How Much Should a B2B SaaS Company Spend on Marketing?

How much should a B2B SaaS company spend on marketing?

The median is 8 percent of annual recurring revenue, and it has not moved. SaaS Capital's 2026 spending benchmarks, drawn from its fifteenth annual survey of more than 1,000 SaaS companies completed in March 2026, put median marketing spend at 8 percent of ARR, unchanged from the previous year. Whether that is the right number for you depends almost entirely on how you are funded.

We get asked this by founders more than almost anything else, usually in the form of a nervous question about whether they are underspending. The benchmark is a useful anchor and a terrible target, and the difference between those two things is what this piece is about.

Here is what the data says, what it leaves out, and how we would actually set the number.

What do the benchmarks actually say?

SaaS Capital's 2026 survey gives a clean picture of where the money goes across a private B2B SaaS business. Sales came in at a median of 15 percent of ARR, up from 13 percent the previous year. Marketing held at 8 percent, unchanged. Research and development sat at 22 percent, also unchanged. General and administrative rose to 15 percent from 14 percent, and customer support and success rose to 9 percent from 8 percent.

Read those together and something stands out. Sales went up two points while marketing stayed flat. Every other line either held or crept up by a point. The composite picture is a sector that spent 2026 putting incremental money into closing rather than into demand creation.

Total spend tells you the other half. Bootstrapped companies spent a median 96 percent of ARR across the whole business. Equity-backed companies spent 101 percent. One group is running at a small profit. The other is, by design, spending slightly more than it brings in.

Why does funding change the number so much?

Because it changes what the money is for. SaaS Capital's medians split sharply on this. Bootstrapped companies spend a median 4 percent of ARR on marketing and 9 percent on sales. Equity-backed companies spend 8 percent on marketing and 15 percent on sales. The funded group spends roughly double on marketing and two thirds more on sales.

Neither column is correct in the abstract. A bootstrapped company is buying growth it can pay for out of this year's revenue. A funded company is buying growth it has promised to deliver by a date. Those are different products purchased with the same budget line, and copying the other column's number without the other column's obligations is how companies end up with a marketing team they cannot sustain.

The practical test is simple. If your board would be upset by 8 percent of ARR going to marketing this year, you are bootstrapped in spirit regardless of your cap table, and the 4 percent column is your reference.

Does the benchmark change with company size?

Less than people expect on marketing, and more than people expect everywhere else. SaaS Capital's breakdown for companies between 3 and 5 million dollars in ARR shows marketing at 8 percent, identical to the all-company median. Sales at that size sits at 12 percent rather than 15, research and development at 24 percent rather than 22, and general and administrative at 15 percent.

So the smaller company in that band is spending relatively more on building and relatively less on selling. That is the expected shape of a company still establishing that the product is right, and it is a healthier allocation than the reverse at that stage.

What the 8 percent constancy tells you is that marketing spend scales roughly with revenue across a wide range. It does not step-change at a threshold. Anyone telling you that you need to triple marketing at a specific ARR number is describing a strategy, not a benchmark.

What actually counts as marketing spend?

This is where most internal comparisons fall apart, and it is worth settling before anyone quotes a percentage. Salaries are usually the largest line and are frequently excluded by accident, which makes a team look wildly underspent against a benchmark that includes them.

Our working definition covers marketing salaries and contractors, agency fees, paid media, events, martech subscriptions, content production, and the cost of building and running the website. If a cost exists to create or capture demand, it is marketing.

Two lines people argue about. Sales development representatives usually sit in sales even though they do demand capture, and where they sit changes your marketing percentage by a point or two. The website is marketing, always, including hosting and the build itself. If you cannot say which bucket a cost is in, you cannot compare yourself to anything.

How should you split the budget inside marketing?

There is no defensible universal split and we are not going to invent one. What we can say is which questions decide it: how long your sales cycle is, whether buyers already search for what you sell, and how much of your pipeline a single account represents.

Gartner's marketing research in 2026 found that awareness and conversion together account for 62.6 percent of total media spend. That is media specifically, not all marketing, but it shows where the weight sits: the top and the bottom of the funnel take almost two thirds, leaving a third for everything in the middle.

Our bias for B2B SaaS is to protect the owned assets first. The website, the content engine, and the search and AI visibility work compound, and they keep producing when you turn the paid budget down. Paid media stops the day you stop paying. We wrote about that trade-off in how to split brand and performance spend.

Where does AI spending fit into this now?

It is already a meaningful slice and most teams have not budgeted it explicitly. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs allocate 15.3 percent of marketing budgets to AI, while only 30 percent are ready to scale AI capabilities.

Hold those two numbers next to each other, because the gap is the story. Roughly one marketing dollar in six is going to AI, and seven in ten of the organisations spending it say they are not ready to scale it. That is a lot of money moving ahead of the operational capacity to use it.

Our advice is unglamorous. Budget AI as tooling and as headcount time rather than as a separate initiative, and make one person accountable for whether it produced anything. Spend that cannot be traced to an output is the easiest thing in a marketing budget to defend and the hardest to justify twice.

What should you do if you are well below the benchmark?

First, check whether you are actually below it or just counting differently. Add salaries, agency, media, tooling and the website, then recalculate. A surprising number of companies that believe they spend 3 percent are spending 7.

If you genuinely are below, the question is not how to get to the median. It is whether your growth rate is acceptable to the people who decide your future. A bootstrapped company growing 25 percent a year on 4 percent of ARR is doing well by any standard, and increasing marketing spend to match a median would be destroying margin to hit a number nobody asked for.

The case for spending more is a case about a specific constraint: a segment you cannot reach, a competitor outranking you on the searches that matter, a sales team without enough qualified conversations. Name the constraint, price the fix, and let that be the budget. We covered the upstream half of that in defining an ideal customer profile you can actually act on.

When is a benchmark the wrong tool entirely?

When your motion is unusual, which is more often than the benchmark literature admits. A company selling six-figure contracts to twenty accounts a year has no business benchmarking against a median built mostly from companies selling to thousands. The median hides enormous variance, and SaaS Capital reports medians precisely because averages would be distorted by outliers.

Benchmarks also say nothing about efficiency. Two companies can both spend 8 percent of ARR and get results that differ by a factor of five. The percentage tells you whether you are in a normal range. It tells you nothing about whether the money is working, which is a measurement problem rather than a budgeting one, and we went through it in making B2B SaaS attribution useful.

Use the benchmark as a sanity check once a year. Do not use it as a target.

How would we set the number?

Start from the constraint, not the percentage. Write down the single thing stopping growth this year, cost the work that would remove it, and see what percentage of ARR that comes to. Then compare that figure to the 4 and 8 percent medians and ask which column your company belongs in. If your number is far outside both, you either have an unusual business or an unrealistic plan, and it is worth knowing which.

Then protect the compounding assets inside whatever budget you land on. Website, content, search and AI visibility, and the measurement to know if any of it works. Those survive a bad quarter. Campaigns do not.

If you want a straight opinion on whether your website and content engine are earning their share of that budget, we are happy to walk through it. You can find us at phoenix.studio.