Your numbers
Suggested channel split
What this budget could buy (estimate)
These are planning estimates built on industry-typical cost-per-lead and booking-rate benchmarks, not a guarantee. Your real numbers depend on reviews, response time, service area, and close rate.
How much should a contractor spend on marketing?
The honest answer is a range, not a single number: most home service contractors land between 5% and 12% of revenue. Where you fall depends on three things, your margins, how fast you want to grow, and how competitive your market is. As a rule of thumb, around 5% holds your current pipeline steady, roughly 8% funds steady growth, and 10% to 12% is what aggressive growth usually costs. Newer businesses fighting to get established often run higher for a stretch; mature businesses with strong word-of-mouth can sometimes run lower.
The calculator above turns that into a dollar figure based on your revenue and goal, then does the part most "X% of revenue" advice skips: it splits the budget across the channels that actually generate contractor leads, and estimates what the spend should produce.
How to split a contractor marketing budget across channels
A budget number is useless without an allocation. For most home service contractors, a sensible starting split looks like this:
- Google Local Services Ads (about 35%) pay-per-lead, top of the page, and you only pay for actual contacts. Usually the highest-intent channel for home services.
- Google Ads search (about 25%) captures the searches LSA does not, gives you control over messaging, and scales when LSA inventory caps out.
- Local SEO and Google Business Profile (about 20%) the compounding channel. Slower to pay off, but it lowers your blended cost per lead over time as organic and map-pack visibility grow.
- Meta, Facebook and Instagram (about 10%) useful for demand generation, retargeting, and bigger-ticket or seasonal services.
- Testing reserve (about 10%) hold this back for trying a new channel, a seasonal push, or doubling down on whatever is working.
This is a starting point, not a rule. If one channel already books jobs far cheaper than the others, weight toward it. The split adjusts the dollar figures in the calculator automatically.
Why "percent of revenue" alone is not enough
Plenty of advice stops at "spend 7% to 8% of revenue on marketing." That is fine as a ceiling, but it tells you nothing about whether the spend will actually pay for itself. The number that matters is cost per booked job, what you pay in total marketing to win one paying customer, measured against your average ticket. A roofer with a $9,000 average job can profitably spend far more per booked job than a drain-cleaning business at $250. The calculator estimates this for you using cost-per-lead benchmarks by trade and a typical booking rate, so you can sanity-check whether your budget is realistic before you spend it.
When to spend more, and when to pull back
A marketing budget is a dial, not a thermostat. A few situations justify turning it up: you have open capacity on the calendar, you are heading into your busy season, a competitor just left the market, or you have proof that one channel is booking jobs below your target cost. Spending more when demand and capacity are both high is how you compound, instead of just maintaining.
The opposite is also true. If your phones are not getting answered, your reviews are thin, or your booking rate is low, more budget mostly buys more wasted leads. Fix the conversion side first. The cheapest lead is the one you already paid for and let slip because nobody picked up. In practice that means an answered phone during ad hours, fast follow-up on form fills, and a steady review cadence before you scale spend.
Seasonality matters too. Demand for most home services swings hard across the year, so a flat monthly budget over-spends and under-spends by turns. Pace toward your peak: build budget in the weeks before the season starts so your ads, reviews, and ranking are already warm when search volume spikes, then hold a floor in the slow months to stay visible rather than going dark and restarting from zero. Use the split above as a baseline, then let your own cost per booked job, not a generic percentage, decide where the next dollar goes. Review the numbers every quarter, because the channel that was cheapest last year is rarely the cheapest this year, and the budget that grows your business is the one you actually adjust as the data comes in.
Related tools and reading
- LSA ROI Calculator forecast leads and ROAS from a Local Services Ads budget.
- Google Ads Calculator the same, for a Google Ads budget.
- How much do contractor leads cost by channel the CPL benchmarks behind this tool.
- LSA Lead Tracker once you are spending, audit your true cost per lead from your real data.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a contractor spend on marketing?
Most home service contractors spend 5% to 12% of revenue. Roughly 5% maintains your pipeline, 8% supports steady growth, and 10% to 12% funds aggressive growth. Margins, growth goals, and market competitiveness move the number.
How should I split the budget across channels?
A common starting split is about 35% Google LSA, 25% Google Ads, 20% Local SEO and Google Business Profile, 10% Meta, and 10% testing reserve. Weight toward whatever channel already books jobs cheapest for you.
Are the lead and ROAS estimates guaranteed?
No. They are planning estimates from industry-typical cost-per-lead and booking-rate benchmarks. Your real results depend on reviews, response time, service area, and close rate.
Does the budget include Local SEO even though it is not "ads"?
Yes. Local SEO and Google Business Profile work is part of a complete marketing budget. It is the compounding channel that lowers your blended cost per lead over time, so the calculator allocates to it even though the lead estimate above only counts the paid channels (LSA and Google Ads) to stay conservative.