Most contractor marketing agencies charge $900 to $5,000 a month in management fees, on top of whatever you spend on ads. For a single-location trade business, $1,500 to $3,000 is the common band.
That range is accurate. It is also close to worthless, because it tells you nothing about whether the specific quote in front of you is a good deal for your specific business. Two roofers in the same city can be handed the identical $2,500 proposal and one is getting robbed while the other is getting a bargain.
The reason nobody publishes the useful answer is that almost every page ranking for this question was written by an agency. Their pricing tables are marketing collateral. What follows is the same question answered from your side of the table: three tests you can run on any proposal in about ten minutes, using numbers you already have.
Test 1: the fee-to-spend ratio, and the minimum that breaks it
Ask for the fee as a percentage of your ad spend, then compare it to what the industry publishes for your budget size.
The standard PPC structure is described as the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the money goes to ads and 20 percent to the agency. Swydo's 2026 agency pricing guide breaks that into tiers. Budgets under $5,000 a month pay 20 to 30 percent, $5,000 to $25,000 pay 15 to 20 percent, $25,000 to $50,000 pay 12 to 18 percent, and $50,000 plus pay 10 to 15 percent.
Then comes the line almost nobody reads twice.
Watch out
Most agencies maintain a monthly minimum of $1,000 to $5,000 regardless of ad spend level, plus a one-time setup fee of $500 to $3,500. Source: Swydo's 2026 agency pricing benchmarks, aggregated from SE Ranking, AgencyAnalytics and Digital Agency Network surveys.
The minimum and the percentage cannot both be true at small budgets, and the minimum always wins. Here is what a $1,500 monthly minimum does to the advertised tiers:
| Your ad spend | Fee at the published tier | What you actually pay | Real fee-to-spend | Every lead costs you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | $250 | $1,500 | 150% | 2.50x the platform CPL |
| $2,000 | $500 | $1,500 | 75% | 1.75x |
| $3,000 | $750 | $1,500 | 50% | 1.50x |
| $5,000 | $875 | $1,500 | 30% | 1.30x |
| $8,000 | $1,400 | $1,500 | 19% | 1.19x |
| $25,000 | $3,750 | $3,750 | 15% | 1.15x |
The last column is the one to sit with. Google's Local Services Ads averaged $58.06 per lead across 4,459 contractor leads and $258,867 in spend in Q2 2026, according to 99 Calls, who publish the date range and record counts behind the figure. If you are spending $2,000 a month against a $1,500 minimum, your true cost per lead is not $58. It is $102, because the fee rides on every lead you get.
This is the actual answer to "am I overpaying." Not the fee. The multiplier.
Two consequences follow, and both are uncomfortable:
Small budgets are structurally bad agency clients. If you can only put $1,500 a month into ads, no agency can serve you profitably at a fee that leaves your economics intact. Either raise the spend until the ratio works, or hire a freelancer, or do it yourself. There is no version where a $1,500 minimum on a $1,500 budget is a good trade.
Asking for a discount usually attacks the wrong number. Negotiating $2,500 down to $2,200 moves your ratio from 83 percent to 73 percent on a $3,000 budget. Moving spend from $3,000 to $6,000 at the same fee moves it to 42 percent. Scale fixes the ratio faster than haggling does.
Test 2: how many extra jobs does the fee cost
Convert the fee into the only unit that means anything to a contractor.
Break-even jobs per month = monthly agency fee / (average job value x gross margin)
That is how many additional jobs the agency has to generate before it has cost you nothing. Not more leads. Not better rankings. Jobs, over and above what you would have booked anyway.
At a $2,500 monthly fee, here is what that bar looks like across trades. The cost per lead column is real Q2 2026 LSA data from 99 Calls. The job value and margin columns are illustrative, so replace them with yours before drawing any conclusion.
| Trade | LSA cost per lead | Example job | Example margin | Gross profit | Break-even jobs/mo | Leads needed at 20% close |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing | $101.15 | $12,000 | 30% | $3,600 | 0.7 | 3.5 |
| HVAC | $50.21 | $9,000 | 40% | $3,600 | 0.7 | 3.5 |
| General contracting | $49.76 | $15,000 | 25% | $3,750 | 0.7 | 3.3 |
| Painting | $33.30 | $4,000 | 40% | $1,600 | 1.6 | 7.8 |
| Landscaping | $29.05 | $2,500 | 35% | $875 | 2.9 | 14.3 |
| Plumbing (service) | $66.11 | $1,500 | 45% | $675 | 3.7 | 18.5 |
| Electrical (service) | $43.20 | $1,200 | 45% | $540 | 4.6 | 23.1 |
The same $2,500 fee is a completely different proposition depending on what you sell. A roofer needs less than one extra job a month. An electrician running service calls needs nearly five, which means the agency has to deliver 23 extra qualified leads every month, forever, for you to break even.
