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Contractor marketing cost

Every agency shows you this chart.It's the wrong artefact.

A tier chart prices our effort. What decides your budget is your market — and a painter working one town versus a roofer covering three counties can need budgets ten times apart for identical services. Any chart that fits both is overcharging one of them. So instead of a price list, this page gives you the benchmarks, the arithmetic, and a calculator that works your number out from your own revenue target.

Work out your number Call 1-800-481-8638

Campaigns from $50/mo  ·  No long-term contracts  ·  Built by a contractor  ·  Benchmarks reviewed August 15, 2026

Nothing above is real. Notice what a keyword count doesn't tell you: whether any of them produce jobs.

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Of gross revenue, where most home service marketing budgets land
$0
Monthly budget for a $1M contractor at 8% of revenue
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Minimum return commonly cited — below 3:1, fix the funnel first
$0
Where our campaigns start, per month

Sources: 2026 contractor marketing budget analyses from BaaDigi, PipelineOn, WatsonCo and Construction Marketing Services, which converge on a 5–15% band with growth-stage variation; BaaDigi 2026 for the 5:1 minimum return guidance. Percentages are an anchor, not a target. Published guidance spans anywhere from 3% for an established referral-led business to 20% for a company under five years old building visibility from nothing — which is precisely why a single price cannot be honest.

The position

Why won't you just tell me a price?

Because the number depends on things we cannot see from here, and pretending otherwise is how contractors end up on a package that was never sized for their market. Below is what actually moves your figure. Every one of them can shift a budget by a multiple, which is why the honest answer is a conversation and a quote rather than a chart.

Variable 01

What a job is worth to you

A remodeler with a $45,000 average job can profitably pay thousands per lead. A drain-clearing business at $280 cannot pay $80. Same services, same agency, budgets an order of magnitude apart — and no tier chart has a column for that.

Variable 02

How contested your market is

Some metros have private-equity-backed competitors spending $20,000–$30,000 a month on search alone. Some towns have four competitors who have never claimed their profile. The same plan costs wildly different amounts in each.

Variable 03

How old your business is

Published guidance puts established referral-led contractors at 4–7% of revenue and companies under five years old at 12–20%, because visibility you have not built yet has to be bought. Age genuinely changes the number.

Variable 04

Whether you're maintaining or growing

Keeping a full schedule and adding a second crew are different jobs with different price tags. Most of the 5–15% spread in the published benchmarks is explained by this one question, and only you can answer it.

Variable 05

What you already have

A contractor with 200 reviews and a decent site needs a fraction of what someone starting from an unclaimed profile does. Quoting before looking means charging both the same, which is only good for the agency.

Variable 06

Whether the phone gets answered

If leads sit for hours, more budget produces more waste. We would rather fix that first and sell you less — and that is a real conversation we have, not a line on a pricing page.

Work it out yourself

How do you work out a contractor marketing budget?

Backwards from what you want, not forwards from what you spent. Revenue target, divided by average job value, gives jobs. Jobs divided by close rate gives leads. Leads multiplied by cost per lead gives the budget. That is the whole method, and it beats any percentage rule because it is built from your numbers rather than somebody's average.

The Budget Backsolve

AFC · No. 020
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$
%
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1 Revenue marketing has to produce after repeat and referral $0
2 Jobs that requires at your average job value 0
3 Leads that requires at your close rate 0
4 Media spend that requires at your cost per lead $0
5 Plus agency, website and content the rest of a marketing budget $0
Monthly marketing budget
$0
 
Return on marketing spend
0:1
Jobs per month
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Leads per month
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Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is stored or transmitted. This is arithmetic rather than a model — four multiplications on your own numbers — so its only weakness is the numbers you feed it. If you are guessing at your close rate and cost per lead, the output is a guess too. One season of tracking replaces both with facts, and the free lead tracker exists for exactly that. The percentage check compares your result against the published 5–15% band, which is an anchor rather than a rule. One thing worth understanding about that comparison: the published band describes total marketing spend — media, agency fees, website, content, brand — whereas steps one to four here compute only what your specific target requires in media. That is why the fixed-cost line matters, and why a result comfortably under the band is usually good news rather than a warning.

Published benchmarks

What percentage of revenue should a contractor spend on marketing?

Between 5 and 15 percent for most home service businesses, with your position in that band set almost entirely by how established you are and whether you are maintaining or growing. Here is what the published 2026 guidance actually says, including the two ends where the advice is to stop rather than to spend.

Where you are
Of revenue
At $1M revenue
What the guidance says
Spending under 5%
<5%
under $4,200PER MONTH
Reported to correlate with stagnation. Not a moral failing — often just a business living on referrals that has not needed more yet.
Established, referral-led
4–7%
$3,300–$5,800PER MONTH
Enough to keep the site current, the profile active and reviews arriving. Maintenance, not growth.
Actively growing
8–12%
$6,700–$10,000PER MONTH
Adding a crew, widening the service area, moving into bigger work. Where most contractors who call us actually sit.
Under 5 years old
12–20%
$10,000–$16,700PER MONTH
You are buying visibility your competitors already have in reviews and referrals. Expensive, and temporary.
Spending over 18%
>18%
over $15,000PER MONTH
Usually signals inefficiency rather than ambition. Before adding budget here, check cost per booked job and close rate.

