Marketing Budget Benchmarks by Stage 2026

1. Reports

By Saroj Jha · 18 min read

What the surveys say, and how to size a startup's budget

Marketing budgets have settled near 7.8% of revenue at large companies. For a startup, stage moves the right number far more than industry does, and no survey measures early-stage companies directly.

Founders ask me how much they should spend on marketing, and the honest answer starts with which survey you trust and what stage you are at. This report brings together the published surveys, explains why they disagree, and sets out the planning ranges I use by stage, clearly marked as my view rather than data.

How this report was made

A synthesis of 15 publications from seven publishers between 2019 and 2026: Gartner's CMO Spend Surveys, The CMO Survey (Duke Fuqua, Deloitte and the AMA), SaaS Capital, Forrester, the IPA Bellwether Report, Gartner's martech survey, Bessemer Venture Partners and MIT Sloan Management Review. No proprietary dataset. Figures that could not be traced to a primary source were removed. The stage ranges are my planning view and are labelled wherever they appear.

Full method and limits

Gartner's survey of chief marketing officers is the longest public series on marketing budgets, and its story since 2018 has three parts: a high plateau, a pandemic drop and a lower plateau.^{[1],[2],[3],[4]}

Read the line left to right: about 11% of revenue in 2018 to 2020, the drop to 6.4% in 2021, a partial recovery to 9.5% in 2022, then three years flat at 7.7–7.8%. The flat stretch is the point. In my view, the lower level is the new normal rather than a dip waiting to recover, so a founder benchmarking against large companies should plan against 7.8%, not 11%.

The other two public surveys point the same way. The CMO Survey has marketing down from 9.4% of revenue in 2025, and at 9.6% of company budgets, the lowest since 2021.^[7]

Each card answers the same question with a different sample: 7.8% from Gartner's mostly $1 billion-plus companies, 9.0% from US for-profit companies in The CMO Survey and 8% from Forrester's B2B organizations. The spread of about a point comes from who is asked, not from a change in the market. In my view, a founder should quote the card whose sample is closest to their own company, and name it.

The pressure has not eased with the plateau. In Gartner's 2026 survey, 56% of CMOs said their budget was insufficient to deliver their strategy, from 59% in 2025.^[4],[6]

About this data

Gartner's sample is mostly companies above $1B in revenue, and The CMO Survey covers US for-profit companies only. Neither isolates startups.

Whichever survey you use, adjust it for stage and type before applying it. An average is easily pulled up by a minority of heavy spenders, which is the argument Tavassoli and Moorman make for moving beyond peer averages.^[9] A growth-stage company should expect to sit above Gartner's line, not on it.

The one published figure close to startups is SaaS Capital's: a median of 8% of ARR across more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies, with equity-backed companies spending roughly twice what bootstrapped ones spend.^[10]

Below that, I size budgets against the base that actually exists at each stage: cash burn before product-market fit, the round raised at Seed, ARR at Series A and revenue after that.

Two of my ranges sit away from the published figures on purpose. Mature enterprise at 5–7% is below Gartner's 7.8% because Gartner spans industries and counts the whole marketing budget at very large companies, while my range is B2B SaaS, marketing only. Series A at 20–30% of ARR is above SaaS Capital's 8% median because a Series A company's ARR is small, so the same dollars read as a far larger share; SaaS Capital's median also includes bootstrapped companies.

The two moments that matter are Series A, when founder-led acquisition has to become a repeatable engine, and the move from Series B to scaling, when absolute budget grows while efficiency standards tighten. Holding on to a Seed-era budget at Series A is one of the most common ways to stall.

The CMO Survey splits marketing spend by whether a company sells products or services, and to businesses or consumers.^[7]

Each column is a 2026 sector mean. B2C product, in gold, is the tallest at 12.0%, about 1.7 times B2B product's 7.0%; B2B services sit at 10.1% and B2C services at 7.2%. The note under the chart shows how much one wave can move the gap: it was about 2.4 times in 2025. In my view, a B2B product startup should anchor on the 7.0% column and treat the B2C figure as context, not a target.

About this data

The sector cells are small and their standard deviations large (11 to 15 points in 2025), so treat the direction as reliable and the multiple as one wave's reading.^[11]

No published survey splits marketing spend by go-to-market motion, so I give no percentages here. In my view, product-led companies put more into content, self-serve activation and analytics; sales-led companies balance programs and people, with more on events, sales-supporting content and account targeting; account-based programs cost more per account and usually go with larger deals.

Of the sources here, only The CMO Survey breaks spend out by industry, and its 2025 cells hold 3 to 28 companies each. The figure shows only the sectors with at least 15 responses.^[11]

Each bar is a 2025 sector mean, with the number of companies behind it beside the name. Technology, software and platform companies, in blue, sit at 5.5%, below the middle of a range that runs from insurance's 14.4% to energy's 2.5%. With 16 to 28 companies per bar, a one-point gap between neighbours is noise. SaaS Capital's 8% of ARR is a rough cross-check only, because revenue and ARR are different bases.^[10]

Trust-driven and service categories such as insurance and professional services spend to win relationships that then renew, so brand and retention carry more of the budget. Regulated categories with long cycles, such as banking and energy, spend less of revenue on acquisition. Apply the stage range first and use the industry figure only to check it.

