Marketing Spend as a Percentage of Revenue by Industry: UK Benchmarks 2027
Most marketing budget benchmarks quoted to UK founders come from US surveys, large enterprise surveys or no source at all. The real numbers tell a more useful story. Smaller companies spend almost twice the headline average. The typical business spends less than it.
The short answer Large companies spend 7.8% of revenue on marketing (Gartner, 2026). US companies of all sizes average 9.0% (The CMO Survey, 2026). Companies under $25m revenue average 13% to 17%. No primary source publishes a UK benchmark by industry. UK leaders should plan from sector, size and growth target, then test the number against acquisition maths.
The numbers for 2027 planning
7.8% of revenue: average marketing budget at large companies in North America, the UK and Europe (Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026, 401 leaders).
9.0% of revenue: average across US companies of all sizes (The CMO Survey 2026, 154 responses to this question).
17.4% of revenue: companies with $10m to $25m revenue (The CMO Survey 2026).
£53.5bn: forecast UK advertising spend for 2027, up 5.9% (Advertising Association and WARC, July 2026).
15.3% of marketing budgets now go to AI. Only 30% of CMOs say their organisation is ready to scale it (Gartner 2026).
56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy (Gartner 2026).
The 2026 benchmark: 7.8% for large companies, 9.0% across all sizes
Marketing budgets at large companies sit at 7.8% of revenue in 2026. That is up from 7.7% in 2025, which Gartner describes as effectively flat. The figure comes from 401 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, surveyed from January to March 2026, most at companies with over $1bn in revenue.
The CMO Survey, run by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, puts the US average at 9.0%. Its sample covers US companies of every size. That difference in sample explains most of the gap between the 2 surveys.
Both figures are averages. In The CMO Survey the spread of answers is wider than the average itself.
A few heavy spenders pull the figure up. The typical company spends less than the headline.
"CMOs are being asked to deliver growth, efficiency and transformation without meaningful budget expansion." Ewan McIntyre, VP Analyst and Chief of Research, Gartner, May 2026
How the benchmark has moved since 2018
Gartner CMO Spend Survey
Marketing budgets as a % of company revenue, 2018 to 2026
Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2018 to 2026. Large enterprises in North America, the UK and Europe.
| Year | Marketing budget, % of company revenue |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 11.2% |
| 2019 | 10.5% |
| 2020 | 11.0% |
| 2021 | 6.4% |
| 2022 | 9.5% |
| 2023 | 9.1% |
| 2024 | 7.7% |
| 2025 | 7.7% |
| 2026 | 7.8% |
Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2018 to 2026. Large enterprises. Sample size and geography have changed over time. Treat year on year moves as directional.
The 2026 figure is 18% lower than 2022. Before the pandemic, budgets averaged around 11% of revenue. They have not been back there since.
Marketing spend as a percentage of revenue by industry
This is the table most people search for. The most current public source is The CMO Survey 2026 sector breakout.
It is US data. Some sectors rest on very few responses. The table below shows the sample size for every row.
Sectors with 12 or more responses
The CMO Survey 2026, % of revenue
| Sector | % of revenue, 2026 | Responses | % of revenue, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer packaged goods | 11.5% | 15 | 14.4% |
| Tech, software and platforms | 10.6% | 33 | 9.0% |
| Banking, finance and insurance | 7.4% | 21 | 5.0% |
| Professional services | 6.8% | 12 | 4.2% |
| Healthcare | 5.9% | 17 | 7.6% |
| Manufacturing | 5.6% | 13 | 2.5% |
| All companies | 9.0% | 154 | 9.35% |
Source: The CMO Survey 2026 and 2025, Firm and Industry Breakout Reports. US companies. Means.
Sectors with fewer than 12 responses (indicative only)
Retail and wholesale 8.8% (10 responses). Education 18.4% (5). Communications and media 18.0% (6). Real estate 12.6% (4). Consumer services 11.0% (3). Energy 7.1% (4). Pharma and biotech 6.8% (5). Transportation 3.8% (3). Mining and construction 0.4% (3).
These small samples swing hard from year to year. Pharma and biotech went from 18.2% in 2025 to 6.8% in 2026. Treat them as a direction, never as a target.
Gartner publishes its industry benchmarks to clients only.
B2B vs B2C
| Business model | % of revenue, 2026 | Responses | % of revenue, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| B2C product | 12.0% | 34 | 15.5% |
| B2B services | 10.1% | 41 | 9.0% |
| B2C services | 7.2% | 18 | 6.0% |
| B2B product | 7.0% | 61 | 6.4% |
Source: The CMO Survey 2026 and 2025. US companies. Means.
