I have a feeling we're going to be very eager by that point to get away from everyone, unwind, and attend to some "better things to do" as Nlmiele said. 
Thanks for the replies everyone!
We are doing a morning ceremony at 11 and finishing the reception at 3. Short, sweet, and to the point!
I wouldn't worry about it. Our ceremony was at 6:30 with dinner starting around 7:30. Honestly, by the time 10 rolled around, we were pretty tired and we went home by 10. There were noise ordinances out so after 9pm the music wasn't allowed to be loud anyway.
We're having a restaurant reception from 8:30-11:30pm on a Friday night. Anybody else can hang out at the bar downstairs later if they want, but we'll be getting the hell out of there ;)
We are also doing an afternoon wedding. We have our venue from noon until 6. We won't be having a cocktail hour, but we will be serving champagne as the guests arrive.
We'll have the wedding ceremony from 5-5:30, cocktail hour from 5:30-6:30 and reception from 6:30-11.
we are doing 7-11. I think people will have an amazing time no matter what the time consists of. They are there to spend time with you.
@LittlestBirds:
We actually had trouble finding a place that would let us go until past midnight as well! Some would let us go right until midnight, but then there wouldn't be time to clean up. That's part of the reason we chose the venue that we did, because they just require that we're out of there by 2AM. We'll make our exit just after the fireworks.
I was initially concered in fact, about having the reception go so late, because I am afraid that our older relatives aren't going to want to have dinner so late and stay until after midnight. But it IS New Year's Eve and would be terribly lame for the party to end before midnight! Also, because New Year's Eve falls on a Friday next year, we really can't start the ceremony any earlier than 7. I had a friend do a 6PM ceremony on a Friday once and nearly half of the attendees (including myself) missed the ceremony because of traffic. We also want local friends that have to work that day to not need to take the day off.
I think in your case, you can have the reception end whenever you like. Even if it's 10:30, I think that's plenty fine! It will be a long day and you'll be ready to have some time to unwind. Plus, you've got the cocktail hour plus reception time adding up to a decent amount of time. I don't know that we'll build in a formal cocktail hour or not, because it would push dinner back so far. Plus, I'm just not sure about the logistics...the ceremony and reception are in the same room and the chairs will have to be moved and the dinner tables set up...I think we'll just have plenty of drinks post-dinner!
We're doing approx. 6 (might open up the doors a bit earlier for an antipasti buffet) til 1am. It's the standard where I'm from. My family loves to dance the night away!
Our cocktail hour will be from 6:30- 7:30, then dinner and dancing till midnight. Perhaps you can plan an afterparty if you feel 10:30 is too early to end the celebrations. We will probably go somewhere with our close friends after our reception.
We're doing a morning ceremony with a lunch reception for only 2 hours...primarily because our favors are tickets to DISNEYLAND & we want to get everyone into the park to enjoy the gift.
Ceremony: 10:30 am
"Cocktail" hour: 11a-12p
Reception: 12p-2p
"After-party" in Disneyland: 2p-closing (midnight!) We (the couple) may leave before then to attend to "better things to do" (as coded earlier).
Our ceremony started at 5PM and dancing/reception ended at 10PM. Both the ceremony & reception were at the same place so it was a 5 hour block w/ no travel time.
We're doing 5PM-10:30PM (everything is in the same place)... this was a huge point of contention actually. Depending on how far guests live and when people would want to go home (or if they stay overnight), different times make sense. Another consideration for us was wanting it to be dark during the reception (the dancing will be in a tent-like structure with clear walls, so it's really beautiful at night.)
Our wedding is at 5:30pm, reception/cocktails start at 6:30 and goes until 11pm. Honestly I don't know if I'll make it all the way till 11 let alone midnight! :o) Good luck with whatever you do!!
Ceremony: 11:30 am
"Cocktail" Hour 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Brunch Reception: 1 pm - 4pm
Our venue has a mandatory "leave at 11" thing. So I just worked backward: 5p ceremony (30 minutes) 6p cocktail hour and 7:05 dinner. Ceremony and reception are within a 1 minute walk of each other.
