2026 Marketing Budget Benchmarks Report

Marketing budgets fell to 9.0% of company revenue in 2026 — the lowest share since 2021 — even as digital marketing spending grew 8.2% and acquisition budgets outpaced retention budgets by 26%, according to the Spring 2026 CMO Survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association. A separate panel of larger enterprises in the Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts the average lower, at 7.8% of revenue — the gap comes down to who each survey is asking, and both surveys agree the underlying story is the same: budgets are flat to shrinking, and what remains is being reallocated fast, especially toward AI.

Marketing Budget as a Percent of Revenue, 2021–2026

The CMO Survey has tracked this number nine times since August 2021. 2026 is the lowest reading in the series for both measures:

Wave	% of Overall Company Budget	% of Company Revenue
Aug-2021	9.8%	8.6%
Feb-2022	11.8%	10.4%
Sept-2022	13.8%	8.7%
Spring-2023	12.3%	10.9%
Fall-2023	10.6%	9.2%
Spring-2024	10.2%	10.1%
Fall-2024	10.1%	7.7%
2025	11.4%	9.4%
2026	9.6%	9.0%

Source: The CMO Survey, Spring 2026 Highlights and Insights Report (35th edition).

Why Two Major Surveys Disagree — 7.8% vs. 9.0%

The Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey polled 401 senior marketing leaders, almost all at companies with revenue above $1 billion, and found budgets essentially flat at 7.8% of revenue (up from 7.7% in 2025). The CMO Survey polls a broader mix of company sizes, including many mid-market and small firms — and smaller companies consistently report spending a higher share of revenue on marketing than large enterprises do. Neither number is wrong; they’re measuring different populations. Companies under $1 billion in revenue — the range where most agency clients sit — should treat the CMO Survey’s 9.0% as the more relevant benchmark; Gartner’s 7.8% describes Fortune 1000-scale peers.

Budgets by Business Model: B2C Product Spends Almost Double B2B Product

The starkest gap in the 2026 data is between B2C and B2B product companies:

Business Type	% of Revenue	% of Overall Budget
B2B Product	7.0%	7.0%
B2B Services	10.1%	9.2%
B2C Product	12.0%	13.8%
B2C Services	7.2%	11.5%

B2C Product companies allocate 12.0% of revenue to marketing versus 7.0% for B2B Product — a gap largely explained by shorter sales cycles, lower switching costs, and heavier reliance on brand-building media in consumer categories. Source: The CMO Survey, Spring 2026.

Where the Money Is Actually Going

Overall marketing spending grew just 1.7% over the prior 12 months — the weakest growth rate since 2021 — while digital marketing spending grew 8.2% in the same period. Traditional advertising is projected to decline a further 1.5% over the next year, continuing a multi-year trend. Social media spending rebounded to 14.3% of budgets after falling in 2025, and marketers now expect it to reach 17.1% within a year and 23.1% within five years. Worth noting: the survey’s own long-term tracking shows that 12-month social media spending forecasts have overshot actual spending by an average of 2.1 percentage points, so the 17.1% figure is worth treating as directional rather than exact.

AI Is Eating a Growing Share of the Marketing Budget

Both surveys point to the same shift: AI is where new marketing budget is going, even while total budgets shrink. In the Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, CMOs now allocate an average of 15.3% of their marketing budget to AI initiatives. Among the 30% of CMOs whose organizations Gartner classifies as “AI-ready,” that figure rises to 21.3% — and this group also reports higher overall marketing budgets (8.9% of revenue, versus the 7.8% survey average), suggesting AI investment and budget health move together rather than trading off against each other.

The CMO Survey’s numbers tell the same story from a different angle: AI’s share of marketing activities has nearly doubled in two years, from 13.1% in 2024 to 24.2% in 2026, and companies project AI will handle 55.9% of marketing activities within three years. Generative AI specifically has grown even faster — 220%, from 7.0% to 22.4% of activities over the same period. The heaviest adoption is in content creation (73.9% of companies), content personalization (65.4%), automation (48.9%), data analysis (46.3%), and targeting (45.2%). A newer category, Generative Engine Optimization — getting content to appear in AI search answers — is already used by 41.5% of companies, despite not existing as a measured category in prior survey waves.

The catch: technology adoption is outrunning the ability to use it well. No marketing technology activity scores above 5 out of 7 on the survey’s performance scale, and performance hasn’t improved in two years. Asked what’s actually blocking martech impact, marketers pointed to budget first — lack of budget and funding is the top-cited barrier at 20.1%, ahead of technology integration and data architecture (19.1%), bandwidth and focus (14.1%), and talent management (13.1%). In other words, the budget conversation and the AI conversation are now the same conversation.

A Third of Marketing Work Is Now Outsourced

This is the number that matters most for agencies. Companies now outsource roughly a third of their digital marketing activities to external agencies and partners — 33.6% today, up from 31.6% in 2022, and projected to reach 34.3% within two years, per the CMO Survey. That’s on top of budgets that are already stretched thin and increasingly reallocated toward AI tooling that most teams admit they don’t yet use well — exactly the combination that pushes companies toward outside help rather than building every capability in-house. Outsourcing intensity varies sharply by industry. The heaviest external users are Retail/Wholesale (57% of digital marketing activities outsourced), Consumer Packaged Goods (55%), and Mining/Construction (52%). The lightest are Education (3%), Communications/Media (10%), and Tech/Software/Platform companies (28%), which tend to keep marketing execution in-house alongside their product and engineering teams.

Acquisition Still Beats Retention, Even Though Retention Performs Better

Acquisition budgets are now 26.0% larger than retention budgets, up from a 19.6% gap a year earlier — despite retention consistently delivering stronger results in the same survey. There’s a related pattern in how companies react to a profit miss: 53.1% of companies say they cut expenses when profits fall short of expectations, up from 46.0% a year ago, and marketing gets cut disproportionately — 45.4% more often than other expense categories. Together, these numbers point to budget decisions that are more reactive to short-term pressure than tied to a long-term growth strategy — a pattern reinforced by the survey’s broader finding that companies are now spending almost 60% of growth budgets on penetrating existing markets with existing customers, rather than pursuing new customers or new geographies.

What the 2026 Numbers Mean for Companies Choosing a Growth Partner

Three patterns in this data matter beyond the headline number. First, peer benchmarking only works with the right peer group: a company under $1 billion in revenue comparing itself to Gartner’s enterprise-skewed 7.8% will look like it’s overspending when it isn’t — the CMO Survey’s broader sample is the fairer comparison for mid-market and smaller companies. Second, AI is no longer a discretionary line item; at 15.3–21.3% of total marketing spend among the CMOs already using it, it has moved into core operating budget, and the gap between the average team’s AI adoption and its AI performance (no activity scores above 5 of 7) is exactly the kind of execution gap that outside specialists are hired to close. Third, the acquisition-retention imbalance is a real opportunity: since retention already outperforms acquisition on results while receiving 26% less budget, a modest reallocation toward existing customers is one of the few moves in this data backed by the survey’s own performance numbers rather than just spending momentum — and it’s a conversation growth teams are increasingly having with outside partners rather than solving alone.

Sources

• The CMO Survey, Spring 2026 Highlights and Insights Report — Duke University Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association, published April 2026.
• Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey coverage — Sword and the Script, June 2026, summarizing Gartner’s May 2026 press release.