Consumer product companies spend the most at 12.0%. In B2B, services companies outspend product companies, at 10.1% against 7.0%.
Online businesses spend more than twice as much
Companies that make 50% or more of their sales online spend 18.6% to 18.8% of revenue on marketing. Companies with no online sales spend 8.0%. If the website is the shop, marketing is the cost of opening the door.
Marketing spend by company size
Company size moves the number more than industry does.
The CMO Survey 2026, % of revenue
| Company revenue | Marketing spend, % of revenue |
|---|---|
| Under $10m | 13.3% |
| $10m to $25m | 17.4% |
| $26m to $99m | 11.1% |
| $100m to $499m | 5.9% |
| $500m to $999m | 6.9% |
| $1bn to $9.9bn | 5.7% |
| $10bn and above | 9.5% |
Source: The CMO Survey 2026. US companies. 15 to 34 responses per band. Means.
Smaller companies have less existing demand working for them. Every customer has to be found and won. Marketing takes a bigger share of revenue as a result.
Above $100m, the ratio drops to around 6%.
For software businesses, SaaS Capital's 2026 survey of more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies puts median marketing spend at 8% of annual recurring revenue, with sales at a further 15%. Equity backed companies spend twice as much on marketing as bootstrapped ones.
What the percentages mean in pounds
| Annual turnover | At 5% | At 7.8% | At 10% | At 13% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £1m | £50,000 | £78,000 | £100,000 | £130,000 |
| £5m | £250,000 | £390,000 | £500,000 | £650,000 |
| £10m | £500,000 | £780,000 | £1m | £1.3m |
| £25m | £1.25m | £1.95m | £2.5m | £3.25m |
| £50m | £2.5m | £3.9m | £5m | £6.5m |
Arithmetic only. 7.8% is the Gartner large company average. 13% sits at the lower end of The CMO Survey's under $25m bands.
A £5m business at the large company average has £32,500 a month. That has to cover people, agencies, media, technology and content.
The UK picture
There is no published UK benchmark for marketing spend as a percentage of revenue by industry or by company size. We checked the IPA, the Advertising Association, the ONS, the Department for Business and Trade, the FSB and the British Business Bank. Any page quoting a precise UK sector percentage should show you where it came from.
What the UK does publish tells you where the money is going.
UK advertising spend, 2025 to 2027
| Year | Total UK adspend | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | £46.7bn | +6.4% |
| 2026 (forecast) | £50.5bn | +8.2% |
| 2027 (forecast) | £53.5bn | +5.9% |
Source: Advertising Association and WARC Expenditure Report, July 2026. Nominal figures.
UK advertising grew 9.3% to £11.7bn in the first quarter of 2026. Search took £17.9bn in 2025, 38% of the total. Social took £11.5bn, up 21%. Retail media grew 17.5% to £3.75bn.
S&P Global's forecast for the IPA is lower: 2.1% growth in 2026 and 2.3% in 2027. That forecast strips out inflation and the AA/WARC figure does not. Both point the same way.
What UK businesses actually buy
UK businesses bought £73.8bn of advertising and market research services in 2024, according to the ONS Annual Purchases Survey. That is around 4.3% of all the goods and services UK businesses buy. It excludes in house marketing salaries. The full UK marketing bill is higher.
What the IPA Bellwether measures
The IPA Bellwether reported a net balance of +6.9% in the second quarter of 2026. That means 23.8% of the 300 or so marketing leaders surveyed raised budgets and 16.9% cut them.
The figure measures direction. It does not mean UK budgets grew 6.9%.
Events led the increases at +11.0%. Video reached a 7 quarter high at +8.2%.
The third quarter report is due in mid October 2026. This page will be updated when it lands.
The panel is drawn mainly from the UK's top 1,000 companies. It tells you nothing about SMEs, which make up 99.85% of the UK's 5.69m businesses.
Where the budget goes in 2026
The total is flat. The mix inside it is moving fast.
| Category | Share of marketing budget, 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Paid media | 31.4% | 5 year high |
| Labour (in house people) | 24.5% | Up from 21.9% in 2025 |
| Agencies | Not published | Cut to fund paid media |
| AI (spread across all categories) | 15.3% | First year reported |
Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026. Large enterprises. AI spend overlaps the other categories and should not be added to them.
Inside media, awareness and conversion take 62.6% of spend. Loyalty and retention have fallen 29% since 2024 to under 15%. Acquisition budgets are 26% larger than retention budgets in The CMO Survey.
Digital is now more than 2 thirds of media investment at large companies. In the US, digital marketing spend grew 8.2% last year while total marketing spend grew 1.7%.