We have the following schedule:
ceremonyat 4 pm
reception starting at 5-5:30 (immediately after our loooooong Catholic nuptial mass)
dinner at 6
dance 8-12, unless we pay the dj to play until 1.
Can you plan on 10:30 and then pay for more time if the party is still going strong? The 10:30 end time wouldn't be all bad though, if you have a lot of older people or people with little kids coming. Can you move the party to a nearby bar or something afterwards?
Our reception will be from 6pm-midnight (well, 11:30/45 due to having to be completely cleared out by midnight!).
cocktails from 6-6:45
dinner 6:45-8:30/9:00
dancing from 9:00-midnight
Our ceremony will probably start sometime in the afternoon between 2p and 4p (we're still trying to figure out what time works for our church).
@mspascua Oooh, you guys are the best hosts ever, treating your wedding guests to Disneyland! That will make for so many wonderful memories.
SAPPHIRE! Great to see you on Weddingbee! I hope you love it, I have found it to be a wonderful source of inspiration and community throughout the planning process. Have you been around here long? I hadn't thought about the fact that your wedding is on a Friday, since I'm so used to New Year's Eve being lumped into vacation time from work. I doubt many people will be working that day, at least not a full day, so I wouldn't worry about them getting there on time. You mentioned the cocktail hour; my impression is that the point of the cocktail hour is primarily to give the couple a few private moments after the ceremony to enjoy each other and bask in being married before they rush off for hours of nonstop socializing and being the center of everyone's attention, and secondarily to provide time to take group photos. If you don't feel like you and Mr. Sapphire (hee) will need the break between ceremony and reception, and your photos will already be done, then don't worry about it! Maybe if the weather cooperates, you could just push everyone out onto the balcony for a minute while the tables and chairs are rearranged?
I'm thinking of more reasons why we would want to push our time table an hour later, a major one being that I could stop pouting about the lack of darkness making it foolish to use beautiful candles and luminaries. Oh do I love some candles and luminarires, and if the reception includes a good 60-90 minutes of darkness, then they'd really get time to glow. Thanks again for the advice everyone!
I think I'll have to talk to someone spacially smarter than me like our caterer and figure out what we can do with the space. I think ideally we could set up the bar and some tables in the back with the ceremony in the front, and people could move backwards and out onto the deck while the chairs are being rearranged. The balcony alone wouldn't be big enough for our ~130 guest list but between those two it would probably work. I don't have a good visual sense of how much space all the chairs for the ceremony will take up.
It's a good point that most people would at least be off work early that day. Our venue is very flexible about adjusting the time that we need the space, so maybe we should consider having the ceremony at 6, and having from 6:45-8 or so to rearrange the space while people mingle in the areas that have been set up. We'll likely have most of our formal pictures done by then because I'd like some outside with the sun still up (which is going to need to be before 4PM!) but it might be a good time to get some cool evening shots of just the two of us. :)
[And no, haven't been here long! Just needed something to do to keep me sane during my study breaks this week!]
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When we were searching for venues, almost all of the ones we found had a very early mandatory end-time for the reception, due in large part to the fact that we'll be outdoors. We were fortunate to find a place that will let us go until midnight, which works great as we were planning on having the cocktail hour 5-6pm and the reception 6-10:30pm.
We have friends who just got engaged and are now planning to get married on New Year's Eve with their reception going from 8pm-midnight. I think this sounds awesome, and I'm suddenly wondering if ours is going to be lame ending so early! The sun sets really late where we live at the time of year when we'll be getting married, so it won't even be dark until a little before 10pm. I hadn't considered going later than 10:30pm because I thought the relatives would want to get to bed, and I didn't want anyone to feel like they had to stay up later than they want or leave before FI and I make our grand exit.
What are you all doing? We want to host a great party that everyone will have a lot of fun at, I'm hoping everyone will do a lot of dancing and drinking and enjoy themselves!