Sources: 2026 contractor and home services budget guidance from BaaDigi, PipelineOn, WatsonCo, HSM Pro and Construction Marketing Services. Bands vary between publishers by a few points and the $1M column is straight arithmetic on the percentages. Treat the whole table as an anchor for a conversation, not as a rule — the backsolve above is built from your numbers and is the better guide.

One line worth pulling out of the guidance, because it reframes the whole table: budget against the revenue you are trying to reach, not the revenue you had. Setting a percentage against last year funds last year's size, which is a fairly reliable way to stay exactly where you are.

How a quote gets made

What happens between the first call and a number?

A day, mostly spent looking at your market rather than talking about ours. You get the findings whether you hire us or not, and if the arithmetic does not work we say so instead of quoting anyway.

Step 01 · the call

Your numbers, not our services

Average job value, close rate, service radius, what a slow month looks like, and where work comes from now. We cannot price a market we have not asked about, and most of the call is questions rather than a pitch.

Step 02 · free, and yours to keep

The audit

Your site, your Google Business Profile, your review position, and the competitors above you — plus a grid scan showing where you actually rank across the market rather than from your office. You keep it whether you hire us or not.

Step 03 · the arithmetic

Break-even before budget

Profit per job multiplied by close rate gives your ceiling per lead. If no channel in your market can hit it, that is the finding — and it means the fix is margin, close rate or ticket size rather than advertising.

Step 04 · the quote

One number, scoped to the plan

What it costs, what it covers, and what the realistic runway is per channel — paid search inside a month, organic four to eight. No tiers, no minimum term, and no pretending SEO pays back in thirty days.

Step 05 · monthly

Reporting in booked jobs

Calls and forms attributed to source, and where possible the work that closed. A ranking report is not a result. If a channel stops earning its place we will tell you to cut it, including when that shrinks our own invoice.

Any month

Leaving

Month to month, so you can go whenever. The website, the profile, the tracking, the content and the reviews are yours — that is the difference between building an asset and renting a pipeline, and it should be true of any agency you hire.

Tape measure, square and marking tools on a workbench beside a contractor marketing plan
The quote we sometimes give

Sometimes the honest number is nothing.

If your break-even cost per lead is $22 and nothing in your market comes close, more marketing won't fix that — margin, ticket size or close rate will. If your budget is under the floor a channel needs to function, spending it there buys you an unreliable test rather than a cheap one. We've told contractors to spend the money on a second truck instead, and we'd rather do that on a free call than three months into an invoice.

Get a real quote
Allocation

Where should the money go first?

In this order, and the published guidance agrees on it: immediate channels first so something is producing while the slow ones build, then the compounding ones, then the rest. The larger mistake at small budgets is not picking the wrong channel — it is spreading across five instead of doing one properly.

First · pays back in weeks

Local Services Ads & Google Ads

Leads within days, at a published blended $53 per lead on LSA with a 43.9% book rate. If the schedule has a hole, this is where the first dollar goes, because everything else takes months and a hole does not wait.

Google Ads & LSA Second · cheap and fast

Google Business Profile & reviews

The highest return per dollar available to a contractor, and much of it is free. Map pack movement usually shows in 30 to 90 days because most competitors have half-finished profiles.

Local SEO for contractors Third · compounds

Contractor SEO & content

Four to eight months before it carries weight, then cost per lead falls while everything else rises with the auction. Only worth starting if the budget can be sustained — we will say so if it cannot.

Contractor SEO Underneath all of it

Tracking & speed to lead

Usually the cheapest line on the quote and often the most valuable. Doubling your booking rate costs less than doubling your budget and improves every channel at once, including the leads you never paid for.

Lead generation systems Fourth · once the rest works

Meta & retargeting

Demand creation rather than capture, with its own budget floor of roughly $50–$65 a day to function properly. Excellent for seasonal pushes and accompanying long decisions; a poor place for a first small budget.

Contractor Facebook ads Costs nothing

The free audit

Before any of the above. Findings on your site, profile, reviews and competitors, plus your break-even cost per lead worked out from your own numbers. Yours to keep either way.

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Two lower-cost routes worth knowing about

If a full programme is more than you want to commit to right now, our parent company runs two options built for exactly that position. The VIP Marketing Membership is $69.99 a month, month to month, and unlocks member pricing across every service. The marketing subscription covers ongoing work at a flat monthly rate. Both sit under Eye To Ad Media, and we mention them here because they are frequently the right answer for a contractor whose honest budget is a few hundred a month rather than a few thousand.

Use this on us too

What should you ask any marketing agency before signing?

