What businesses spend on marketing — and which businesses the numbers describe
“What percentage of revenue should I spend on marketing?” is the most-asked question in small business and the worst-answered, because every benchmark in circulation was measured on companies unlike yours. The survey answer is 7.7% of revenue — from firms with a marketing VP. The tax-return answer for specialty trade contractors filing as sole proprietors is 0.60% of receipts. Both are here, each with its population attached.
| Metric | Value | Period | Source | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Marketing spend as a share of company revenue — mean Before you copy 7.7% into your own plan, read the next row — the median answer to the same question is 4%. The CMO Survey samples marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies — 2,231 invited, 260 responded, 97.2% of them VP-level or above. That is a population of companies large enough to employ a marketing VP, which no home-service contractor is. This is the figure quoted everywhere as "companies spend about 8% of revenue on marketing". Verbatim from the sourceMarketing expenses account for what percent of your company's revenues? … Mean = 7.70 … Median = 4 … Valid Cases = 135 Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 7.70% | Fall 2024 (fielded 4–25 September 2024) | The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Topline Report, Fall 2024 | |
Marketing spend as a share of company revenue — median If someone quotes a marketing-budget benchmark at you and cannot say whether it is a mean or a median, the number is not usable. Same question, same 135 respondents. The mean is nearly double the median because a handful of companies spending 30–44% of revenue drag it up. The median is the typical company; the mean is not. Verbatim from the sourceMarketing expenses account for what percent of your company's revenues? … Mean = 7.70 … Median = 4 … Maximum = 44.39 … Valid Cases = 135 Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 4% | Fall 2024 (fielded 4–25 September 2024) | The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Topline Report, Fall 2024 | |
Marketing spend as a share of total company budget — mean Check which of the two a benchmark measures before comparing it with your own numbers. The CMO Survey samples marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies — 2,231 invited, 260 responded, 97.2% of them VP-level or above. That is a population of companies large enough to employ a marketing VP, which no home-service contractor is. Share of budget and share of revenue are different questions with different answers, and they are routinely quoted as if interchangeable. Verbatim from the sourceMarketing expenses account for what percent of your company's overall budget? … Mean = 10.10 … Median = 8 … Valid Cases = 130 Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 10.10% | Fall 2024 (fielded 4–25 September 2024) | The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Topline Report, Fall 2024 | |
Marketing spend as a share of revenue, companies under $10M revenue Do not plan against this number. Plan against your own cost per booked job — that is what an ad budget actually buys. The smallest bucket in the survey, and the one people reach for when they want a small-business number. It rests on 20 respondents with a standard deviation of 18.88 — wider than the mean itself, so the honest reading is "somewhere between very little and a third of revenue". Verbatim from the sourceMarketing expenses account for what percent of your company's revenues? … Sales Revenue … <$10 million … N = 20 … Mean = 16.82 … SD = 18.88 Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 16.82% | Fall 2024 (fielded 4–25 September 2024) | The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Fall 2024 | |
Marketing spend as a share of total budget, companies with under 50 employees Useful as a ceiling on what small companies with real marketing departments spend, not as a target for a contractor. 25 respondents. "Under 50 employees" in this survey still means a company with a marketing leader senior enough to be invited — closer to a funded startup than to a five-van plumbing company. Verbatim from the sourceMarketing expenses account for what percent of your company's overall budget? … Number of Employees … <50 … N = 25 … Mean = 15.38 … SD = 9.00 Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 15.38% | Fall 2024 (fielded 4–25 September 2024) | The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Fall 2024 | |
Marketing spend as a share of revenue, B2C services companies The nearest thing to a benchmark for a service business here — and still not close enough to budget from. B2C services is the survey's closest sector to home services, and it is 14 respondents with a standard deviation larger than most of the values in it. Treat it as a direction, not a figure. Verbatim from the sourceMarketing expenses account for what percent of your company's revenues? … B2C Services … N = 14 … Mean = 10.39 … SD = 13.24 Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 10.39% | Fall 2024 (fielded 4–25 September 2024) | The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Fall 2024 | |
Advertising expense as a share of business receipts — specialty trade contractors filing as sole proprietors The typical solo contractor deducts well under one percent of receipts on advertising. Any plan built on "the industry spends 8%" is describing a different industry. This is the one figure on the page that actually describes one-van operators: NAICS 238 covers plumbing, HVAC, electrical, painting and roofing contractors, and these are the ones filing as sole proprietors. We divided the two dollar lines the table publishes — advertising expenses over total business receipts — for 2,521,516 returns. It is what was deducted on a tax return, not a marketing budget: unpaid word of mouth, an owner's own time, and anything booked under a different expense line are all outside it. Verbatim from the sourceSpecialty trade contractors — Business receipts, total [1]: 257,750,287; Advertising expenses: 1,536,013 (Table 2, businesses with and without net income; money amounts in thousands of dollars; 2,521,516 returns) Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 0.60% | Tax year 2023 | IRS Statistics of Income, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorships: Income Statements by Industrial Sectors, Tax Year 2023 (Table 2) | |
Specialty trade contractor businesses filing as sole proprietors This is the real competitive field in most local markets: millions of one-person businesses, almost none of them advertising. Sole proprietors only — no partnerships, no corporations. Average receipts work out to roughly $102,000 per return, which is what a one-person trade business looks like in federal data. Verbatim from the sourceSpecialty trade contractors — Number of returns: 2,521,516; Business receipts, total [1]: 257,750,287 (Table 2, businesses with and without net income; money amounts in thousands of dollars) Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 2,521,516tax returns | Tax year 2023 | IRS Statistics of Income, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorships: Income Statements by Industrial Sectors, Tax Year 2023 (Table 2) | |
