Last Updated on July 14, 2026
Do UK marketing agencies publish their prices? How much does a marketing agency cost in the UK? Nobody will tell you, and that is the finding. This is original Whito research, July 2026 data. We took the top five marketing agencies in each of ten UK cities, fifty firms in total, and checked every website for a published price. Two published a proper price list. One buried “from” figures in an FAQ. Forty seven published nothing at all, and a number of them ask what your budget is before they will discuss theirs.
Executive summary
Every other industry you buy from tells you the price. The accountant has a fee schedule. The insurer gives you a quote online. The software company has a pricing page with three tiers on it. Marketing agencies, almost without exception, do not.
We checked fifty UK marketing agency websites. Not a survey, not a sample of estimates gathered from forums. We went to each firm’s own site and looked for a number.
Two of the fifty publish a price list you can read without speaking to anyone.
Forty seven publish no figure at all. Instead you get “request a proposal”, “book a discovery call”, “send us your brief”, or a form that asks for your budget.
This is not a scandal. It is a structure, and it is working exactly as designed. When only one side of a negotiation knows the going rate, the price is set by what you reveal, not by what the work costs. Every business owner who has ever wondered whether they overpaid an agency was operating without the one piece of information that would have told them.
Key figures
- 2 of 50 publish a complete price list
- 1 of 50 publishes “from” prices, in an FAQ, with no price on the packages themselves
- 47 of 50 publish no price anywhere
- 10 UK cities: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol, Sheffield, Liverpool, Nottingham, Cardiff
What we did
We ran the same search, “marketing agency [city] UK”, across ten UK cities. In each city we took the top five genuine marketing agency websites. We excluded directories, aggregators and “top ten agencies” listicles, because we wanted agencies, not lists of agencies.
For each of the fifty firms we fetched the homepage, and where one existed, the pricing, packages, plans or services page. We then looked for a single thing: a number.
Full. A complete price list or priced package tiers, published on the site, readable without giving up your email address.
Partial. One figure, or a set of “from” figures, but no priced package list.
None. No price anywhere. Contact us, request a quote, bespoke only.
We did not count a price that appears only in a page’s meta description and not in the visible copy. We did not count a “what is your budget?” dropdown on a contact form, because that is your price, not theirs.
Finding one: 47 of 50 publish nothing
Forty seven of the fifty agencies we checked publish no price for their services anywhere on their website. That is 94%. It held across every city and every size of firm. The big London network agencies do not publish prices. Nor do the five-person shops in Sheffield. Liverpool and Sheffield returned ten out of ten with no figure at all.
The language is remarkably consistent. “Request a proposal.” “Book your discovery call.” “Send us your brief.” “Let’s chat.” Every one of those phrases performs the same function, which is to move the pricing conversation off the page you can read at 11pm on a Tuesday and onto a call where someone can ask you questions first.
Some agencies gesture at price without giving one. CMS Advertising in Leeds offers its services “for a low monthly fee” and never says what the fee is. Fenti in Sheffield promises “one simple retainer fee, a set monthly fee”, with no figure attached. Thinktank in Manchester advertises “delivering more, for less” and leaves you to guess what less means.
Value claims are not prices. If the number is genuinely good, the number is the argument.
Finding two: they will not name their price, but they will ask yours
This is the finding that matters, and it is the one nobody talks about.
Several of the agencies that publish no pricing at all have a contact form that asks what your budget is. Serotonin in Manchester has a “monthly marketing budget” dropdown running from “under £750” to “over £100,000”. The Bristol Marketing Company asks “what is your budget?” on a form headed “request a proposal”. London Marketing Company has an unlabelled budget field on its enquiry form.
Read that structure back slowly. They will not tell you what the work costs. They will ask you what you can afford to pay for it. Then they will send you a proposal.
You are not being quoted. You are being sized.
There is nothing illegal or even unusual about it. It is how most bespoke professional services are sold, and there are legitimate reasons a genuinely custom scope carries a genuinely custom price. But you should understand what game you are in. In every other purchase you make, you see the price and decide whether it is worth it. Here you state what you can spend, and the price arrives shaped to fit.
The information flows one way. It flows away from you.
