How Much Should a Health & Wellness Business Spend on Marketing?
Most answers to this question online cite a rule that does not exist. Before the number, it is worth knowing which numbers are real.
The rule everyone quotes is a 2012 blog post
You will read, on a great many agency sites, that the U.S. Small Business Administration recommends businesses under $5 million in revenue spend 7–8% on marketing. That line is on sba.gov. It comes from a guest post by a contributor, published in June 2012, with no study attached. A commenter asked the author what research it was based on and never got an answer. Fourteen years later it is still being passed around with a federal agency's name on it. Do not budget against it.
What the real benchmarks say
The CMO Survey, run by Duke's Fuqua School of Business with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, fielded its 35th edition in January 2026 with 308 U.S. marketing leaders. Broken out by company size, firms under $10 million in revenue reported spending 13.34% of revenue on marketing. Firms between $10 and $25 million reported 17.40%. Firms above $100 million reported between 5.7% and 6.9%.
That is the opposite of the folklore. Small firms spend a much larger share of revenue on marketing than large ones, because they are buying awareness the big ones already own.
Cut by industry rather than size, the same survey puts healthcare at 5.88% of revenue and professional services at 6.84%. Both of those cells are small — seventeen and twelve respondents — so treat them as direction rather than precision.
You will also see Gartner's figure of 7.8% of revenue quoted as the average business. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey is real, but the sample is overwhelmingly companies above $1 billion in revenue. It does not describe a practice.
A more useful question than percentage of revenue
Percentages tell you what other people spend. They do not tell you whether yours is working. What tells you that is what a booked patient costs you.
LocaliQ published search advertising benchmarks for sixteen healthcare specialties in January 2026, drawn from 3,542 U.S. campaigns running between October 2024 and September 2025, reported as medians. Physical therapy came in at a $32.79 median cost per lead, with a 15.35% conversion rate. Healthcare overall was $66.02. General practice was $62.80. Mental health, at $141.17, was the most expensive on the list.
Two honest caveats. That report does not cover chiropractic or functional medicine — nobody has published credible benchmarks for those, whatever the agency blogs claim — so physical therapy and general practice are the closest real proxies. And a lead is not a patient. Your number is your cost per lead divided by the share of leads who actually book.
So what should you actually spend?
Work backwards. Decide how many new patients you want this year. Multiply by what a lead costs in your specialty, then divide by the share of leads your front desk converts. That is your floor. Compare it to 5–13% of revenue as a sanity check, not as the answer.
If that math is uncomfortable, the problem is usually not the budget. It is that nobody is tracking which spend produced which booking, so every dollar looks equally risky.
Frequently asked questions
Should the budget go to digital or traditional? Gartner's 2026 survey found digital now exceeds two-thirds of total media investment, up 18% since 2024. For a local practice the practical answer is that your listings, reviews and site are not really marketing spend at all — they are the floor everything else stands on.
What if I am starting from nothing? Start with the things that cost time rather than money: a complete Google Business Profile, consistent listings, and a working way to ask for reviews. Paid traffic sent to a practice that is invisible everywhere else is expensive.
How long before I can tell if it is working? Paid search tells you in weeks, because you can trace the click. Visibility work takes a quarter or more before the trend is readable. Judge them on different clocks.
Vitality Growth Labs builds growth systems for functional medicine, chiropractic, physical therapy and wellness practices in Minneapolis, Sioux Falls, Omaha, and virtually. Want your spend traced to a booking? Book a scope call.
