Marketing Budget Calculator
How much should you spend on marketing next year — and can you defend the number? This planner takes your industry, revenue, growth target, funding profile and current team, and returns a benchmark-backed range with every derivation step shown. Free, ungated, and honest about where the data stops.
Step 1 of 4 — Your company
~60 seconds, no email required
Next year's expected revenue if you have it — the budget funds next year, not last year.
Select your industry to continue
How the calculator derives your number
Most budget calculators multiply your revenue by a flat percentage and call it a recommendation. This one works the way an annual budget planner actually has to: it starts from the published baseline for your industry and business model, then adjusts for the three things that move real budgets most — company size(smaller companies spend a higher share of revenue, because fixed costs don't amortise), growth target (a company underwriting 40% growth needs more than one defending its base), and funding profile (equity-backed companies measurably outspend bootstrapped ones).
Every step is shown on the results screen with its source, because the number is only useful if you can walk a CFO through it. And the output is always a range — conservative, benchmark midpoint, aggressive — never a false-precision point. The studies behind the model publish medians and quartiles; pretending otherwise would be theatre.
The model is held to an automated calibration contract: fed the company profile behind our worked B2B SaaS budget template, it must reproduce that template's total within a point, and every input combination is swept for sensible, in-bounds behaviour before a change ships. The full method, its sources and — just as important — its limitations are documented in the methodology section below.
Worked scenarios from the model
Four deliberately different company profiles, computed through the same model you just used. Same question, four very different defensible answers — revenue alone tells you almost nothing.
Series B B2B SaaS, $12M ARR, 40% growth target
anchored$1.3M–$1.8Mper year · 10.9%–14.9% of revenue
midpoint $1,548,000 (12.9%)
Equity backing and a growth mandate put it above the blended median. This is the exact profile behind our worked B2B SaaS template — the calculator reproduces its total by construction.
D2C e-commerce brand, $3M revenue, doubling next year
modeled$480K–$717Kper year · 16%–23.9% of revenue
midpoint $600,000 (20%)
Small revenue base and hypergrowth push the percentage far above the blended panel — and this far from the surveyed centre, the model labels its own output modeled, not anchored.
Bootstrapped manufacturer, $80M revenue, maintain mode
modeled$2M–$3Mper year · 2.5%–3.8% of revenue
midpoint $2,560,000 (3.2%)
Scale, a maintenance mandate and cash-flow discipline all compress the percentage — but at this revenue the dollars are still a seven-figure cost centre with a real team inside it.
Professional-services firm, $8M revenue, steady growth
anchored$272K–$440Kper year · 3.4%–5.5% of revenue
midpoint $360,000 (4.5%)
A referral-driven industry with a low published baseline. The interesting output is not the total but the people-vs-programme check: two senior marketers can consume most of the midpoint.
The data behind this calculator
The model runs on published research rather than intuition. The datasets live on their own pages — deliberately, so there is exactly one place each number is published and maintained.
How to read your result
The range is the recommendation; the checks around it are what make it survive a finance review.
The three points of the range
The midpoint is what companies like yours actually do. The conservative end is a profitability-mandate reading; the aggressive end is what a board that has explicitly funded growth should expect to see. Pick the end that matches the mandate you were given — in writing, ideally.
The people-vs-programme check
Your team cost is compared to the typical people share for your profile. Team-heavy means the budget funds salaries but not the campaigns those people exist to run. Team-light at real revenue means hiring headroom — and programme spend without owners tends to become agency management.
Anchored vs modeled
Anchored means every derivation step sits on a published figure. Modeled means at least one step — hypergrowth, an unlisted industry, a launch premium — is judgement several steps from the data. Modeled results are honest starting points, not benchmarks.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a company spend on marketing?
- There is no single honest number — which is why this page is a calculator rather than a table. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey (401 CMOs, fielded January–March 2026) puts the cross-industry average at 7.7% of company revenue, and SaaS Capital’s 2026 benchmarks put the median for private B2B SaaS at 8% of ARR. But those are blended figures: the defensible number for your company moves with industry, company size, growth target and funding profile, which is exactly what the four steps above adjust for. For the full by-industry dataset behind the model — 19 industries, split B2B and B2C — see our marketing budget benchmarks research, which this calculator uses as its baseline.