Finding three: the price Google can see and you cannot
Creative Ideaz in Birmingham has an SEO packages page. The page itself carries no price. Its on-page FAQ, asked directly how much SEO costs, answers: “it really depends on what you want”, and invites you to get in touch.
The page’s meta description, the text Google reads and displays in search results, ends with the words “Starting from £199 a month”.
The price exists. It is written down. It is served to the search engine and withheld from the person reading the page. That is almost certainly a leftover from an older version of the page rather than a deliberate trick, and we say so plainly. But it is a neat illustration of where the incentive actually sits. The number is worth publishing when it wins a click. It is not worth publishing when it might let you compare.
Finding four: pricing pages with no prices
Two agencies have gone to the trouble of building the page and then left the number out.
The Munro Agency in Glasgow publishes nine named packages, sets out in detail what is in each one, and attaches to every single one a button reading “send pricing and package details”. The prices exist. They are behind your email address.
The Yellow Agency in Liverpool does the same, with a form that says “fill out the form to be sent our production process and prices” and a button that says, without irony, “send me prices!”.
Arise in Sheffield has a page at /pricing/. On it there is an embedded third-party estimator tool and some links to blog posts about cost. There is no price.
A pricing page with no price on it is not an oversight. It is a lead capture form wearing a pricing page’s clothes.
The three that do publish
Credit where it is earned. Three of the fifty give you a number before they give you a sales call.
| Agency | City | What they publish |
|---|---|---|
| Republic Marketing | Birmingham | Three priced tiers: Launch £999/mo + VAT, Grow from £2,500/mo + VAT, Scale from £4,500/mo + VAT, with a feature comparison table and minimum contract terms |
| Pxa Marketing | Cardiff | Two example retainers, itemised: “Something Basic” £1,500/mo and “Something Comprehensive” £2,500/mo, broken down by service |
| Our Agency | Leeds and Wakefield | “From” figures in the FAQ: SEO from around £1,200/mo, growth from £1,800/mo, audits from £450, PPC management £300 to £600/mo. The named packages themselves carry no prices |
One honest note, because we check the ones we like as hard as the ones we do not. Pxa’s itemised line items for the £2,500 “comprehensive” package add up to £1,600, not £2,500, as published. We are not suggesting anything is wrong. We are pointing out that even the most transparent pricing in a fifty-firm sample does not fully reconcile, which tells you how little pressure this market is under to get pricing right.
What this actually costs you
Here is the mistake most business owners make. They assume the absence of a price means the price is bespoke. Sometimes it is. Often it means there is no anchor, and in the absence of an anchor, you become the anchor.
You have no published figure to compare against, so you cannot tell whether £2,000 a month is a good price or double what the firm next door pays. You disclose your budget on the enquiry form, so the proposal that comes back is calibrated to your ceiling rather than to the cost of the work. You have no idea how many hours you are buying, because nothing is itemised. And when the retainer underdelivers, you have no basis to challenge it, because you never agreed what you were paying for in the first place.
That is not an accident of a busy market. It is the predictable output of an information structure where one side knows the going rate and the other does not.
Our analysis of 128 published UK marketing prices and our agency retainer research give you the wider range to test any quote against.
Now look at the three that publish. Republic’s entry tier is £999 a month. Pxa’s basic retainer is £1,500 a month. Our Agency’s SEO starts around £1,200 a month. Those are the only public anchors that exist in a sample of fifty firms, and they are the closest thing the UK market has to a going rate for a small business retainer.
If you are being quoted well above that for comparable work, that is not proof you are being fleeced. It is a question you are now equipped to ask.
What to do before you speak to an agency
- Work out your number first. Start with the UK Marketing Cost Index and what a lead costs in your sector. What is a customer worth to you, and what can you afford to pay to acquire one? If you cannot answer that, no agency price is meaningful, cheap or expensive, because you have nothing to compare it to.
- Do not fill in the budget field. Leave it blank, or write “please quote your standard rates for this scope”. If they cannot price the work without knowing your ceiling, they are not pricing the work.
- Ask for the scope in hours or deliverables, in writing. “Ongoing optimisation” is not a deliverable. “Four hours of technical SEO and two blog posts a month” is.