How AI is changing the marketing budget
AI is being funded by moving money, because the total is not growing. Gartner found that 15.3% of marketing budgets now go to AI.
At the most AI ready organisations the AI share is 21.3%. Their total marketing budget is 8.9% of revenue, against the 7.8% average.
Readiness is the constraint.
70% of CMOs say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal. 30% say their organisation is ready to scale AI. 38% name a lack of internal AI talent as the biggest barrier.
The work itself is changing. Marketing leaders expect AI to automate 36% of marketing work by 2028, up from 16% in 2026 (Gartner). The CMO Survey finds AI is already used in 24.2% of marketing activities, up from 13.1% in 2024.
Headcount is following. 18% of marketing leaders have eliminated certain roles because of automation. 16% have created new ones (Gartner, 1,303 leaders, 2026).
US marketing headcount growth slowed to 2.5% in 2026, from 5.4% the year before (The CMO Survey).
AI search is changing what the budget buys
When Google shows an AI summary, users click a traditional result on 8% of visits. Without one, they click on 15% (Pew Research Center, 68,879 searches, 2025). Only 1% click a link inside the summary.
Being cited in the summary decides who keeps the traffic. Seer Interactive's 2026 analysis of 2.43bn impressions found brands cited in Google's AI Overview earned about 20,700 clicks per million impressions on informational searches. Brands left out earned about 9,400.
"AIO presence isn't the mover, whether or not a brand is cited in that AIO is." Seer Interactive, April 2026
41.5% of US companies in The CMO Survey already use generative engine optimisation. In 2027, part of the content and SEO budget needs to target AI citation as well as Google ranking.
The numbers you should stop quoting
"The SBA recommends 7% to 8% of revenue." We found no SBA study behind this. It appears in US small business planning material as a rule of thumb for firms under $5m revenue with net margins of 10% to 12%. It is US guidance with conditions attached.
"The FSB says 5% to 10%." We found no FSB publication containing this figure. Use it as a rough range at most.
"Marketing budgets are 7.7% of revenue." That was Gartner's 2024 and 2025 figure. The 2026 figure is 7.8%.
"UK SMEs spend 16.8% of turnover." We could not trace this to any study.
UK sector tables showing consumer goods at 29%. The most widely used UK sector table comes from survey data published in March 2023. It is now over 3 years old.
"UK marketing budgets grew 6.9%." The IPA Bellwether measures the balance of companies raising budgets against those cutting them. It does not measure the size of the increase.
How to set your 2027 marketing budget
A benchmark is a starting point. Each budgeting method below has a different weakness.
Percentage of revenue. The budget rises and falls with sales. It is easy to defend to a board, even though while revenue lags. It also cuts spend exactly when sales fall, which is when holding your position matters most.
Objective and task. Work out the target. Cost the activity needed to hit it. That cost becomes the budget.
It is the most logical method. It only works if you know what a customer costs to acquire. Our sets out the metrics.
Share of voice. Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of the IPA Databank shows brands grow when their share of category advertising exceeds their market share. 10 points of excess share of voice delivers around 0.6 points of market share growth a year in B2C and 0.7 in B2B. Use it to turn a market share target into a spend target.
Brand and activation split. Once the total is set, Binet and Field's work points to around 60% brand and 40% activation in B2C. In B2B it is closer to 46% brand and 54% activation.
They describe both as guiding principles. Neither is a precise rule. We cover the split in more detail in .
For the full method with worked examples in pounds, see How Much Should You Spend on Marketing in 2027?
What happens when companies cut
In the 2008 and 2009 recession, brands with excess share of voice above 8% grew market share by 4.5% a year. Brands with zero or negative excess share of voice grew 1% (Peter Field, 2020, IPA Databank). Yet when profits miss, marketing is the cost that gets cut 45.4% of the time (The CMO Survey 2026).
Cutting promotions is often a better lever. The IPA's October 2026 study with Les Binet found UK consumer goods companies spend around twice as much on price promotions as on paid media.
"Price promotions are like class A drugs: expensive, dangerous and addictive." Les Binet, IPA, October 2026
UK employment costs
Employer National Insurance rose from 13.8% to 15% on 6 April 2025. The threshold fell from £9,100 to £5,000. On a £50,000 marketing salary, employer NI rose from £5,644 to £6,750.
Labour is already 24.5% of large company marketing budgets. Every in house hire now takes a bigger share of the budget. See the full .
What counts as marketing spend
Benchmarks only compare if you count the same things. Gartner's benchmark covers in house labour, agencies, marketing technology and paid media. A complete count usually includes:
In house marketing salaries and costs
Agencies, freelancers and consultants
Paid media across search, social, TV, outdoor and retail media
Marketing technology and software, including AI tools
Content, creative and production
Events, sponsorship and PR
Research and insight
Sales team costs are excluded. If your benchmark excludes salaries and you compare it against a total that includes them, you will think you are underspending.
