When we set up Google’s Local Services Ads for a DFW roofing client in September 2026, Google wouldn’t accept a weekly budget under $327 for their ZIP codes. Enter anything lower and it warns that you’ll likely get no leads. That comes to about $1,400 a month for one channel, billed by Google, before you’ve signed a job or paid anyone to run it.
As a share of revenue, the two owners I found who posted full figures spent between 2.2% and 5.5% once they were established. One of them, a retail roofer doing $2.7 million a year, wrote that he spent 10 to 15% in his early years. The 7 to 8% you’ll hear most often is a Small Business Administration (SBA) rule of thumb for any small business under $5 million, and I couldn’t find a survey of what roofing companies spend.
So I’d set the budget in signed jobs and use those owners’ figures as a check. If you’re established and spending well past the 5.5% at the top of their range, look hard at what each channel costs per signed job before you raise the budget.
Google’s recommended Local Services Ads budget would cost about $4,700 a month in north DFW
Google offered that client three weekly budgets: $327, $1,090 and $1,635. At the lowest it showed a monthly maximum of $1,421 and projected three leads a week, about $109 a lead. Google’s help page recommends a budget for at least 10 leads a week under its Maximize leads bidding. At $109 a lead, that matches the $1,090 preset, a monthly maximum of about $4,734, though Google doesn’t say that’s how it sets the presets. The $327 floor held for one client’s ZIP codes, and yours may sit higher or lower.
Those per-lead prices are Google’s projections, made before the account had billed a single lead, so I can’t yet tell you what a signed job from Local Services Ads costs in DFW. Even so, $109 looks cheap next to search ads. LocaliQ, an agency, put the median roofing and gutters lead from US search-ad campaigns at $228.15 between April 2024 and March 2025, the highest of its 16 home-services categories and about twice Google’s projection. A long-running roofer moving online asked r/Roofing in January 2026 whether the average Google Ads budget was closer to $1,000 a month or $5,000. At LocaliQ’s median, $1,000 buys about four search-ad leads.
You pay per lead, and Google treats the weekly budget as a target, so some weeks spend more and some less. The month is capped at the weekly budget times 30.4, divided by 7, and once that’s spent your ads stop for the rest of the month unless you raise the budget.
Those rules change as Local Services Ads move into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns, with roofing in the first US group from August 2026. When an account moves, Google divides its weekly budget by 7 to get a daily average and caps the month at 30.4 times that. Manual bidding ends, so check whether your account has moved before you plan around a maximum price per lead, since after the move you can’t set one. The $327 floor may change with the move too. Google Local Services Ads for Roofers: Budget, Cost per Lead and Disputes goes further on setup and bad leads.
The 7 to 8% rule was written for every kind of small business
Roofing marketing blogs repeat the 7 to 8% figure, and it traces back to the SBA’s marketing-plan guide. The guide says budgets range from 2% of sales up to 20% while a business gears up a new product or service, and that a business under $5 million should generally put 7 to 8% into marketing. It gives no source for that rule. It also assumes you keep 10 to 12% of revenue after every expense, marketing included, so check that against your own books before you borrow the number.
Roofing Contractor’s 2026 State of the Industry report has no figures on marketing spend, and every roofing percentage I found online came from an agency or a software vendor, citing the SBA or nothing at all.
Contractors’ tax returns put advertising under 1% of receipts
The IRS publishes what businesses deduct, industry by industry, and roofing sits in a group it calls other specialty trade contractors. In tax year 2022, corporations in that group deducted $3.55 billion of advertising on $799.9 billion of receipts, or 0.44%, less than half the 1.04% for all industries. S corporations and sole proprietors in the specialty trades came out close, at 0.49% for 2022 and 0.60% for 2023.
Those figures are estimates from a sample of returns, and they leave a lot out. Roofing isn’t broken out, so the group also holds framing, masonry, siding, drywall, painting, flooring and site prep. The line counts advertising only, so marketing staff and lead fees booked under other expenses don’t show up, and neither do rep commissions. A roofer on r/RoofingSales called the cost of door knocking “hard to quantify since it’s usually just paying your reps commissions.” A company that finds its work by knocking doors can show almost nothing for advertising and still pay to find every job, in commission. So the IRS figure understates what contractors spend to win work, and I can’t tell you by how much, though half a percent is a long way from 7 to 8%.
