This marketing budget calculator sets your practice's monthly budget from goals instead of a guess: how many new patients you want, how many you can actually see, what each channel costs you per new patient, and your fixed monthly costs. Percent of revenue comes out as a result, not a starting rule. No patient information is entered or stored.
Build your budget with the marketing budget calculator
- New patients wanted per month. It starts at 20.
- Open new-patient slots per month (optional). The goal is capped here.
- Fixed monthly costs: website, software, management fees.
- Monthly revenue (optional), used only to show the budget as a share of revenue.
- Channels. Google Ads, Website & SEO and Meta ads are preloaded at 50%, 30% and 20%. For each, set its share of new patients and your cost per new patient. Add, rename or remove rows; the tool warns if shares don't total 100%.
You get your target new patients, channel spend (patients per channel × cost per patient), the total monthly budget and, if you entered revenue, the budget as a percentage of it.
Start from new-patient goals and capacity
Start with the appointments you need to fill, not the money you'd like to spend. For a dental practice adding an associate, that's the new doctor's open exam slots. For a therapy group, the open spots in each clinician's caseload. For a med spa, the injector's unbooked blocks.
Count open new-patient appointments per month, not total appointments. Advertising can't fill a schedule that's already full; past capacity, extra spend only builds a waitlist. That's why the calculator caps your goal at the open slots you enter.
Fixed costs vs ad spend
Fixed costs stay the same whether you see 10 new patients or 30: website and hosting, software, SEO, management or agency fees, directory subscriptions. Ad spend is variable; it rises with the patients you want. Our guide to marketing costs for practices breaks down both.
Don't count anything twice. If your organic search cost is the website and SEO already in fixed costs, enter $0 as that channel's cost per new patient.
As one example of fixed costs, Medfy's base plan is $349/month. Add-ons are Google Ads management at $199/month, Meta ads + AI creatives at $199/month and the HIPAA AI chat widget at $49/month. Ad spend is paid directly to Google and Meta, and billing is monthly, cancel anytime. See Medfy pricing for what each includes.
Cost per new patient by channel
Use your own reports: a channel's monthly cost divided by the new patients it brought. If you don't have that yet:
- Google Ads: estimate it with the Google Ads budget calculator, which pairs real cost-per-click data with your conversion rates.
- A channel you've never run: start with a small test budget for a few months and measure.
- After launch: check actual results with the ROI calculator.
Hypothetical arithmetic: a practice wants 20 new patients a month but has 15 open slots, so the target is 15. Google Ads brings 60% (9 patients × $250 = $2,250), Meta ads 20% (3 × $200 = $600) and Website & SEO 20% (3 × $0, since its cost sits in fixed costs). Channel spend is $2,850. Fixed costs are $747 (a $349 base plan plus two $199 ads add-ons). Total budget: $3,597 a month, or 6.0% of $60,000 monthly revenue.
What "% of revenue" rules miss
"Marketing budget calculator" gets 70 US searches a month, "marketing budget for small business" 110 and "marketing budget percentage of revenue" 50 (Google Ads Keyword Planner data via DataForSEO, US, 12-month average to Sep 2026). The percentage question is common; a sourced answer isn't. The SBA's marketing guidance gives no percentage at all. Its advice is to "compare your marketing and sales costs to the revenue it generates." (opens in a new tab)
A percentage-of-revenue rule of thumb misses what decides the right budget for a practice:
- Capacity. A booked-out practice needs less, whatever its revenue.
- Stage. A new practice has low revenue and an empty schedule, so a percentage rule starves it.
- Specialty economics. A click for an implant search costs far more than one for urgent care, and the patients are worth different amounts.
Use the percentage the calculator shows as a sanity check, not a target.
Revisiting the budget each quarter
Every quarter, replace estimates with actuals:
- Update each channel's cost per new patient from real results.
- Update capacity for new providers, changed hours or a waitlist.
- Shift share toward channels with a lower cost per patient seen, if they can deliver more.
- Compare new patients against the goal and reset it.
Put the budget into your healthcare marketing plan so it's reviewed on a schedule. The free marketing audit shows where your current channels stand across six areas, and more free marketing tools cover ROI and cost per patient.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a medical practice spend on marketing?
Enough to fill the new-patient appointments you actually have open, at the cost per new patient each channel achieves for you. Multiply the patients you want from each channel by its cost per new patient, add fixed costs, and that's the budget. We don't recommend a fixed percentage of revenue: it ignores capacity, and a full schedule doesn't need more advertising.
Should a new practice spend more on marketing?
Usually a larger share of revenue, because revenue is small and the schedule is mostly open. Budget from open capacity rather than revenue, and expect cost per new patient to run higher while reviews, listings and service pages build up. Set a monthly ceiling, track cost per new patient from the first month, and rebalance each quarter.
What belongs in a practice's fixed marketing costs?
Costs that don't change with the number of new patients: website hosting and software, SEO, analytics and reporting tools, agency or management fees, paid directory listings and design work. Ad spend belongs in the channel rows, because it rises with the patients you want. Keep each cost in one place only, or the budget counts it twice.