What I see when I look at marketing budgets
Some of the fastest growing companies I see are built on paid media. Switch it off and .
That is a fragile position. Every platform is an , intent, email addresses and leads. Competitors bid for the same people. Cost per lead and cost per acquisition keep climbing.
Large companies have pushed paid media to 31.4% of their marketing budgets in 2026, a 5 year high (Gartner). If you are spending at that level, you need the right people doing the right jobs.
"Growth" is too broad to budget against. It is the same reason .
Do you want more leads, more revenue or more app installs? Or is the real problem churn, lost accounts and people unsubscribing?
Each answer needs different campaigns, channels and . Name the one you need and the budget can be built around it.
Marketing budgets are scrutinised harder than almost any other line, which is why . Boards want a guarantee: spend this and that will happen. With the right person, strategy, creative and timing, it does happen.
The job has grown at the same time. One budget is now expected to win customers, keep them and build the brand while costs rise.
AI is taking on more of that work with every release. It has already made for businesses that could never justify a full marketing team. Marketing leaders expect AI to automate 36% of marketing work by 2028, up from 16% in 2026 (Gartner).
The budget question for 2027 comes down to attention. Your customers are on social, search, shopping platforms and now AI answers. Being seen in each of them costs money. The companies that budget for all 4 will be the ones customers find.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of revenue should a business spend on marketing? Large companies average 7.8% of revenue (Gartner 2026). US companies of all sizes average 9.0% (The CMO Survey 2026). Companies under $25m revenue average 13% to 17%. Set yours by size, sector and growth target, then test it against your cost to acquire a customer.
What is the average marketing spend as a percentage of revenue in the UK? No primary source publishes a UK average. Gartner's 7.8% includes UK companies but is not split out. UK data from the ONS shows businesses bought £73.8bn of advertising and market research services in 2024.
How much should a small business spend on marketing in the UK? US companies under $10m revenue average 13.3% of revenue. Those between $10m and $25m average 17.4% (The CMO Survey 2026). There is no equivalent UK survey. Use these as a guide.
How much should a startup spend on marketing? Private B2B SaaS companies spend a median of 8% of annual recurring revenue on marketing and 15% on sales (SaaS Capital 2026). Equity backed companies spend twice as much on marketing as bootstrapped ones.
Which industries spend the most on marketing as a percentage of revenue? Among sectors with reliable samples, consumer packaged goods (11.5%) and tech and software (10.6%) spend the most. Manufacturing (5.6%) and healthcare (5.9%) spend the least (The CMO Survey 2026, US).
What percentage of revenue should a B2B company spend on marketing? B2B services companies average 10.1% of revenue. B2B product companies average 7.0% (The CMO Survey 2026, US).
Do salaries count as marketing spend? Yes. Gartner's benchmark includes in house labour, which makes up 24.5% of the average large company marketing budget in 2026.
Is the 5% to 10% rule still right? It is a reasonable range for larger companies. It is too low for most companies under $25m revenue, which average 13% to 17% in The CMO Survey 2026. We found no primary study behind the rule itself.
Are marketing budgets going up or down in 2027? UK advertising spend is forecast to grow 5.9% to £53.5bn in 2027 (AA/WARC). US marketing leaders expect budgets to grow 7.6% over the next 12 months (The CMO Survey 2026). As a share of revenue, large company budgets have been flat at 7.7% to 7.8% since 2024.
How do I calculate marketing spend as a percentage of revenue? Divide total annual marketing spend by total annual revenue and multiply by 100. A business spending £400,000 on marketing with £5m revenue spends 8%.
Sources and methodology
Figures on this page were checked against the original publisher's material on 8 October 2026. Figures we could not trace to a primary source are excluded or labelled.
Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026. 401 marketing leaders, North America, UK and Europe, January to March 2026, mostly companies over $1bn revenue. . . . .
Gartner AI automation and roles. . .
The CMO Survey 2026 (Duke Fuqua, Deloitte, AMA). 308 US marketing leaders, 7 to 29 January 2026. 154 answered the percentage of revenue question. . .
Advertising Association and WARC Expenditure Report. . .
IPA Bellwether Report. Around 300 UK marketing leaders. . .
ONS Annual Purchases Survey 2024. . Official statistics in development.
Department for Business and Trade. .
SaaS Capital. .
Binet and Field. .
Peter Field. .
IPA and Les Binet. .
Pew Research Center. .
Seer Interactive. .
HMRC. .