Paid media is the largest line Gartner reports, at 2.4% of company revenue in 2025, and Gartner says its growth is funded by cuts to agencies.^[1],[6],[12]

The three columns are Gartner's 2024, 2025 and 2026 surveys, each of about 400 CMOs: paid media's share of the budget climbs from 27.9% to 30.6% to 31.4%. It rose while total budgets stayed flat, so the money came from other lines. In my view, paid media is now the default place a CMO adds money, which makes it the first line to question when a board asks where efficiency will come from.

AI initiatives took 15.3% of the 2026 budget, rising to 21.3% at AI-mature organizations, while only 30% of CMOs report mature or fully developed AI readiness. In 2025, CMOs reported returns from generative AI mainly as time efficiency (49%), cost efficiency (40%) and capacity (27%).^[4],[6]

Read the chain left to right: AI takes on more of the work, CMOs plan cuts to agencies and labour, and the money reappears in paid media and AI. The source line holds the context that matters: total budgets barely moved, from 7.7% to 7.8% of revenue. In my view, this is reallocation, not growth, so any AI line in a startup budget should name the cost it replaces.

Channel-level figures are where published benchmarks are weakest. The CMO Survey 2026 puts social media at 14.3% of marketing budgets, with marketers expecting 17.1% within a year.^[7]

Over-rotating toward paid media at the expense of organic and brand tends to push acquisition cost up as audiences saturate. For program budget I use a simple heuristic, shown below, so that no single channel absorbs most of the spend. For the whole budget, my working split for growth-stage teams is roughly 40–50% people, 20–25% technology and 30–40% programs; a budget that is mostly payroll is not a marketing budget.

The bar splits program budget, not the whole budget: 70% to channels with a measured history, 20% to channels with early evidence and 10% to experiments with none. It is my planning heuristic, not a surveyed benchmark. In my view, the 10% is what keeps next year's 70% from going stale, and the 70% is what stops a team betting the quarter on an untested channel.

Generative AI is the fastest-moving force: 22% of CMOs said in 2025 that it had reduced their reliance on external agencies.^[6],[7]

The columns show the share of marketing activities in which companies use generative AI: 7.0% in 2024, 15.1% in 2025 and 22.4% in 2026, roughly a tripling in two years. Even so, AI touches fewer than one activity in four. In my view, the gap between that use and the 30% of CMOs who report mature AI readiness is where most teams will spend the next year.

Marketers expected brand-building spending to grow 5.9% over the next twelve months, slightly below the 6.6% expected a year earlier, and marketing organizations grew just 2.5% over the year to early 2026, down from 5.4%.^[7]

Outside the US, the IPA Bellwether survey tracks how UK firms revise their marketing budgets each quarter.^[14]

Each bar is a net balance, the share of UK firms revising budgets up minus the share revising down, not a growth rate. Events (+12.3) and PR (+6.8) ran well ahead of total budgets (+1.9) at the end of 2024. In my view, one quarter of one country's data says in-person work came back first; it is not yet a trend to budget against.

About this data

Geography: The CMO Survey covers US companies and Gartner's sample spans North America, the UK and Europe. No source in this report gives budgets as a share of revenue for continental Europe, Asia-Pacific or Latin America, so none is quoted.

With headcount growth slowing, output has to come from systems: better attribution, cleaner audience data and AI-assisted production. Outside the US and UK, calibrate against local talent costs and channel prices rather than copying a US budget.

• Pre-seed — Size the budget against burn, not revenue, and spend it on learning which one or two channels can work.
• Seed — Spread a fixed share of the round across its runway, and validate channels before scaling any of them.
• Series A–B — Move to a share of ARR or revenue, fund the repeatable channels, and keep paid media from absorbing most of the program budget.

Five questions to calibrate your number

1. What stage are you, and what does it require? Apply the stage adjustment before any other benchmark.
2. What is your CAC payback by channel? Bessemer recommends investing in acquisition when LTV to CAC is 3× or better, with payback under 12 months for SMB, 18 for mid-market and 24 for enterprise.^[15]
3. What does your competitive set spend? Benchmark against the companies you compete with, not the sector mean.
4. How is the budget split between people, technology and programs? Check the split before arguing about the total.
5. Is your attribution honest enough to decide with? Last-touch attribution over-funds bottom-funnel channels and under-funds brand.

@techreport{jha2026budget,
  author = {Jha, Saroj},
  title = {Marketing Budget Benchmarks by Stage 2026},
  institution = {AAJ},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aajconsult.com/reports/marketing-budget-benchmarks-2026}
}