Marketing budget calculator

A budget as a share of revenue, next to one built from the customers you need — and the gap between them.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored. Updated 2026-09-30.

There are two honest ways to size a marketing budget: a share of revenue, and new customers needed × customer acquisition cost. A company with $2.4 million of revenue spending 8% has a $192,000 budget; one that needs 1,500 new customers at a $110 CAC needs $165,000.

The first method says what the business can afford; the second says what the plan requires. Most budget arguments are the gap between them, so the calculator shows both side by side. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey put marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, up from 7.7% in 2025 — a reference point for the first method, drawn mostly from large companies, not a target.

Which method to trust

A share of revenue is easy to defend and blind to the plan: it gives the same budget whether you need 500 customers or 5,000. A goal-based budget follows the plan but is only as good as the CAC you assume — the CAC calculator works it out from real spend and customers. Use the goal-based figure to plan and the share-of-revenue figure as the limit the business can carry.

When the goal-based budget is higher, the conversation is about growth ambition versus affordability. When it is lower, either the plan is modest or the CAC assumption is optimistic.

What the survey benchmark does and does not say

Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe found budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, from 7.7% in 2025. Its respondents are mostly large companies, and a company's stage matters more than its size: a young business buying growth commonly spends a larger share than a mature one defending share.

Use the benchmark to sanity-check an outlier, not to set a number.

Budget the funnel, not a lump

A budget becomes a plan when it is split by channel with a target cost per acquisition for each. The Google Ads budget calculator and the Facebook Ads budget calculator run that step for the two largest paid channels, from the conversions you want back to the spend they take.

Computing this from your own accounts

Every calculator on this page takes numbers you typed. The version that keeps working is the one that reads them from the accounts themselves — which is what TableBI is: connect Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4 or Search Console once, and cpa() becomes a macro you can query from your terminal.

# connect once, then the metric is a standing query
tablebi connect google_ads
tablebi connect meta_ads   # beta: your own or test ad accounts

tablebi ask "WITH w AS (SELECT MAX(date) AS anchor FROM metrics)
   SELECT platform, cpa(SUM(cost), SUM(conversions)) AS cpa
   FROM metrics, w WHERE date > w.anchor - 30
   GROUP BY platform ORDER BY cpa DESC"

# pin the answer to a URL that refreshes itself
tablebi pin --title "marketing budget calculator by channel"
→ https://you.tablebi.com/d/dsh_…

The pinned answer is a live URL that refreshes on its own — here is one running now. No hosted model does the reasoning; your own Claude Code or Codex drives the CLI, which is why there is no inference bill attached to it.

Questions people ask about marketing budget calculators

Related calculators

All of them are listed on the free marketing calculators page.