Wedding bells — as well as those at the cash register — will soon be ringing.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized marriage equality across the land. It struck down state bans on same-sex marriage by a 5-4 majority as unconstitutional and said those states don’t have the right to refuse to recognize couples who have already gotten married in the 37 states and the District of Columbia where it’s already legal. Justice Anthony Kennedy, widely regarded as the swing voter among eight other justices who traditionally sit firmly to the left or right of the political spectrum, wrote of same-sex couples in his ruling, “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The constitution grants them that right.”

President Obama tweeted after the decision was announced: “Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else.” With the Supreme Court changing its interpretation of the U.S. constitution and legalizing marriage for same-sex couples, many same-sex couples will do just that. In fact, it could mean a $2.6 billion spending boom over the next three years and could also provide enough products and services for over 13,000 jobs, according to the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California.

The South, which had been slow to open marriage to same-sex couples, could see a total economic benefit of $733 million over the next three years, the Williams Institute study concluded. A potential $750 million nationwide could be realized now that the Supreme Court extended marriage to same-sex couples, the study found. This would include $181.6 million of spending and $14.8 million in tax revenue in Texas, $70.8 million of spending and $5 million of tax revenue in Ohio and $78.8 million of spending and $5.5 million in tax revenue in Georgia. “It could bring jobs to small businesses all across the country,” says M.V. Lee Badgett, Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute.

Read: 5 ways gay marriage is good for everyone

Much of those increases would come from short-term spending on the weddings. In what has been dubbed by some commentators as the “gay-marriage stimulus package,” additional jobs might be created in the wedding and tourism industries. To put that into perspective, the report estimates that only 390,000 out of nearly 1 million same-sex couples in the U.S. are married. And Americans spend on average $850 each on bachelor and bachelorette parties, according to a recent survey by Google Consumer Surveys for travel website Priceline.com, and the average wedding guest will spend $673 this year, according to the annual American Express Spending & Saving Tracker. Add to that the fact that the cost of attending weddings has soared 16% in four years, reaching $31,213, a separate survey of 15,800 brides by wedding website The Knot concluded.

The inclusion of sexual orientation to the “2013 National Health Interview Survey” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also offers a new source of data to explore differences among same-sex and different-sex married and unmarried couples, Gates adds. An estimated 4 in 10 lesbian, gay or bisexual adults reported either being married or in a cohabiting relationship with a partner compared with 6 in 10 heterosexual adults. Some 51% of lesbians and 35% of gay men were married or in a cohabiting partnership compared with 57% of heterosexual women and 63% of straight men.

Friday’s ruling in support of marriage equality was widely expected, given the Supreme Court’s previous ruling on the issue. In June 2014, the Supreme Court overturned the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, opening up federal benefits to same-sex married couples. It heard two cases: Hollingsworth v. Perry, the successful challenge to California’s Proposition 8 measure, a 2008 ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in that state; and a New York case, U.S. v. Windsor, which overturned DOMA. In the latter case, New York residents Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer married in Canada in 2007 after 40 years together. Spyer died in 2009 and Windsor was required to pay $363,000 in federal estate taxes on her wife’s estate.

Read: What the Supreme Court’s historic ruling means for same-sex couples