How Much Should Electricians Spend on Marketing?

Ask ten electricians what they spend on marketing and you get answers from zero to five figures a month, and almost nobody can tell you why their number is their number. It is usually whatever was left over last quarter, or whatever the last salesperson asked for. Both methods produce budgets that are disconnected from the thing a budget exists to buy: a specific amount of growth.

The good news is that the right number is calculable. It comes from three inputs (the revenue you are aiming for, the stage your business is at, and what a booked job is worth to you), and this guide works through all three. By the end you will have a monthly figure, a split across channels, and the math to check whether each channel is paying for itself.

One principle drives everything below: set the budget against the revenue you want to be doing twelve months from now. A shop billing $400,000 that wants to bill $600,000 should budget as a percentage of $600,000. Marketing is the input; revenue is the output; budgeting off last year locks in last year.

The percent-of-revenue framework

Established home-service businesses commonly spend 5–10% of revenue on marketing. That range holds up across trades because it maps to the economics of service work: gross margins around 40–60%, average tickets from a couple hundred to several thousand, and a customer base that churns as people move. Spend much under 5% for long and the phone slowly quiets. Spend over 10% and you had better be in deliberate growth mode, because you are trading present profit for future scale.

Growth mode is exactly where the range shifts. A business pushing hard for new territory, a second crew, or a new service line typically runs 10–15% of target revenue for a defined push, usually 12 to 24 months, then settles back toward the established range once referrals and repeat work carry more of the load. A brand-new solo operation is in permanent growth mode by definition, which is why the youngest businesses carry the highest percentage on the smallest revenue. That feels backwards and is correct.

Budget by stage

Here is the framework applied to the three stages most electrical businesses pass through, with worked examples in dollars and pounds. Treat the ranges as brackets. Your market density, job mix, and appetite for growth decide where you land inside them.

Solo, just starting

Year one is heavy on one-time foundation costs: a website that converts, a fully built Google Business Profile, review systems, call tracking. Those front-load the budget, which is another reason the percentage runs high early. The temptation at this stage is to spend nothing and live on word of mouth, and plenty of good electricians stall at exactly the revenue that word of mouth alone produces. If $2,000 a month sounds impossible, remember the comparison point: one van, wrapped, costs more and generates fewer calls.

2–5 trucks

This is the stage where marketing stops being optional, because payroll is now a fixed cost that eats slow weeks. The budget jumps in absolute terms and the mix shifts: paid channels need enough monthly spend to generate consistent data (Google Ads under about $1,500 a month in a competitive metro produces too few clicks to learn from), and SEO starts earning a real allocation because you can now afford to invest in things that pay out in month six.

Established fleet

At $2M+ the percentage falls but the dollars grow, and the game changes from generating demand to defending position and steering job mix. Budget goes toward owning the map pack in every suburb you serve, outbidding newcomers on the highest-ticket keywords, and pushing the service lines you want more of (EV chargers, generators, commercial contracts) rather than taking whatever calls arrive.

Where the money goes at each stage

A budget without an allocation is just a number waiting to be wasted. The split below reflects how the channels behave: your website and Google Business Profile are the foundation everything else drives traffic to, Local Services Ads deliver leads fastest per dollar, Google Ads scale further but need budget density, and SEO compounds, expensive in the months it is planted and cheap in every month after.

Two notes on that table. First, the solo column front-loads the website because everything downstream depends on it, and ads pointed at a weak site burn money at full price. Second, the attribution line stays constant at every stage because it is the line that makes every other line accountable. More on that below. For a deeper look at how the lead channels compare head to head, see our guide to getting electrician leads.

