Marketing budget calculator
What your growth target actually costs.
Most marketing budgets are set by what feels affordable. This works the other way around: start from the revenue you want, and it shows the jobs, leads, cost per signed job, and ad spend required to get there.
Start from a trade
High ticket, low volume. The economics are forgiving, so the real constraint is usually how many qualified estimates your market can actually produce.
Your numbers
Every field is editable. Replace the estimates with your own.
The goal. New revenue per year, not your total revenue. Everything below is what reaching it takes.
What the business does today. Without it, marketing spend is judged against new revenue alone, which always reads high.
Utah replacement averages, a published range of roughly $9,400 to $14,700 (2026).
Residential replacement runs 30 to 33 percent gross. Commercial runs higher.
Retail roofing commonly runs 25 to 40 percent. Insurance work behaves differently.
Where the leads come from
SearchLight 2026 LSA benchmark for roofing, midpoint of a $71 to $162 range.
Optional, but it is the difference between a plan and a wish. Zero means skip the check.
Our packages: $1,875, $2,875, or $3,875 per month. Ad budget is billed separately and paid directly to the platforms.
To add $1,000,000 a year
$2,046 ad spend + $3,875 management
Check this6.2 more jobs a month · 18 leads to get them
At $116 per lead and a 35% close rate, each signed job costs $331 to win and returns $4,050 in gross profit, so you keep $3,719 of it. Over a year that is $71,050 of marketing against $300,000 of gross profit added.
Unit economics
Each job returns 12.2× what it costs to win.
Share of revenue
1.8% of $4,000,000 total revenue, inside the normal 5–10% band.
Volume feasibility
Add your current monthly lead count to check whether this jump is realistic.
per month · 74 per year
per month · 212 per year
$2,046 ads + $3,875 fee
of $4,000,000 · 7.1% of the new revenue alone
The derivation
Jobs needed
$1,000,000 ÷ $13,500 per job = 74/yr
6.2/mo
Leads needed
6.2 jobs ÷ 35% close rate · 212/yr
18/mo
Cost per signed job
$116 per lead ÷ 35% close rate
$331
Gross profit per job
$13,500 × 30% margin
$4,050
Ad spend
6.2 jobs × $331 each · $24,550/yr
$2,046/mo
Total marketing, with the fee
$2,046 ads + $3,875 fee · $71,050/yr
$5,921/mo
Gross profit added
6.2 jobs × $4,050 · $300,000/yr
$25,000/mo
Left after marketing
$25,000 gross profit − $5,921 marketing
$19,079/mo
Month by month. 6.2 extra jobs a month need 18 leads, which costs $5,921 a month all in. Those jobs add $25,000 of gross profit a month, leaving $19,079 after marketing — and the spend is 1.8% of a $4,000,000 business.
Cost-per-lead defaults are 2026 published benchmarks from SearchLight, drawn from $14.9M of home-services Google Ads spend across 816 contractors. They are starting points, not your numbers: real cost per lead moves with market, season, competition, and how well the account is run. This is a planning model, not a forecast. It assumes your close rate and average job value hold as volume grows, and it does not model seasonality or whether your crews can absorb the extra work.
Common questions
The math behind the number
Four questions that decide whether a marketing budget is an investment or a guess.
How much should a home service company spend on marketing?
Work it out from what a lead costs rather than from a percentage rule. Divide your real cost per lead by your close rate and you have what one signed job costs to win. Multiply that by the jobs you need and you have the budget. The percentage of revenue is then something you check the answer against, not something you start from.
Why does the channel change the answer so much?
Because the same job can be profitable or unprofitable depending on what you paid for the lead. Published 2026 benchmarks put plumbing leads at about $57 on Local Service Ads and about $183 on non-branded search. On a typical service ticket the first is comfortably profitable and the second is close to break-even, with nothing else about the business having changed.
My cost per lead is higher than the benchmark. Does that mean it will not work?
Not on its own. What matters is average job value multiplied by margin and close rate, measured against that cost. A roofer can pay far more for a lead than a drain-cleaning company and still come out ahead. Enter your own number and the calculator will tell you whether the economics hold.
Why does it ask how many leads we get today?
Because economics and feasibility are different questions. A plan can be perfectly profitable per job and still require four times the lead volume your market produces. Comparing the leads you need against the leads you already get is what separates a plan from a wish.
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