Four questions. They work on us as well as on anyone else pitching you, and an agency that cannot answer the first or the last is telling you something important.

"What's my cost per booked job?"

Not cost per lead. If they cannot tell you how they will measure the difference, they are not tracking outcomes — they are tracking activity.

"What do I keep if I leave?"

The website, the profile, the tracking, the content, the reviews. If the answer is anything less than all of it, you are renting rather than building.

"How long before this pays back?"

Per channel, not blended. Paid search inside a month, SEO four to eight. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is describing a keyword nobody searches.

"What would you tell me not to spend on?"

The most revealing question on the list. An agency with no answer is selling everything it has rather than what you actually need.

Straight answers

Contractor marketing cost questions

How much does contractor marketing cost?
We build campaigns from around $50 a month up to several thousand, scoped to the market rather than sold as a package. For wider context, published 2026 guidance puts most home service contractors between 5 and 15 percent of gross revenue on marketing, which works out at roughly $6,700 a month for a company doing $1 million at 8 percent. Specialist agencies commonly quote $2,500 to $7,500 a month for a full programme. The number that matters is not any of those, it is what your own revenue target divided by your close rate and cost per lead actually requires, which is what the calculator on this page works out.
Why don't you publish a pricing table?
Because a tier chart prices the agency's effort rather than your market, and those are not related. A painter working one town and a roofing company covering three counties can need budgets ten times apart for the same services, and any chart that fits both is either overcharging one or underserving the other. Published guidance itself spans 5 to 20 percent of revenue depending on age, competition and growth stage, which is another way of saying no single price is honest. We quote after we have looked at your market, and we tell you when the arithmetic does not support spending at all.
What percentage of revenue should a contractor spend on marketing?
Published 2026 benchmarks cluster around 5 to 15 percent of gross revenue, with the position inside that band set by growth stage. Established contractors with a strong referral base often hold at 4 to 7 percent. Companies actively growing typically need 8 to 12 percent. Businesses under about five years old, without the review count or referral network their competitors have, frequently need 12 to 20 percent simply to become visible. Reported analysis suggests companies spending under 5 percent tend to stagnate while those at 10 to 15 percent grow considerably faster, and that spending above roughly 18 percent usually signals inefficiency rather than ambition.
Should I budget from last year's revenue or this year's target?
The target, and this is the most common budgeting error in the trades. Setting a percentage against last year's revenue funds last year's size, which structurally guarantees you stay there. A contractor aiming for $2 million should size the budget against $2 million rather than the $1.5 million they did. The calculator on this page works forward from the target for exactly that reason: revenue goal, divided by average job value, divided by close rate, multiplied by cost per lead.
What return should a contractor expect on marketing spend?
Commonly cited guidance is a minimum of 5 to 1, meaning five dollars of revenue for every dollar spent. The useful part is what to do at either end of that. Above 5 to 1 the usual advice is to spend more, because a channel returning that well is being artificially capped by your budget. Below 3 to 1 the advice is to fix the funnel before adding spend, since more traffic into a process that is not converting simply produces more waste. Reported Local Services Ads performance sits well above the threshold at a blended 7.84 times closed return.
Is there a minimum spend to work with you?
No formal minimum, and campaigns genuinely start around $50 a month. There is an honest caveat though, which is that some channels have their own floors regardless of what we charge. Meta campaigns need enough conversions to exit the learning phase, commonly cited at $50 to $65 a day. Search engine optimization compounds, so a budget that cannot be sustained for six months produces nothing. At small budgets the right answer is usually to do one thing properly rather than five things thinly, and we will tell you which one.
Do you require a contract?
No. Everything is month to month, and we would rather keep you because the work produces jobs than because you signed something. The honest caveat is that channels do not all pay back on the same timeline. Paid search typically produces booked work within the first month. Search engine optimization takes four to eight months before it carries real weight. We will tell you upfront what the realistic runway looks like for each part of the plan, so leaving early is a decision rather than a surprise.
What should I ask any contractor marketing agency before signing?
Four questions. What is my cost per booked job, not cost per lead, and how will you measure it. What happens to the assets, the website, the profile, the tracking, the content, if I leave. What is the realistic timeline before this channel pays back. And what would you tell me not to spend money on. An agency that cannot answer the first is not tracking outcomes, and one that has no answer to the last is selling everything it has rather than what you need.

More plain-English definitions in the contractor marketing glossary.

Free audit & quote

Get the number that's actually yours

Tell us your market and your numbers and we will audit your site, your Google Business Profile, your review position and the contractors currently above you — then quote against what your market actually requires rather than against a package.

About a day to turn around. You keep the findings whether you hire us or not. If the arithmetic does not support spending, or your budget is below the floor a channel needs, we will say that plainly instead of quoting anyway.

Prefer to talk? 1-800-481-8638 — a person answers. Or email info@eyetoad.com.

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A real number beats a tier every time.

One call. We'll look at your market, work the arithmetic from your numbers, and quote against what it actually takes. If that's nothing, we'll say nothing.

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