What leads actually cost

Cost per lead varies wildly by market, season, and job type. An emergency call-out lead in a small town and an EV charger lead in a major metro can differ by 5x. Anyone quoting you a single confident number is selling something. These are the honest ranges we see across electrical businesses in the US and UK:

The gap between the two columns is your booking rate, and it is the most underrated lever in the whole budget. A shop that answers every call and books 50% of leads pays half as much per job as a shop with identical ad spend that lets a third of calls hit voicemail. Before you conclude a channel is too expensive, check what happened to the leads it sent. Local Services Ads in particular reward operational discipline. Google charges per lead and lets you dispute the junk, which is why we wrote a full guide to Local Services Ads.

The ROI math, worked through

Here is the arithmetic that turns a budget from a leap of faith into a business decision. Take a shop spending $2,400 a month on paid channels at a blended $80 per lead:

1. $2,400 ÷ $80 per lead = 30 leads a month.
2. 30 leads × 50% booking rate = 15 booked jobs. (If your booking rate is materially lower, fix that before spending another dollar. It is the cheapest improvement available.)
3. 15 jobs × $800 average ticket = $12,000 in revenue. That is a blend of $250 service calls and $3,000 panel upgrades; know your own blend.
4. $12,000 × 50% gross margin = $6,000 in gross profit.
5. $6,000 gross profit − $2,400 spend = $3,600 contribution, a 2.5x return on gross profit before a single repeat job or referral from those 15 customers.

That last line matters. A first job is rarely the whole value of a customer. The panel upgrade client calls you for the EV charger two years later and refers a neighbor in between. If a channel roughly breaks even on the first job, it is usually profitable over the customer relationship. And the same arithmetic runs in reverse as a sanity check: if your average ticket is $800 at 50% margin, you can afford up to about $400 per booked job before a channel loses money on first-job economics. Compare that ceiling against the cost-per-booked-job table above and most channels have room. The ones that go over the ceiling are where the next section applies.

When to cut a channel

Cutting too early is the most expensive mistake in trade marketing, and cutting too late is the second. The rules that keep you between them:

• Give paid channels 90 days before judging. Google Ads and LSA need time to gather data and for you to prune bad keywords and dispute junk leads. Month one is nearly always the worst month.
• Give SEO six to twelve months. It compounds on a different clock. Judging SEO at day 60 is like judging an apprentice at lunch on day one.
• Cut when cost per booked job exceeds gross profit per job for a full quarter, after you have verified the booking rate and lead quality. A channel that costs $500 per job that yields $400 in gross profit is a machine for shrinking the business.
• Check the season before you check the channel. January is slow for most residential electrical work in both the US and UK. A channel that looks broken in January and strong in June is fine; budget around the curve instead of reacting to it.
• Reallocate instead of pocketing the savings. A cut channel frees budget for the channels beating their targets. Shrinking the total budget mid-year quietly resets your growth target too.

Attribution changes the whole conversation

Every number in this guide sharpens or blurs depending on one thing: whether you know which channel produced each booked job. Without tracking, budget season is guesswork with a spreadsheet on top. You keep the channel with the best sales rep and cut the one that was quietly booking two panel upgrades a month, because nothing connected those jobs to their source.

The fix is unglamorous and takes about a day: call tracking numbers per channel, form and booking events measured, and a source noted on every invoice. Once that loop closes, the conversation changes from "marketing costs $6,000 a month" to "Google Ads returns $3.10 per dollar and LSA returns $4.80, so move budget to LSA." One of those sentences is a complaint and the other is a decision. Wiring that loop is exactly what our attribution service does, and it is the ~5% line item that makes the other 95% honest.

One last advantage worth knowing about: sample size. A single shop testing headlines and offers learns from its own traffic and nothing else. We run these budgets across many electrical businesses at once, test layouts and offers across the whole client base, and roll the winners out to everyone, so each client budgets with data no individual shop could generate alone. That system is the Local Dominance Method, and it is why our answer to "how much should I spend?" comes with receipts.

The short version of this whole guide: pick your target revenue, take 5–15% of it depending on stage, split it across the table above, track every job to its source, and review quarterly. The electricians who grow on purpose are running that loop. The number matters less than the loop.