What percentage of revenue should a small business spend on marketing?
Where the familiar 7 to 8 percent figure comes from, why it describes big companies, and how to set a number you can check against what the spend returns.
There is no official percentage. The best-known benchmark is just under 8 percent of revenue. Gartner's 2026 survey of marketing leaders put average marketing budgets at 7.8 percent of company revenue, almost unchanged from 7.7 percent in 2025, and most of the companies it surveyed earn over $1 billion a year. A small business can use that as a reference point, then set its own number by what the spend has to return.
The Gartner figure comes from 401 chief marketing officers and marketing leaders in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, surveyed from January to March 2026. That is a useful benchmark for large firms and a loose one for a 12-person company in Ankeny. Gartner also found that 56 percent of those leaders said they lacked the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy, which is a reminder that a percentage of revenue says nothing about whether the plan behind it is any good.
The Small Business Administration's own blog has covered the same question. Its 2019 post on marketing budgets says many businesses set the budget as a percentage of revenue, and that a startup should work from projected revenue instead. It passed on survey figures from the time showing total marketing spend averaging 7.9 percent of revenue in 2018, with consumer-facing companies spending more than business-to-business ones: 6.3 percent for B2B product firms, 6.9 percent for B2B services, 9.6 percent for consumer products and 11.8 percent for consumer services. The same post notes that startups usually need a bigger share than established businesses.
Read together, the sources point to a sensible starting range in the high single digits, a little lower if you sell to other businesses and higher if you sell to the public or are new. Treat that as an estimate to begin from. The percentage is the easy part.
The harder part is what the SBA's business guide asks for next. It tells owners to compare marketing and sales costs with the revenue they generate, so they can see whether the spend has a positive return and which parts of the plan are working. It also warns that some tactics are hard to measure, and says to be consistent in how you measure them. A budget set at 8 percent of revenue with no way to tell what it produced is a guess with a decimal point.
A practical way to set the number for next year is to start from what one customer is worth. Work out the average gross profit from a new customer over the first year, decide how much of that you are willing to spend to win one, and multiply by the number of new customers you need. If that number is far above or below the 7 to 8 percent reference point, look at the assumptions before you look at the budget. Then pick one or two measures you will check every month, such as new inquiries by source or cost per new customer, and write them next to the budget line.
If marketing is already running and nobody can say what it returned, the budget question can wait until that is fixed. The six questions on this site work out what is missing between the spend and the result, and point to the fix that matches it.