Two owners who posted full figures spent between 2.2% and 5.5%
A roofing owner on r/RoofingSales whose company is 95% retail put fiscal 2024 marketing at well over $100,000 on $2.7 million of revenue, closer to $150,000 counting truck wraps and apparel, or about 5.5%. It went on organic SEO, HomeAdvisor, Angi, direct mail and Local Services Ads, with nothing on Google Ads, and about 30% of his work comes from referrals and repeat customers. Back when he was doing $1 million to $1.5 million, he was at 10 to 15%, and he wrote that those years are probably the better guide for a newer company.
The owner of a family exterior company in its 70th year, doing roofing along with siding and windows, wrote on r/smallbusiness that it spent about $40,000 on marketing in 2022. On $1.6 million to $1.8 million of revenue, that’s roughly 2.2 to 2.5%. For 2023 he planned 5% of a projected $3.6 million, or $180,000, four and a half times the year before.
When someone asked r/RoofingSales in August 2025 what share of revenue a roofer should spend, every answer of 8% or more came from people whose own posts show they sell marketing. The roofing side offered a secondhand 4% for a $38 million company that tracks everything, plus advice to keep spending to a minimum. An agency CEO interviewed in Roofing Contractor in September 2026 said the companies she sees put 5 to 10% of revenue into marketing. I sell marketing too, so weigh what I say the same way.
Referrals are one reason an established company can spend a smaller share. Another owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in 2023 that about $2,000 a month in ads, plus referrals, keeps his company busy. In Roofing Contractor’s 2026 homeowner survey, sponsored by Owens Corning, 74% of homeowners said they follow a recommendation from someone they know and about 62% would call a roofer they’d used before, while half use search engines. The survey gives no sample size, and its respondents averaged 58.
Work the budget out from the signed jobs you need
Start with how many signed jobs a month you need beyond what referrals and repeat customers already bring. Then price each channel by its cost per signed job, meaning everything you spent on it divided by the jobs it brought in. At Google’s projected $109, the DFW floor buys about 13 leads a month. Every lead it takes you to sign one job adds another $109 to that job’s cost, so your close rate moves the number as much as the lead price does.
Check that the channel can run at the size you can afford, since $1,000 a month couldn’t buy Local Services Ads at all in those DFW ZIP codes. Then spread the money across the year. The exterior company set its 2023 plan month by month, from $7,560 in December up to $25,740 in August, and put $7,000 of January’s into Google pay-per-click ads, when his leads were costing about $100 each. Pick a level you can hold through your slow months before you add a second lead source.
Expect a bigger share while you’re new, as the retail roofer was, or while you push into a new service, where the SBA’s range runs up to 20%. If you can’t yet say which jobs came from which channel, fix that before you raise any budget. How to Track Which Marketing Brings In Your Roofing Jobs shows how.
Google makes an agency show its fee apart from your ad spend
However you pay whoever runs your marketing, keep the ad money and their fee as separate numbers. Google’s third-party policy already requires that of anyone managing your Google ads. An agency that charges a management fee has to tell you in writing before your first purchase and on every invoice. Its cost reports have to show exactly what Google charged, with its own fees left out, and it has to give you your Google Ads customer ID when you ask. It can meet the reporting rule by letting you sign in to your own account, so ask for that sign-in before you pay anyone and compare what Google charged with what you were billed.
On our plans, Google bills your ad spend to you directly and we never mark it up or hold it. Our own fee is flat and month to month.
A flat fee doesn’t fit every company in every season. In September 2026 a DFW roofing client turned down all three of our packages, pointing to fixed costs that had just gone up with new salaries, and to the end of storm season. The same week another roofer signed up for our smallest package. What you can commit to each month depends on your fixed costs and your season as much as on any percentage.
Whatever you pay, ask each month what the spend produced, what each lead cost and how that’s trending, and what the plan is for next month, as the agency CEO in that Roofing Contractor piece suggests. I’d add a fourth question: how many of those leads became signed jobs. Before you sign with anyone, us included, read How to Hire a Roofing Marketing Company Without Getting Burned.
To see where you already show up without paying for it, run the free Google Maps heatmap. Pick your Google profile and a search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.