How Much Should a Flooring Contractor Spend on Marketing?
There is no single right marketing budget. Once you land on a number, here is how to bake it into your day rate, job price, or square-foot rate instead of quietly eating it.
Last updated August 16, 2026
Agencies that work with home service contractors commonly recommend 8% to 10% of revenue in steady maintenance mode, 12% to 15% while actively growing, and 15% to 20% for a company under two years old. Those are agency recommendations, not a rule from any government or academic source, so treat them as a starting range. The table below turns them into dollars, and the calculator turns whatever figure you settle on into a per-working-day, per-job, and per-ft² amount to bake into your pricing so it never gets silently eaten.
What those ranges mean in dollars
A percentage is easy to agree with and hard to budget from. Here is what each range comes to at three sizes of business, per year and per month.
| Stage (share of revenue). Cells: per year, then per month | $250,000 revenue | $500,000 revenue | $1,000,000 revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steady, maintenance mode (8% to 10%) | $20,000 to $25,000 /yr $1,667 to $2,083 /mo | $40,000 to $50,000 /yr $3,333 to $4,167 /mo | $80,000 to $100,000 /yr $6,667 to $8,333 /mo |
| Actively growing (12% to 15%) | $30,000 to $37,500 /yr $2,500 to $3,125 /mo | $60,000 to $75,000 /yr $5,000 to $6,250 /mo | $120,000 to $150,000 /yr $10,000 to $12,500 /mo |
| Under two years old (15% to 20%) | $37,500 to $50,000 /yr $3,125 to $4,167 /mo | $75,000 to $100,000 /yr $6,250 to $8,333 /mo | $150,000 to $200,000 /yr $12,500 to $16,667 /mo |
Rows are the stage of the business and the share of annual revenue agencies commonly recommend for it. Columns are annual revenue. Each cell is the marketing budget that share comes to: the top line per year, the bottom line per month, rounded to the dollar. The ranges are agency recommendations, not a published standard. If your revenue sits between two columns, the same percentages apply to your own figure.
How to read the inputs
Marketing Spend
- Toggle Monthly or Yearly, then enter your total spend across every channel. The field starts completely blank, and nothing calculates until you type a real number
Your Business Volume
- Working Days Per Week × Weeks Worked Per Year sets your working days; Jobs Per Year × Typical Area Per Job sets your annual area. Defaults are 5 days, 52 weeks, 60 jobs, and 80 ft² per job
Add to Your Pricing
- Per Working Day, Per Job, and Per ft² (or m²) are three different ways to bake the same spend into a quote. Use whichever matches how you actually price a job
Apply to Profile & Copy Summary
- Apply to Profile pushes all three allocations into your Pro Business Profile at once; Copy Summary only grabs Per Year, Per Month, Per Working Day, and Per Working Week, not Per Job or Per Area
Worked example
A solo contractor spending $2,000/month on marketing, working 5 days a week for 52 weeks a year (260 working days), landing 60 jobs a year averaging 80 ft² each (4,800 ft² of annual area), gets: $92.31 per working day, $400.00 per job, and $5.00 per ft². The same $24,000 yearly spend also breaks down to $461.54 per week and $2,000.00 per month. Those are four different views of the exact same number, so you can add whichever one matches how you actually quote.
Turn your own spend into a per-day rate
Pick Monthly or Yearly, enter your real spend, and set your own working days, jobs, and typical job size to see your true per-day, per-job, and per-ft² add-on.
Full tool also sets Working Days Per Week, Weeks Worked Per Year, and Typical Area Per Job (ft² or m²), and can push all three results into your Business Profile.
