How Much Does Care Home Marketing Cost?

Ask three care home marketing agencies what they charge and you will get three versions of the same answer: it depends, let’s get a call in the diary. Sometimes that is genuine. Mostly it is a way of finding out what you can afford before anyone tells you a price.

So let us do the thing almost nobody in this sector does, and put real numbers on the page.

How much does care home marketing cost? For a single independent home in the UK, budget a one-off build of somewhere between £4,000 and £9,000 to get the foundations right, then £800 to £1,500 a month to keep it working. Our own prices sit inside that: £4,450 for a single-home build, £8,950 where the whole brand needs rebuilding, and £1,095 a month to run it. They are published in full on our pricing page, which is more than we can say for most of the market.

Below is what sits behind those numbers, what makes them move, and how to tell a fair quote from a padded one.

Why nobody will give you a straight number

There are two honest reasons a price varies, and one dishonest one.

The honest reasons: a 30-bed home with a two-year-old website and a claimed Google profile needs far less work than a 90-bed group with three sites and no tracking. And a home that needs its whole brand rebuilt is a bigger job than one that needs its website rebuilt.

The dishonest reason is that a discovery call is a pricing exercise. If an agency knows your occupancy, your fee rate and your frustration before it quotes, it can price the pain rather than the work. That is why the number never appears on the website.

“It depends” is a real answer to what exactly will this cost me. It is not a real answer to roughly what am I looking at.

You are buying two separate things

Almost every quote you receive is a blend of two very different purchases, and the single most useful thing you can do is pull them apart.

A one-off build. The work that happens once: the website, the brand, the photography, the search setup, the enquiry tracking. You should own all of it outright when it is paid for.

An ongoing service. The work that only counts if it keeps happening: search visibility, content, reviews, keeping your fees and services accurate wherever families and AI assistants look.

Agencies that quote a single monthly figure for both are usually rolling the build cost into a long contract. That is not automatically bad, but you should know it is happening — because if you leave in month eight, you may have paid for a website you do not own.

What the one-off build costs

This is the part most homes underestimate and most agencies quote vaguely.

A proper build for one home covers the brand basics, a website written around your home rather than a template with your logo dropped in, local search and Google Business Profile set up properly, a photography day, and an enquiry system that tracks where every lead came from.

Across the UK market, standalone care home websites are commonly quoted anywhere from £3,000 to £12,000, and that spread tells you how little the word “website” means on its own. A £3,000 site is usually a template and a contact form. A £12,000 site should include the research, the words, the photography and the tracking.

Ours is £4,450 for a single home, and £8,950 where a full rebrand is needed or where you are a group and this is your first home. Both can be spread over 12 months — £371 and £746 a month respectively — or paid in full for 5% off.

Whatever you are quoted, ask what happens to it if you leave. If the answer involves small print, that is your answer.

What the ongoing work costs

Once the foundations exist, the monthly work is what actually fills beds: being found when a family searches, being described accurately when they ask an assistant instead, having reviews that stand up, and publishing enough that your home looks alive rather than abandoned. Most of that sits under care home SEO and reputation work.

Typical UK retainers for a specialist care marketing agency run from around £1,500 to £5,000 a month for full service. Entry-level packages start nearer £500 a month, and a narrow local SEO-only package usually sits around £800 to £1,200.

Ours is £1,095 a month for one home, falling per home as a group grows.

A useful way to sanity-check any monthly figure: compare it to one care worker. If a full marketing function costs less than a single member of staff, the question stops being whether you can afford it and becomes whether it works.

What actually moves the price

How many homes. Group pricing should fall per home, and steeply. The brand, the platform and the strategy are built once. If an agency quotes you five homes at five times the single-home rate, they are charging you five times for one piece of thinking.

What you already have. A recent website, a claimed Google profile and a working enquiry form genuinely reduce the build.

Whether the brand needs rebuilding. A logo you like is not the same as a brand. If your home has a real point of difference that has never been put into words, that is a bigger job than a website refresh — and usually a more valuable one.

Whether you are adding paid advertising. Which is its own line, and often the most confusing one.

Paid advertising sits outside all of this

If you take one thing from this article, take this: your ad budget and your management fee are two different numbers.

The ad budget is money that goes to Google or Meta. It should sit in your own account, in your name, and you should be able to see it. The management fee is what the agency charges to build and run the campaigns.

