How much should a contractor spend on marketing?
Short answer
A common benchmark is 5–10% of revenue for a stable business and 10–15% when actively growing. But percentage-of-revenue is a blunt tool — the sharper rule is to spend up to your cost-per-closed-job ceiling: average project value × gross margin × ~15%. As long as a marketing dollar returns more than a dollar in profit, you're spending too little, not too much.
Two ways to set the number
- Top-down: 5–10% of revenue to maintain, 10–15% to grow. Simple, but ignores your unit economics.
- Bottom-up (better): work out the most you can pay to close one job and still profit, then spend into every channel that stays under it.
UpdatedJul 14, 2026