Marketing Spend as a % of Revenue: 2026 Ranking by Company Size

Smaller companies spend a far higher share of revenue on marketing than large enterprises — 17.40% of revenue for $10–25M companies versus just 5.70% for $1–9.9B companies — and online-only businesses spend nearly three times more than offline ones (18.75% vs. 7.97%), according to the CMO Survey’s Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Spring 2026, which cuts the same marketing-budget question by company size, sales channel, and business model.

Marketing Spend as % of Revenue, by Company Size

The relationship between company size and marketing intensity isn’t a straight line — it dips through the middle market before ticking back up at the very top:

Annual Revenue	Marketing Spend (% of Revenue)
Under $10 million	13.34%
$10–25 million	17.40%
$26–99 million	11.14%
$100–499 million	5.86%
$500–999 million	6.86%
$1–9.9 billion	5.70%
$10+ billion	9.45%

The peak is at $10–25M in revenue (17.40%), not at the very smallest companies — businesses under $10M actually spend a lower share (13.34%) than that next tier up, likely because pre-revenue and very early-stage companies are still building out a marketing function at all. Spend as a share of revenue then falls steadily through the mid-market, bottoming out around $1–9.9B (5.70%), before rising again at $10B+ (9.45%) — large enterprises with the biggest brand-marketing and multi-market budgets buck the “bigger company, smaller share” pattern. This U-shape is a genuinely useful benchmarking insight on its own: a company shouldn’t assume it’s overspending just because its ratio looks high relative to a $10B+ competitor, since the $10–25M tier is the actual historical peak in this data, not an outlier to correct toward the mean. Source: The CMO Survey, Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Spring 2026, p. 126.

Online Sales Share Is the Single Biggest Driver

Company size explains part of the story, but how much of a company’s revenue comes through online sales explains more of it:

Share of Sales That Is Online	Marketing Spend (% of Revenue)
0%	7.97%
1–10%	6.59%
11–49%	10.61%
50–99%	18.64%
100%	18.75%

Companies that sell entirely online spend 18.75% of revenue on marketing — nearly 3x the 6.59% spent by companies doing only 1–10% of sales online, and more than double the overall survey average of 8.96%. The relationship isn’t linear at the low end (0% online sales actually spends slightly more than the 1–10% group, 7.97% vs. 6.59%, likely reflecting a mix of very different business types with no online channel at all) but becomes sharply linear once online sales cross the 50% threshold. For any company deciding how much to invest in marketing, “what percentage of my revenue happens online” is a more predictive question than “how big is my company.” It’s also worth noting that once a company crosses the 50% online-sales threshold, the jump to 18.64% and then 18.75% is almost flat — the marginal cost of going from half-online to fully-online is minimal, which suggests the step-change happens in the shift from a hybrid model to a primarily digital one, not in the last mile toward 100%.

Business Model and Government Sales Also Move the Number

The same survey wave breaks the 8.96% overall average down two more ways. By business model, B2C Product companies spend the most (11.99% of revenue), B2B Product companies spend the least (7.02%), with B2B Services (10.07%) and B2C Services (7.24%) in between — consistent with the wider gap the Spring 2026 CMO Survey reports at the topline level. Companies that sell to government spend notably less of their revenue on marketing (6.28%) than those that don’t (10.81%) — a 4.5 percentage-point gap that likely reflects how much government procurement runs on relationships, RFPs, and compliance rather than marketing-driven demand generation. This government-sales gap is actually larger in relative terms than the B2B-vs-B2C product gap, which suggests that whether a company sells to public-sector buyers at all is a stronger predictor of marketing intensity than its broader business model classification.

Why High-Spend Companies Aren’t Necessarily Less Profitable

It’s tempting to read the 18.75% online-sales figure as pure overhead, but the agency-side profitability data suggests a more nuanced relationship. Digital-first companies spending heavily on marketing are, by definition, spending into channels — paid search, social, retention email — that have shorter feedback loops and clearer attribution than traditional brand advertising, which means a higher spend ratio in this segment is more often a reflection of a fully digital revenue engine than of inefficiency. This mirrors the pattern in the CAC data, where digital-native categories like eCommerce also show the lowest acquisition costs: a higher share-of-revenue number and a lower cost-per-customer number can coexist when the underlying growth engine is well-instrumented, because more of that spend is going into repeatable, trackable, incremental channels rather than into brand-building whose payoff shows up on a much longer and fuzzier timeline.

What This Tells You About Benchmarking Your Own Budget

The practical takeaway is that a single “marketing should be X% of revenue” rule of thumb breaks down fast once you cut the data by size, channel, or business model. A $15M company benchmarking against the 8.96% overall average would conclude it’s overspending at 17.40% — when in fact it’s sitting close to where companies its size and online-sales-mix typically land. The online-sales cut in particular is worth checking before any other variable: it moves the number more than company size does, and it’s usually the easiest one for a company to know about itself with certainty. Stacking these cuts together is more useful still: a $15M company that also sells 100% online and has no government contracts should expect to sit well above the 8.96% overall average on all three counts simultaneously, not despite them.

Sources

• The CMO Survey — Firm and Industry Breakout Report, Spring 2026 — Duke University Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association.