Open the live calculator →Is the budget paying for itself? Cost per lead and per booked job
A budget only means something next to what it brings in. Two divisions turn a month’s spend into the numbers that decide whether it is working:
- Cost per lead = what you spent that month ÷ the calls and form fills it produced
- Cost per booked job = cost per lead ÷ your close rate (the share of leads that become jobs)
With made-up inputs to show the arithmetic: $2,000 in a month that produces 20 leads is $100 per lead, and if 1 in 4 of those leads books, each job cost $400 to win. That $400 has to come out of the job’s profit, not its price, so the useful comparison is against what a typical job leaves you after materials and labor. Run it on your own numbers: a spend that looks high as a percentage can be cheap per job, and the reverse.
The Marketing ROI Calculator takes your spend, leads, close rate, job value and margin and shows the leads, jobs, gross profit and return over twelve months, which is the honest test of whether the range you picked above is the right one for your business.
Common mistakes
- Assuming the business-volume defaults are in square meters, when the live default area unit is square feet (ft²); only a stale source-code comment says otherwise
- Treating the $2,000/month example or the 60-jobs/year default as a recommended target. They are just typical-solo-contractor placeholders for the business-volume fields, and the spend field itself starts completely blank so nothing implies a suggested budget
- Expecting this tool to tell you how much to spend. It only converts a number you already picked into a per-day, per-job, and per-ft² add-on; deciding the budget itself is what the separate Marketing ROI Calculator is for
- Assuming the per-ft² figure always rounds to two decimal places. It can show up to four decimals on smaller per-unit numbers, and just happens to land on $5.00 in the example above
- Mixing this calculator’s 52-week-year default up with the Quoting Cost Calculator’s, which is a different tool and defaults to 48 weeks, not 52
- Citing "7% to 8% of revenue, per the SBA" as an official government recommendation, when the SBA’s own blog says there is no fixed answer and only cites third-party data; that specific figure is a widely copied but untraceable claim
Use outside benchmark data to decide the number that goes in the spend field, then let this calculator turn whatever figure you land on into the per-day, per-job, and per-ft² number that actually goes into your pricing. Once a lead comes in, quoting it costs real hours on top of the marketing spend, the other half of what it takes to land a customer.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should a contractor actually spend on marketing?
There is no single official rule, and even the U.S. Small Business Administration says as much on its own marketing-budget page, where it points to third-party data instead of a fixed number. On average, small businesses spend around 1% of revenue on advertising (retailers closer to 4%, restaurants closer to 2%), while a broader marketing-spend survey put the average closer to 7.9% of revenue. Home-service-specific marketing agencies (not government or academic sources) commonly recommend a narrower band for contractors: roughly 8% to 10% of revenue in steady maintenance mode, 12% to 15% while actively growing, and 15% to 20% for a company under two years old still building a pipeline. Treat all of these as starting ranges, not rules, and use the Marketing ROI Calculator to check whether your actual spend is paying for itself.
Is the "7% to 8% of revenue" rule really an SBA recommendation?
Not as far as we could verify. That exact figure gets repeated across many marketing-agency blogs and is often attributed to the SBA, but the SBA’s own marketing-budget post does not state it. It explicitly says there is "no hard and fast answer" and instead cites two third-party sources (a 1.08% average ad-spend figure from Small Business Trends, and a 7.9% average marketing-spend figure from a 2018 Web Strategies survey). Treat "7% to 8%, SBA-recommended" as a widely copied but unverified claim rather than something traceable to a primary source.
Does the Marketing Cost Per Day Calculator tell me how much to spend?
No. It does the opposite. It takes a spend figure you have already decided on, monthly or yearly, and converts it into a per-working-day, per-job, and per-ft² or per-m² number to bake into your pricing. Deciding what that spend figure should be in the first place is a separate question, which is what the Marketing ROI Calculator is built for.
Why does the calculator show nothing until I type a number?
Both the monthly and yearly spend fields start completely blank (not $0, and not a placeholder figure), so the tool never implies a recommended spend amount. The business-volume fields (working days, weeks, jobs, typical area) do ship with typical solo-contractor defaults, but the results section stays hidden behind a simple prompt until you enter a real spend number above zero.