Advertising expense as a share of business receipts — all nonfarm sole proprietorships The gap between this line and any marketing-survey benchmark is a difference of universe, not of ambition. Across all 31.1 million nonfarm sole proprietorships, advertising is 1.18% of receipts — so the trades are not unusually thrifty, they are slightly below an already low baseline. Verbatim from the sourceAll nonfarm industries — Business receipts, total [1]: 2,063,191,945; Advertising expenses: 24,294,438 (Table 2, businesses with and without net income; money amounts in thousands of dollars; 31,125,909 returns) Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 1.18% | Tax year 2023 | IRS Statistics of Income, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorships: Income Statements by Industrial Sectors, Tax Year 2023 (Table 2) | |
Advertising expense as a share of business receipts — all construction sole proprietors Compare it with the specialty-trade line above: selling to homeowners raises advertising spend, and it is still under a percent. Construction as a whole, including builders and heavy civil work, which advertise less than the trades that sell to homeowners directly. Verbatim from the sourceConstruction, total — Business receipts, total [1]: 382,517,598; Advertising expenses: 1,959,207 (Table 2, businesses with and without net income; money amounts in thousands of dollars; 3,368,860 returns) Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 0.51% | Tax year 2023 | IRS Statistics of Income, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorships: Income Statements by Industrial Sectors, Tax Year 2023 (Table 2) | |
Total U.S. internet advertising revenue Context for how much competition for attention your budget is standing next to. Compiled by PwC from the platforms' own reported revenue, not a survey of advertisers — it counts what was sold, which is why it is the most reliable market-size figure available. Verbatim from the sourceinternet advertising revenue returned to robust growth with a 14.9% year-over-year (YoY) increase, reaching a record level of $258.6 billion. Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | $258.6 billion | Full year 2024 | IAB / PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2024 | |
Search advertising as a share of U.S. digital ad revenue Where demand already exists, search takes the largest share of the money for a reason. Search is still the largest single segment of U.S. digital advertising, and it is the segment a home-service business competes in most directly — someone with a broken water heater is searching, not browsing. Verbatim from the sourceSearch advertising remains the industry's largest segment, reaching $102.9 billion, growing 15.9% YoY, and maintaining its dominant 39.8% market share. Checked 2026-09-09 · opened by hand — the publisher blocks scripts | 39.8% | Full year 2024 | IAB / PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2024 |
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Where the sources disagree
We do not pick the “right” number for you. Where two honest sources count differently, both are here, along with the reason they differ.
Marketing spend as a share of revenue: 7.7% or 0.6%?
- 7.70% The CMO Survey, Fall 2024 (mean, 135 respondents), Fall 2024
- 4% The CMO Survey, Fall 2024 (median, same 135 respondents), Fall 2024
- 0.60% IRS SOI, specialty trade contractors filing as sole proprietors, Tax year 2023
These are not competing estimates of one number; they are three different populations. The CMO Survey asks marketing leaders at companies big enough to have one, and reports a mean pulled upward by a few very heavy spenders — its own median is 4%. The IRS figure covers 2.5 million one-person trade businesses and counts only what was deducted as advertising on a tax return. Nobody is wrong. Anyone quoting one of them as "the" benchmark is.
What did not survive checking
These are claims we went looking for and could not confirm at the source. They are not in the table — and they are listed here so you do not spend time on them either.
- Gartner: marketing budgets fell to 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024.
- Gartner's press releases refuse every automated read we have — script, text proxy and browser all get HTTP 403 — so we could not open the release ourselves and quote it to the standard the rest of this page is held to. Gartner spells the figure out in the URL of the release itself, which is suggestive but is not the sentence. Read it on gartner.com if you need it; it is not in our table.
- Gartner: digital channels account for 61.1% of total marketing spend; paid online is 69% of digital spend.
- Same bot wall, same decision. Both figures come from Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey and both would have been useful here.
- The SBA recommends small businesses spend 7–8% of revenue on marketing.
- Traced back through the SBA blog post that carries it: every citation leads to a secondary aggregator, never to a survey or an SBA analysis. There is no SBA recommendation behind the SBA-branded number.
- A marketing-spend benchmark measured specifically on home-service contractors.
- It does not exist in any source that publishes its methodology. The IRS sole-proprietor lines above are the closest honest proxy, and they measure a tax deduction rather than a marketing budget.
Methodology
Three primary sources, read directly. The CMO Survey figures come from the Fall 2024 Topline and Firm and Industry Breakout PDFs, quoted from the tables themselves with their sample sizes. The market-size figures come from the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report for full-year 2024. The sole-proprietor figures come from IRS Statistics of Income Table 2 for tax year 2023.
The two IRS percentages are our own arithmetic on the published table, not figures the IRS states: advertising expenses divided by total business receipts, for the column named in each row. Both dollar lines are quoted so the division can be redone.
Every source here is a PDF or a spreadsheet, which our automated re-verification script cannot read, so all rows are marked as checked by hand. The Gartner figures that would normally sit alongside these are not in the table at all: Gartner's site returns HTTP 403 to every read we can perform, and a figure we cannot open is a figure we do not publish.
Sources
- IRS Statistics of Income, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorships: Income Statements by Industrial Sectors, Tax Year 2023 (Table 2) 4 rows
- The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Topline Report, Fall 2024 3 rows
- The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua / Deloitte / AMA), Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Fall 2024 3 rows
- IAB / PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2024 2 rows
How to cite this page
Husky Digital. What businesses really spend on marketing, by universe. Last verified September 9, 2026. https://husky-digital.com/research/small-business-marketing-budgets/
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