Some agencies quote a single combined figure, which makes it impossible to know what you are actually paying them. Some charge a percentage of ad spend, which quietly rewards them for spending more of your money. Ask for the two numbers separately, always. How we handle paid advertising is one clear fee, with your budget staying in your account.

Is any of it worth it? The only sum that matters

Forget marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue for a moment. There is a simpler calculation.

An empty room in a UK care home costs roughly £800 to £1,200 a week in lost revenue. Over a year, one bed sitting empty is somewhere between £42,000 and £62,000 you never see.

Now put the marketing next to it. A full first year with us — the £4,450 build plus £1,095 a month — comes to £17,590. That is what a single empty room costs you in about three to five months.

That does not make it a certainty. Nobody can promise you a move-in, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. But it does change the question. It stops being can we afford the marketing and becomes how long can we afford the empty room.

For context, average UK care home occupancy sat at around 87% in early 2026, according to Knight Frank’s care homes trading performance research. If you are at 87% in a 60-bed home, that is roughly eight empty rooms. If you want to run the numbers on your own home rather than ours, our occupancy calculator does it in about a minute.

What you should not be paying for

A long lock-in on ongoing work. Three months is reasonable, because that is roughly how long it takes to see movement. Twelve or twenty-four months, with no break clause, is a contract designed around the agency’s cash flow rather than your results.

A website you do not own. If leaving means losing the site, you were renting it. Ask directly: when this is paid for, is it mine? Website, photography, films, data, source files.

Reporting that measures the wrong thing. Impressions, reach and engagement rate tell you nothing about beds. Enquiries, where each one came from, and cost per admission tell you everything.

Guaranteed move-ins. Marketing brings a family to your door. Your team, your building and your follow-up decide whether they stay. Any agency claiming credit for the admission itself is claiming credit for your work.

How to compare two quotes properly

Put both in front of you and ask the same six questions of each.

1. What is the one-off cost and what is the recurring cost, separately?
2. When it is paid for, what do I own outright?
3. What is the minimum term, and what happens at the end of it?
4. Is the ad budget separate from the management fee, and whose account does it sit in?
5. What exactly gets measured, and how often do I see it?
6. If I have another home next year, what does that one cost?

The quotes that survive those six questions tend to be the honest ones. The ones that need a call to answer question one usually need a call for a reason.

FAQs

How much does care home marketing cost per month in the UK?

Most specialist agencies charge between £1,500 and £5,000 a month for a full service, with entry-level packages from around £500 and local SEO-only work around £800 to £1,200. Ours is £1,095 a month for a single home, less per home as a group grows. Monthly cost should always be quoted separately from any one-off build.

How much should a care home spend on marketing?

Rather than a percentage of revenue, work backwards from your empty beds. If a vacant room costs you £800 to £1,200 a week, the relevant question is how many months of that you are willing to absorb before acting. Most independent homes find the answer is fewer months than they assumed.

Why do care home marketing agencies hide their prices?

Some genuinely cannot quote without knowing your starting point. Others use the discovery call to work out what you will tolerate before naming a figure. You can usually tell which is which by asking for a rough range on the first call — a straight answer, even a broad one, is a good sign.

Do I have to pay for the website and the monthly service together?

No, and you should be able to see them priced separately. The build is a one-off; the monthly service is ongoing and should be cancellable on reasonable notice. If an agency will only quote one combined monthly figure, ask what happens to the website if you stop paying.

Is a cheap care home website worth it?

A £3,000 template site will look fine and do very little, because the cost is in the thinking, the words and the photography rather than the pages. The test is not what it looks like. It is whether a worried daughter can find what she needs and knows what to do next.

Do group homes cost less per home?

They should. The brand, the platform and the strategy are built once and shared, so each additional home ought to cost noticeably less than the one before. If a quote scales in a straight line, ask why.

How long before care home marketing pays for itself?

Search and reputation work usually takes about three months to show real movement, and one admission typically covers a significant part of a year’s cost. Paid advertising moves faster but stops when you stop paying for it, which is why it works best on top of the foundations rather than instead of them.

Final thought

The reason so few agencies publish prices is not that the work is unquotable. It is that a published price invites comparison, and comparison is uncomfortable when the number was never based on the work in the first place.

You should be able to see what something costs before you speak to anyone. Ours are all on one page, including the group calculator, and nothing changes if you have already decided we are not for you.

Not sure where your home stands? The free Enquiry Review takes about five minutes and scores how your home shows up when a family goes looking. No call required, and if you do not need us we will tell you.