Does the recommendation include salaries?
- Yes — and if your budget does not, you cannot compare it to any published benchmark. Gartner counts labour at 24.5% of the marketing budget, inside its 7.7%-of-revenue figure; every percentage-of-revenue benchmark works the same way. Build a programme-only budget, benchmark it against a figure that includes people, and you will conclude you are overspending while actually running a skeleton team. The results screen shows both numbers: the total cost centre for the CFO conversation, and the working budget — what is left after salaries — because that is the number a marketing leader actually manages.
How much of the marketing budget should go to people versus programmes?
- It inverts with scale, which is why borrowed enterprise benchmarks mislead here. Gartner’s 2026 survey puts labour at 24.5% of the marketing budget — but its respondents are overwhelmingly billion-dollar-revenue companies whose media spend dwarfs their in-house team. At $5–50M revenue, a B2B company typically runs 45–65% of the total budget on people (our worked $12M SaaS template sits at 60.8%), because a company that size has insourced the work an enterprise buys as media and agencies. B2C runs people-lighter at every size, since paid media carries more of the load. The check that actually matters is what is left per person: below roughly $30K of working budget per marketer per year, the team cannot fund the programmes it exists to run.
Should bootstrapped companies really spend less on marketing?
- They demonstrably do. SaaS Capital’s 2026 benchmarks — more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies — find equity-backed companies spend roughly twice what bootstrapped companies spend on marketing, the single largest driver of variance in that dataset. This calculator deliberately applies a much smaller adjustment than 2×, because part of the published gap is growth ambition, which the growth step already prices. Read the funding adjustment as a cash-flow reality, not permission to underspend: a bootstrapped company underwriting aggressive growth still lands near the top of its range.
How much should a $10M company spend on marketing?
- It depends on what kind of $10M company — which is the point of the calculator. Two worked examples from the model: a venture-backed B2B software company at $10M growing steadily lands at roughly $930K–$1.26M a year (9.3–12.6% of revenue, midpoint around $1.1M, headcount included). A bootstrapped professional-services firm at the same revenue in maintain mode lands at roughly $280K–$450K (2.8–4.5%). Same revenue, four-times-different budget — industry, growth target and funding do the work, not the revenue figure.
How do I defend this number to a CFO?
- Walk the derivation, not the total — the results screen is built to be read out loud: the baseline and its sample, then each adjustment and its source. Publish two numbers, total cost centre (the one comparable to benchmarks) and working budget (the one you manage weekly), so nobody benchmarks a programme-only figure against a departmental one. Commit to an efficiency target from your own deal-size cohort rather than a borrowed default: the 2026 Aleph and Benchmarkit study of 342 B2B SaaS companies puts median CAC payback at 16 months, and payback scales with ACV — so a casual "12-month" commitment is top-third performance promised in writing, not a baseline. And bring the range: the conservative end is your pre-negotiated cut scenario, which beats absorbing an unplanned one in Q3. For the full path from a defensible number to an approved budget — finance-team rules, stakeholder mapping, the approval flow — follow the marketing budget planning guide.
What is the difference between this calculator and the budget templates?
- The calculator sizes the total for your specific profile and checks it against your team cost. The templates show where a budget goes line by line — a worked example for one named company profile, every line costed against the vendor’s published price. Use them in that order: get your range here, then open the template closest to your profile to see the allocation at real prices, and rescale it to your midpoint. The two agree by construction — the model is calibrated to reproduce the B2B SaaS template’s total from the same inputs.
How do I budget a single campaign rather than the year?
- They are different questions: the annual budget answers "what should our marketing cost centre be", a campaign budget answers "what will this acquisition push cost". For the second, work backward from the customer target — target customers and conversion rates give required leads, cost per lead gives the spend — using the dedicated PPC budget calculator. The failure mode to avoid is funding the year as a series of campaign budgets: that produces a cost centre with no team, no tools and no brand line, defended lead by lead instead of as a plan.
Methodology & sources
Every percentage, price and target on this page traces back to one of the 4 studies below, or to a vendor’s own published price list. The allocation itself is a judgement call made on top of that evidence — this section says which is which.
