How Much Should You Spend on PR in 2025?

I’ve been asked this a lot over the years. And it pops up in various forms. What percentage of your profit should be spent on marketing? What percentage of your turnover should be spent on marketing? What percentage of your marketing budget should be spent on PR?

In truth, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for setting a PR budget. No magic formulas. This blog would be shorter, and quicker to write if there were.

The real answer is dependent on what your brand or business is trying to achieve. That’s not intentionally evasive. But if you have ambitious goals for your business, say you want to increase your branded traffic by 40%, you will need to invest more than if you were only in maintenance mode.

Another way of looking at it would be, how much can you afford not to spend on PR? How much can you afford not to build a brand, not increase branded traffic and website conversion, not outperform the competition, not increase market share, not attract talent? Not sell more? Perhaps you don’t need any of these tangible benefits? Perhaps your business has no goals?

It is also important to understand that, like any service, there is always a budget option. Of course you can find someone cheaper. Are they better? Unlikely. Can you cut corners? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a company complain about its PR agency only to find out they buy one day a month of the agency’s time.

There are lots of opinions about marketing spend. Some say between 7% to 12% of revenue. A consumer goods company should apparently spend 15%. The PR budget would be a percentage of that marketing spend. I’ll come to how much in a minute.

First here are some examples of reported PR budgets from 2024:

The Ministry of Justice appointed a new agency in January with a £1m spend over a three year contract.

The Danone UK & Ireland PR and influencer account is believed to be worth seven figures.

WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) awarded a £500k one-year contract to a PR agency.

Now of course, these are all big budgets from household names. The smaller budgets don’t get reported publicly. So anecdotally from independent agency land, client retainers vary from £3k per month to £11k per month with the average sitting at £5k. But few businesses serious about making an impact on their brand are spending less than £50k per year on PR. Look how much the big boys are spending.

Presumably if you’re ambitious for your business you want to work with a decent agency.

A decent agency will know its value and charge fees based on a day rate of between £800 and £1,400, depending on industry specialism.

You will then need to buy enough regular time for that PR agency to do the work required to achieve the results you want. No point hiring an A team and leaving them on the bench. I’d say a minimum of 5 days’ a month. So you’re looking at £50k+ a year. That’s advocating a retainer model, so that the benefits can accumulate over time. Project work is too stop start for the true business benefits of PR to be delivered.

If you have a marketing budget already, 50% of that should be spent on brand building. Because brand building is the new SEO, and PR is the route for brand building.

Parking the myriad of advantages PR can offer your business, right now most businesses need to sell more. How can you sell more if not enough people know you exist, or if those that do, don’t understand you? Given the tangible benefits, and problems it can solve, why would PR be the thing you scrimp on?

Bill Gates famously said: “If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on PR.” And he’s done alright for himself.

If you want to be more Bill, get in touch at susannah@energypr.co.uk for a chat.