- Ask what the minimum contract term is, and what leaving early costs.
- Compare against the published anchors. £999 to £2,500 a month is the visible range for an SME retainer across our sample.
- Structure before scale. If your website does not convert and nobody can find you, a retainer buys you a more expensive version of the same problem. Fix the foundations first, then buy the growth.
The sharp takeaway
Forty seven out of fifty UK marketing agencies will not tell you what they charge. A good number of them will ask what you can spend.
That is not a pricing model. It is a negotiating position, and you are on the wrong side of it until you walk in with your own number.
Get your number first. Then ask for theirs.
Methodology
Data collected 14 July 2026. Search performed for “marketing agency [city] UK” across ten UK cities: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol, Sheffield, Liverpool, Nottingham and Cardiff. The top five genuine agency websites in each city were taken, excluding directories, aggregators, listicles and location landing pages belonging to agencies based elsewhere.
For each agency we fetched the homepage and, where linked, the pricing, packages, plans, services or costs page. Up to two pages per agency. Every one of the fifty sites was successfully fetched. There were no failures.
A price was counted as published only if it appears in the visible body copy of a page. Prices appearing only in a meta description were not counted, and are reported separately. Budget bands on contact forms were not counted, as they describe the client’s spend, not the agency’s price. All three published-price findings were independently re-checked against the live source pages before publication.
Whito has no commercial relationship with any agency named on this page, and does not sell marketing services. We publish this because we think the going rate should be public.
Honest limitations. This is a snapshot of one search, on one day, in ten cities. A different search would return a different fifty. Agencies do give prices on the phone, and this study does not measure what those prices are, only who will tell you before you call. Publishing a price is not automatically virtuous, and genuinely bespoke work can carry a genuinely bespoke price. The finding is not that agencies are dishonest. It is that the going rate is not public, and that this asymmetry costs the buyer.
Common questions
How much does a UK marketing agency cost?
Almost none of them will say. We checked fifty UK marketing agency websites in July 2026 and only two published a complete price list. The published figures we did find put an SME retainer between roughly £999 and £2,500 a month plus VAT, with SEO from around £1,200 a month and one-off audits from £450. Those are the only public anchors in a sample of fifty firms.
Why do marketing agencies not publish their prices?
The stated reason is that every project is bespoke. The structural reason is that a published price is an anchor, and an agency that knows your budget before it quotes is in a stronger position than one that has told you its rate up front. Note that several agencies that publish no price do ask for your budget on their enquiry form.
Should I tell a marketing agency my budget?
You do not have to. A reasonable alternative is to ask them to quote their standard rates for a defined scope. If an agency cannot price a clearly defined piece of work without knowing what you can afford, that tells you something useful about how the price is being set.
Which UK marketing agencies publish their prices?
In our sample of fifty, three: Republic Marketing (Birmingham), Pxa Marketing (Cardiff) and Our Agency (Leeds and Wakefield). Republic and Pxa publish priced packages. Our Agency publishes “from” figures in an FAQ.
This study measures who will tell you their price. These measure what the price actually is.
- UK Marketing Cost Index 2026: what UK businesses actually pay across every marketing channel.
- UK Marketing Agency Retainers 2026: what agencies actually charge on a monthly retainer.
- What Marketing Really Costs UK Businesses: 128 published prices analysed.
- Marketing Agencies Are Overcharging UK Businesses by 2 to 3 Times: the markup maths.
- How Much Should Marketing Cost?: real budgets for real businesses.
- How Much Does a Lead Cost in the UK?: 2026 industry breakdown.
- UK Trade Directory Costs 2026: Checkatrade, Bark, Yell and what they really charge.
Cite this research
Whito Research (2026). We checked 50 UK marketing agencies. 47 will not tell you what they charge. Whito. https://whito.co.uk/research/uk-agency-pricing-transparency/
Key finding: 47 of 50 UK marketing agencies publish no price on their website. Only 2 publish a complete price list. Several that publish no price ask the client’s budget on their enquiry form.
This is original Whito research. You are welcome to reuse these figures with a link to this page as the source.
