What Should a School Actually Spend on Marketing?

Short answer: 2–5% of your annual tuition revenue if enrollment is healthy, 5–10% if you have empty seats to fill. If you're launching a new program, budget against the seats rather than the revenue — expect to spend 8–15% of the first cohort's tuition to fill it.

That's the number. The rest of this page is how to get to yours, and what to do when the number is bigger than what you have.

The formula
Annual marketing budget = (tuition revenue × 3%) + (number of unfilled seats × target cost per enrolled student)
The first part maintains what you have. The second part fixes what's missing. Most schools only ever budget the first part and then wonder why the second part never resolves.

Why the "percentage of revenue" answer is only half useful

Every marketing budget article gives you a percentage. Percentages assume your problem is proportional to your size. It usually isn't.

A 180-student school that's full has a retention and reputation job. A 180-student school with 40 empty places has an acquisition job, and acquisition costs what it costs regardless of how big you are. Two schools of identical size can honestly need budgets that differ by a factor of four.

So run both calculations and take the larger.

Worked example: a 90-student school with 12 open seats

• Tuition: $11,000/year
• Current revenue: 90 × $11,000 = $990,000
• Maintenance budget at 3%: $29,700/year (~$2,475/month)
• Target cost per enrolled student: $1,200 see how to set this
• Acquisition budget: 12 × $1,200 = $14,400
• Total: ~$44,000/year, or about $3,700/month

Now the part that makes it defensible to a board: those 12 seats, once filled, are worth $132,000 in the first year. If a child stays an average of five years, they're worth in the region of $660,000 in lifetime tuition. Spending $14,400 to capture $132,000 in year one is not a marketing expense. It's the best-performing line item in the budget, and it isn't close.

What the budget is actually spent on

For a school in the 50–250 student range, a workable split:

Two notes on that table. Photography is underweighted by nearly every school we look at — it's the single highest-return line for the money, because every other channel consumes it. And print is overweighted by nearly every school — the viewbook is comfortable to produce because it feels like a real object, and it converts almost nobody who wasn't already coming.

If you're a program, not a school

Teacher trainings, certifications, retreats and summer intensives work differently. You're filling a cohort against a deadline, not maintaining a rolling population.

Budget 8–15% of the cohort's total tuition value, spent in a compressed window: heavy from six months out, heaviest at eight to ten weeks out, then a final push at the deadline.

A 22-person training at $4,500 is a $99,000 cohort. Budget $8,000–$15,000 to fill it. If that sounds like a lot, compare it with the cost of running the cohort at fourteen people, which is what happens by default.

When the number is bigger than what you have

It almost always is the first year. Three moves, in order:

1. Take the free money first. If you're a 501(c)(3), the Google Ad Grant gives you $10,000 per month in Google Search advertising at no cost. That's $120,000 a year of media. It has real constraints — search only, $2 bid cap by default, no display — but for a school it covers the highest-intent searches in your area. Almost no school in this field uses it. Do this before you spend a dollar of your own.

2. Reallocate before you add. Most schools already spend $8,000–$20,000 on marketing without calling it that: the fair booth, the printed viewbook, the local magazine ad renewed annually since 2014, the admissions director's Saturday hours. Audit it. Kill the print ad nobody can attribute a single family to. That's your first real budget and it doesn't require a board vote.

3. Fund the gap. Enrollment outreach is fundable — as community outreach, access and equity recruitment, or organizational capacity building. Never as "marketing." How to write that ask.

The three ways this budget gets wasted

Spread too thin. $2,000/month across Facebook, Instagram, Google, print, a newsletter and a podcast sponsorship does nothing anywhere. Two channels, done properly, until they work.

No tracking. If you can't say how a family first heard of you, you can't move a dollar intelligently. One question on the inquiry form — "How did you hear about us?" — is worth more than most analytics setups.

Stopping when full. Enrollment marketing that switches off the moment the seats fill has to restart cold every time there's a wobble. The maintenance 3% exists precisely so that never happens.

Try your own numbers

We built a marketing budget calculator that takes your enrollment, tuition, attrition and target and returns a recommended budget, a cost-per-enrollment target, and a channel split. It takes about a minute and you get the numbers as a PDF you can put in front of your board.

By Sascha Rossaint · Reviewed by Curtis Guild · August 2026

About the author

Sascha Rossaint

Founder & Head of Growth

Sascha owns growth at HolyOps — the strategy, systems and infrastructure that turn a mission into a business that can carry it. Former COO at Activation Products, with 15+ years building structure, teams and systems for teachers, institutes and conscious brands.

Reviewed by Curtis Guild, Partner & Head of Client Success.