How Much Should a Remodeling Contractor Spend on Marketing?

Two answers get given to this question. A percentage, which is useless without context, and "it depends," which is worse.

Here is a way to actually land on a number.

Start with the percentage, then throw it away

The common range for home services is five to ten percent of revenue.

A remodeler doing $1.5M lands somewhere between $75,000 and $150,000 a year, or $6,000 to $12,000 a month across everything: ads, website, photography, whoever manages it.

Where you sit in that range comes down to one thing. An established company with a full referral pipeline sits at the bottom. A company trying to grow, enter a new market, or fill a slow season sits at the top, and sometimes above it for a while.

The percentage is a sanity check, not a plan. It tells you whether you are wildly off. It does not tell you what to spend next month.

The number that actually decides it

Work backwards from the jobs you need.

Say you want two extra kitchens a month at $50,000 each. Your close rate on estimates is one in three. So you need six booked estimates a month.

Now the only number you need: what does one booked estimate cost you?

If it is $250, six of them costs $1,500 a month and produces $100,000 in revenue. That is not a marketing budget question, that is a "why are we not spending more" question.

If it is $900, six costs $5,400 and the math still works, just with less room. And if you do not know what a booked estimate costs you, that is the actual problem, and no percentage will fix it.

Most remodelers have never calculated this number. They know what they spent last month and they know how the month felt.

The floor, which matters more than the target

Paid advertising has a minimum that is not about your ambition. It is about how the platforms work.

On Meta, roughly $50 a day is the practical floor. Around $1,500 a month. Below that, the algorithm does not see enough conversions to figure out which homeowners actually book, so it never exits the learning phase.

This is the part that catches people. Half a budget does not buy half a result. It usually buys nothing at all, which is why a contractor who tried ads at $15 a day for a month concluded that ads do not work. They did not test ads. They paid for the first third of a test.

If you cannot fund one channel properly, fund one channel properly instead of three channels badly.

Where the money should go

For a remodeler spending around $5,000 a month, a reasonable split looks like this.

Most of it into paid traffic. This is the part with a knob. It is also the part that stops working the day you stop paying, which is why it is the majority and not the entirety.

A slice into the follow up system. Instant text, alerts, automated sequences. This is small money and it multiplies everything else. A lead answered in two minutes is worth several times the same lead answered tomorrow, and that difference costs you almost nothing to buy.

A slice into content and photography. Real photos of finished jobs are the raw material for every ad you will ever run. A remodeler with good photos of thirty projects has an advantage that money cannot quickly buy.

A small ongoing amount into reviews and your Google profile. Nearly free, compounds, and most contractors do it in bursts instead of steadily.

What to cut first

When the budget gets tight, cut in this order.

Anything you cannot trace to a booked estimate goes first. Sponsorships, print, the truck wrap you renew out of habit. They may be doing something. You cannot prove it, and unprovable spend is the first thing to go when it is tight.

Then marketplace lead spend, because it is the most expensive per booked job and the easiest to switch back on.

Cut your own ad spend last, and never below the floor. Running at $20 a day is not a reduced budget, it is a donation. Turn it off entirely and restart properly, or hold the floor.

The seasonal version

Most remodelers spend evenly across the year and then panic in January.

Your marketing spend should lead your busy season by about six to eight weeks, because that is roughly the gap between a homeowner raising their hand and a signed contract on a large project.

That means spending more in the quiet months, which feels exactly backwards and is the reason so few people do it. The contractor who cut ads in November because things were slow is the one wondering where February went.

FAQ

What percentage of revenue should I spend? Five to ten percent is a reasonable starting range. Bottom if you are coasting on referrals, top or above if you are actively growing.

What is the minimum for Facebook ads? About $50 a day, roughly $1,500 a month. Below that you generally pay for a learning period that never finishes.

How do I know if it is working? Cost per booked estimate, and what share of booked estimates turn into signed jobs. Those two numbers answer everything else.

Should I spend more in the slow season? Yes, and almost nobody does. Spend leads results by six to eight weeks on large projects.