Reviewed by Etropo Editorial Team
Rebuilt from a single-formula campaign calculator into a benchmark-driven planner. The recommendation is now derived — industry base × company size × growth target × funding profile — with every step shown and sourced. The model is held to an automated calibration contract: fed the company profile behind our worked B2B SaaS template, it must reproduce that template’s 12%-of-ARR total within a point, and it is swept across every input combination for ordered, in-bounds results before any change ships.
How these numbers were arrived at
- The number is derived, not asserted. The model starts from the industry baseline in Etropo’s benchmark research of 12,000+ B2B and B2C companies, then applies a company-size multiplier, a growth-target multiplier and a funding-profile multiplier. The results screen shows each step with its source — the same math trail a CFO will ask you to walk.
- The size and growth adjustments are normalized from the same research’s company-size and growth-stage tables, converted from absolute ranges into multipliers on the industry base. Absolute stage figures cannot be applied directly: a "startup" percentage conflates small revenue with fast growth, and the size band already carries the first of those.
- The funding adjustment is deliberately smaller than the published gap. SaaS Capital finds equity-backed companies spend roughly twice what bootstrapped companies spend on marketing — but part of that gap is growth ambition, which this model prices separately. Applying the full 2× on top of a growth multiplier would double-count the same behaviour.
- Headcount is inside the number. Every percentage-of-revenue benchmark the output will be compared against is a departmental figure, so a recommendation that excluded salaries could not be compared to any of them. The results screen shows the people-vs-programme split separately, because the working budget is what a marketing leader manages week to week.
- The model is calibrated against the worked B2B SaaS template: fed that template’s company profile ($12M ARR, Series B, 40% growth target, five marketers), it must land within a point of the template’s 12% of ARR. An automated check enforces this, along with monotonicity — more growth never means less budget, more revenue never means a higher percentage — across every industry and input combination.
- The output is always a range with a stated confidence. Results near the centre of the surveyed panels are labelled anchored; results at the edges — hypergrowth, unlisted industries, launch premiums — are labelled modeled and should be read as directional.
Where they stop being reliable
- The model is multiplicative: it treats industry, size, growth and funding as independent factors, when in reality they correlate. It is calibrated so the combinations behave sensibly, but a specific company can sit legitimately outside its range — the output is a defensible starting point for a budget conversation, not a substitute for one.
- The industry baselines describe a blended panel. Within any industry, the spread between individual companies is far wider than the published range; the adjustments narrow that gap but do not close it.
- The funding effect is anchored in B2B SaaS, where SaaS Capital measures it directly. Applied to other industries it is directional, not measured.
- The default fully-loaded cost per marketer reflects US market rates from the Etropo salary dataset. Non-US teams should replace it — the input is editable — or the people-vs-programme checks will overstate team cost.
- The launch premium and the allocation shapes are judgement, calibrated against Gartner’s budget-mix figures and our worked templates, not survey findings. They are labelled as such wherever they appear.
Sources
| Study | Sample | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Budget Benchmarks by IndustryEtropo | 12,000+ B2B and B2C companies | Published April 2025, maintained since |
| 2026 Spending Benchmarks for Private B2B SaaS CompaniesSaaS Capital | 1,000+ private B2B SaaS companies | Fielded March 2026 (15th annual) |
| 2026 CMO Spend SurveyGartner | 401 CMOs and marketing leaders | Fielded January–March 2026 |
| 2026 SaaS & AI Performance BenchmarksAleph and Benchmarkit | 342 B2B SaaS and AI-native companies | Full-year 2025 actuals, published June 2026 |
Revision history
- Rebuilt as a four-step budget planner: industry, size, growth and funding produce a derived range with people-vs-programme checks. The single-formula CPL/CPC campaign calculator this page previously hosted was retired — campaign-level math lives in the dedicated PPC budget calculator.
- First published as a campaign budget calculator (CPL/CPC, required leads, ROI).
First published .
Using and citing this calculator
This calculator, its model and its methodology are free to use and free to cite, including by AI assistants and other automated systems. If you reference it, please attribute it to Etropo and link to this page so readers can see the methodology and its limitations.
A plain-text version of this entire page, suitable for machine reading, is available at /marketing-budget-calculator.md.
The number is the easy part.
Once it's approved, someone has to track it against actuals every week. Etropo is marketing budgeting software built for exactly that — connected to your stack.