Urgent Care Budget Benchmarks for 2026: How Much Should You Spend on Marketing?

By Alan Ayers, President, Urgent Care Consultants

When launching or scaling your urgent care business, creating an optimized marketing budget is one of the hardest things to get right. There’s a reason operators often ask about benchmarks. A starting point makes it easier to dial in your budget, ensuring you have enough cash to meet your goals without going overboard.

Of course, every urgent care business is different. Reliable financial data isn’t always available in the early days of launching your business, but you still need to set spending targets and understand how your marketing strategy translates to (or is falling short of) long-term success.

In this article, we’ll break down practical marketing budget benchmarks for urgent care in 2025 and share tactics for adjusting your allocation to meet the unique needs of your business.

Urgent Care Marketing Budget Benchmarks for 2026

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to urgent care marketing budgets. But benchmarks give you a reference point from which you can adjust based on your clinic’s size, location, and stage of growth. Understanding what typical spending looks like across the industry also gives you a better understanding of how to tailor your budget for better performance.

Why Benchmarking Matters in Urgent Care

Marketing for urgent care is unlike retail or hospitality. You can’t run a sale on flu vaccines and expect a line to form the next morning. Urgent care is a need-based service, and your patient might not need you today, or even this month. That makes attributing patient visits to specific marketing efforts nearly impossible.

Someone might see your billboard, hear your name from a school flyer, or pass your clinic on the way to work for six weeks before suddenly needing care. When they show up, asking them, “How did you hear about us?” usually returns a vague answer like “Google,” even if Google was just the last stop for directions.

For urgent care, marketing goals can’t be focused on immediate conversions. Instead, concentrate on building awareness. Your clinic must be top of mind and easy to find when a medical need arises. Marketing benchmarks are a practical tool for planning your investments across multiple channels to accomplish this goal.

Typical Spend as a Percentage of Revenue for Digital vs. Offline

The most reliable benchmark comes from the Urgent Care Association (UCA), which reports that marketing averages roughly 3.1% of expenses among urgent care operators. That’s a great starting point for established independent urgent care businesses.

However, new clinics require significantly more effort to establish awareness and need the budget to go with it. Based on industry insights and operator experience, startups should plan to invest about 8% to 12% of net collections from pre-opening through their first 12 months. This should be adequate to cover both digital and traditional marketing channels and build momentum for your growing clinic.

The table below shows how this example translates into real-world numbers:

As results from word-of-mouth and organic channels compound, you won’t need to spend as much on marketing to deliver similar or even better results. After catalyzing your first-year growth with a larger marketing budget, you can start moving toward the average 3% figure gradually through the second year.

UCC Pro Tip: A startup urgent care center should budget at least $50,000 for its first year of marketing efforts. This working capital drives higher patient volumes and pays dividends over time, making it one of the most important investments you can make.

Channel Allocation Benchmarks

The rise of digital media has reshaped urgent care marketing, but you’ll still need traditional outreach and community-focused touchpoints to succeed. The table below offers a look at how you can allocate your marketing budget across multiple channels during different stages of your urgent care’s growth.

“Urgent Care Economics 101” explains how your clinic’s size and location should influence your channel mix and spend.

Cost Per Acquisition Benchmarks

Many operators want to calculate marketing return on investment (ROI) using cost per acquisition (CAC). While CAC can be a useful metric, it’s notoriously difficult to measure accurately in urgent care.

We’ve already discussed that patient utilization isn’t immediate. Another factor blurring CAC calculations is that most patients interact with your business at multiple touchpoints before they visit. This makes it hard to say what actually drove a conversion.

If your marketing includes channels with direct attribution (e.g., Zocdoc or marketplace bookings), you can calculate your CAC with better accuracy. However, doing so is much harder for most marketing channels used by urgent care operators.

Did a paid ad capture their interest when searching for care? Or did they only click because they remembered your signage from their commute? Or did a positive review on your Google Business Profile nudge them to learn more?

Across the industry, customer acquisition costs vary significantly. Location is a key factor, with urban markets having higher CAC because of competition and ad bidding wars. Rural settings often enjoy lower media costs and more organic referrals, while suburban clinics fall somewhere in between.

Ultimately, CAC isn’t a precise indicator of marketing success in urgent care as it is in other industries. While you can use it as a general guide, don’t put too much faith in a specific number.

ROI: Measuring and Optimizing Spend

Much like CAC, urgent care marketing doesn’t deliver tidy campaign ROI reports like it can for an e-commerce brand. ROI in the urgent care world is cumulative, not transactional. You’re buying awareness and reinforcing your presence with the hope of being the first choice when someone twists an ankle or wakes up with a sore throat.

This means success is measured in months, and synergy between your marketing channels matters more than the performance of any one strategy. Rather than trying to perfectly track ROI, instead focus on consistency.

Are you reaching your audience through a mix of online and offline channels? Is your brand visible and recognizable in your community? Do patients know who you are before they need care?

If you can answer yes to these questions, your ROI will almost certainly be positive.

Adjusting Budget Based on Size and Location

Not every urgent care should spend the same amount on marketing. Your plan should reflect the factors unique to your clinic. This includes:

• Setting: Media pricing varies drastically between urban, suburban, and rural markets.
• Location visibility: A high-traffic building with great signage often reduces the need for heavy spending on billboards or ads and amplifies all your other marketing. A tucked-away clinic might need more promotion to remind people that it even exists.
• Competition: If you’re the first urgent care in town, it’s easier to build awareness than if you’re entering a saturated market where you’ll have to fight for attention.
• Size of the group: Multi-site operators can enjoy economies of scale. You don’t need twice the budget to market two locations, especially if their trade areas overlap.
• Scale of operations: Higher-volume clinics have lower patient acquisition costs, which makes their marketing spend more efficient. Newer centers will need to spend more to acquire the same number of patients and must account for this when budgeting.
• Operational maturity: New clinics need to create awareness (see above) and need to spend more to do so. Established locations can afford to spend less and focus on retention and reputation with some occasional outreach.

Need Help with Urgent Care Budgeting?

There’s no single budget formula that’s perfect for every clinic, but with the right strategy and guidance, you can build a marketing strategy that aligns with your goals and grows your urgent care business.

At Urgent Care Consultants, we help new and growing urgent care operators take the guesswork out of marketing budgets. Whether you’re opening your first location or expanding your reach, our team can help you plan smarter and get the most out of your marketing dollars.

When you’re ready for a marketing strategy that delivers real results, schedule a no-risk budget consultation to learn how we can help.