That is the finding the revenue-tier tables hide. Every competing article sorts pricing by company revenue. Revenue is the wrong axis. Gross profit per job is the axis, and it explains why the trades with expensive leads are often the ones that can most easily afford an agency, while the cheap-lead trades cannot.
By the numbers
A contractor on r/Contractor reported paying $1,300 in service fees against $1,500 in ad spend, a fee-to-spend ratio of 87 percent, and getting roughly $120,000 in sales and $14,000 a month in profit from it. Total marketing cost was 2.3 percent of sales. Profit would have to fall about 80 percent before that deal stopped paying. In the same thread, another contractor paying $2,000 a month was getting $3,000 to $5,000 in profit and wrote that he was "barely making money with them."
Both of those contractors are paying a similar fee. One is at a 5x return, the other at 1.5x. Neither number could have been predicted from the fee. If your agency cannot tell you which of those two you are, that is the finding, and it is usually a tracking problem before it is a marketing problem. Start with how to track where your leads come from, and if you suspect something worse than sloppiness, how to tell if your marketing agency is ripping you off walks the account-level checks.
Test 3: what is the effective hourly rate
Ask one question that almost nobody asks: how many hours a month does my account get?
Agencies answer this candidly among themselves. On r/agency, an operator described the structure behind a small retainer plainly: "So basically $650 management plus ad spend. But no, we don't outsource anything. We have a limited scope of work. 4 hours per month per client." Another in the same thread pushed back on the whole framing: "Someone saying $1000 is too low, it's not if you only spend a few hours each month on it. $5,000 per month sounds great, it's not if you are working around the clock."
Run the division:
| Monthly fee | Hours worked | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $650 | 4 | $162/hr |
| $1,500 | 4 | $375/hr |
| $1,500 | 8 | $188/hr |
| $2,500 | 10 | $250/hr |
| $2,500 | 20 | $125/hr |
| $5,000 | 40 | $125/hr |
For scale: the 4A's 2025 Billing Rate Benchmark Survey analysed more than 36,000 data points across 886 agency rate cards and found a US national median of $84.40 an hour, with the most common band for specialist services at $100 to $149.
So the $650 "cheap" retainer is running at roughly twice the national median hourly rate. It is not cheap. It is small. And the $2,500 retainer at 20 real hours is better value per hour than the $650 one, which is the opposite of how contractors instinctively read those two numbers.
Tip
Put the hours in the contract. Not "ongoing optimization" but a number: hours per month, or a named deliverable list. It is the single clause that converts a vague retainer into something you can hold anyone to, and an agency that refuses to state it is telling you the answer is low.
The front-loaded work problem
Here is the structural issue with flat retainers in the trades, described by a roofing marketer on r/RoofingSales who charges $2,500 flat with no contract:
"When I take on a new client, most of the heavy lifting is accomplished in the first few months, after that I go into maintenance mode. To be brutally honest, my services aren't as urgently needed at that point, but many clients are happy to keep me around as long as leads are flowing."
That is an honest operator describing the real shape of the work. The site build, the Google Business Profile rebuild, the service area pages, the tracking setup and the campaign structure are 80 percent of the value and they nearly all happen in months one to four. Month fourteen is monitoring.
The flat retainer prices those two phases identically. Which means either you overpay early or you overpay late, and in practice it is late.
The fix is to price the two phases separately:
- A build fee for the setup work, quoted as a project with a deliverable list and a completion date. Roofing operators in these threads quoted $3,000 to $7,000 for a real site build, and one running a $2.7M shop paid $5,000 to $7,000.
- A lower maintenance retainer afterwards, sized to the actual monthly hours.
Agencies resist this because project revenue is lumpy and retainer revenue is what makes an agency valuable. Nearly 80 percent of agencies now use some form of retainer model, per a Sprout Social survey of more than 220 agencies. That is a fact about their business model, not about your needs. It is a reasonable thing for them to want and a reasonable thing for you to negotiate against.
If you want to see what the three tests say about your current setup, we will run them on your numbers before quoting anything. Our lead generation work is built around a dedicated conversion page, a qualifying form and lead-to-sale tracking, so the break-even calculation above is something you can check every month instead of taking on faith.
Which pricing model puts the risk on whom
Four models cover almost every proposal you will see. The right question is not which is cheapest but where each one puts the risk.
| Model | Typical contractor pricing | Who carries the risk | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flat retainer | $900 to $5,000/mo plus ad spend | You | Same price in February as in June, and in maintenance mode as in build mode |
| Percentage of ad spend | 10 to 20% of spend, $500 to $1,000 floor | You | Direct incentive to grow the budget whether or not it is producing |
| Project | $3,000 to $7,000 for a site build | Shared | No ongoing accountability once it ships |
| Pay per lead | $50 to $500 per lead by trade | Them | Lead quality and exclusivity disputes, and you rarely own the asset |
Across the industry, project work accounts for roughly 50 percent of agency revenue and retainers 44 percent, with commission-based models at just 1 percent, according to the SoDa and Productive survey cited in Swydo's benchmarks. That last figure matters: pure performance pricing is vanishingly rare because agencies will not carry that risk. When someone offers it, read the lead definition very carefully.
For seasonal trades, the flat retainer has a specific flaw worth naming. A landscaper or a paving contractor pays the same $2,000 in January as in July. A commenter in one of these threads made exactly this point about a summer-only business and refused the subscription for that reason. Negotiate a reduced off-season rate up front. Most agencies will agree to it and almost no contractor asks.
The fee is not the price
Two contractors pay $2,500 a month. One owns the Google Ads account, the website, the domain, the Google Business Profile and the call tracking numbers. The other owns none of it. They are not paying the same price, because the second one has to rebuild from zero to leave.
Get these five in writing before signing anything:
- The Google Ads account is under your billing and your ownership, with the agency added as a manager. Not their MCC account with you as a line item.
- The Google Business Profile is owned by your email, with the agency as a manager. This is the single most common hostage asset in the trades.
- The website and domain are yours, hosted somewhere you can access, with the content transferable. A site you rent for $200 a month is not an asset.
- The call tracking numbers port to you on exit. Numbers that have been on your trucks and in directories for three years are not a small thing to lose.
- Month to month after any build period, or a defined exit with the deliverables specified.
A useful test from a marketer in these threads: ask whether they rank for their own keywords. If they will only show you what they have done for others, that is worth noting.
Note
One small business owner documented $1,000 in onboarding plus $1,500 a month for eleven months, $17,500 total, and received roughly eight to ten blog posts, a few pages, analytics setup and monthly ranking reports. At the $500 to $1,000 per 1,500-word article that agencies themselves publish as a rate, that is $4,000 to $10,000 of content billed at $17,500. Ranking reports are not a deliverable. They are a receipt for someone else's software.
The ten minute version
Before you sign or renew anything, run this:
- Get the fee and the ad spend as two separate numbers. Conflating them is the most common budgeting mistake contractors make, and some proposals encourage it.
- Divide fee by spend. Above 40 percent, your economics are broken regardless of how good the agency is. Fix it by raising spend or lowering the fee.
- Calculate gross profit per job. Average job value times gross margin. Use your real margin, not your markup.
- Divide the annual fee by that number. That is the extra jobs per year the agency owes you before it has broken even. Say that number out loud in the sales call and watch what happens.
- Divide that by your close rate to get the extra leads required. Compare it to what they are projecting. If their projection is below your break-even, the proposal fails on its own arithmetic.
- Ask for hours per month. Divide the fee by the hours. Compare to $84.40, the national median.
- Check the five ownership items. Any no is a price increase you have not been quoted.
- Set the review date at 90 days, and agree in advance what number you will both look at. Booked jobs, not impressions.
None of this requires you to understand SEO or ad platforms. It requires you to know your average job value, your gross margin and your close rate, which you should know anyway. If you do not, that is the first problem to fix, and the budget question resolves itself once you do. The companion piece to this one, how much a contractor should spend on marketing, builds the total budget from those same three numbers.
The honest summary is that "what should I pay" has no answer in dollars. A $5,000 fee is cheap for a restoration contractor at $211 a lead and an $8,000 average job. A $900 fee is expensive for a handyman if it produces nothing. The fee only becomes judgeable once you divide it by something, and the three somethings are your ad spend, your gross profit per job, and the hours the work actually takes.
Sources
- Swydo, Agency Pricing in 2026: Real Rates, Formulas, and Benchmarks (16 February 2026), aggregating the SE Ranking survey of 260 agencies, the 4A's 2025 Billing Rate Benchmark Survey (36,000+ data points, 886 rate cards), the SoDa and Productive pricing model survey, and the Sprout Social survey of 220+ agencies.
- 99 Calls, LSA Lead Cost by Industry Report for Service Contractors, Q2 2026 (4,459 leads and $258,867 in spend, 1 April to 30 June 2026).
- r/Contractor, "What is a good ROI for advertising?"
- r/agency, "How much are you guys charging your retainers per month?"
- r/RoofingSales, "Roofers: how much did you pay for your website + additional marketing services?"
- r/smallbusiness, "SEO services for small business, spent $17k+ and still unsure if it was worth it" and "Has anyone paid for SEO / marketing services?"