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 here are real numbers.
How much does care home marketing cost? With us, one home pays £999 to set up plus £99 a month for a page with an enquiries list, or £2,499 plus £149 a month for a full website.
Having the monthly marketing done for you adds £999 a month. Managed adverts are £250 per channel per home per month, and the advert spend goes to the platform directly. All of these prices exclude VAT.
They are published in full on our pricing page. We have not found a reliable survey of what care home marketing costs elsewhere, so we will not quote a market range and call it fact.
Below is what to look for in any price, what makes it 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. This is the work that happens once, such as the website, the brand, the photography and the enquiry tracking. Ask exactly which parts of it you keep if you leave.
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 can be fair, as long as you know it is happening. If you leave in month eight, you may have paid for a website you do not get to keep.
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 a website written about your home, your Google Business Profile set up properly, and an enquiry system that shows where every family came from. Check whether branding and photography are included or priced separately.
The word “website” means very little on its own, so ask what each quote for care home websites includes.
Whatever the price, ask who does the research and writes the words, whether photography is included, and how enquiries are tracked.
Ours is £999 for a one-page Pronto and £2,499 for a Pro website. A Group website for two to five homes is £4,950 for up to three homes, then £995 for each extra home.
Pronto and Pro are paid in one go. The Group set-up is paid in two halves, half to start and half when the site is finished.
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.
Across all sectors, Expert Market’s guide puts UK agency retainers at £1,000 to £10,000 a month. That is a wide range, and it is not specific to care homes.
So judge a monthly fee by what gets done each month and what you can see for it.
Our Marketing Assistant is £999 a month for one home and £549 for each additional home. It sits on top of an Enquiry Generator, which has its own monthly fee of £99 to £199 per home.
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. Work that is done once should cost less per home as a group grows, because 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. It is usually a more valuable one too.
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, Meta or ChatGPT. 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 adverts.
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 Google Ads and other adverts is one clear fee of £250 per channel per home per month, with the advert spend paid to the platform directly.
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 costs you its weekly fee. Knight Frank’s 2025 review put the average at £1,298 a week, so one room empty for a year is about £67,500 you never see. Use your own fee in the sum.
Now put the marketing next to it. A first year on our Pro package comes to £4,287. With the Marketing Assistant as well, it comes to £16,275. Both figures exclude VAT and advert spend.
At £1,298 a week, the larger figure is what a single empty room costs you in about 13 weeks.
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.
A long lock-in on ongoing work. Ours is a rolling monthly contract. A longer term should buy you something extra, as our optional 12-month Marketing Assistant term does with a photo shoot and a walkthrough video.
Twelve or twenty-four months with no break clause and nothing extra is a contract designed around the agency’s cash flow.
A website you cannot take with you. If leaving means losing the site, you were renting it. Ask what you keep, including the website, photography, films, data and source files. With us, the website moves to your own hosting for £199 and its forms keep working, while the texts, tracked number and follow-up stay with us.
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.
What is the one-off cost and what is the recurring cost, separately?
What do I keep if I leave, and what does it cost to take it with me?
What is the minimum term, and what happens at the end of it?
Is the ad budget separate from the management fee, and whose account does it sit in?
What exactly gets measured, and how often do I see it?
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.
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, 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 six minutes and scores your home across six areas.
No call required, and if you do not need us we will tell you.
Barry Jobson, founder
25 years in brand, digital and marketing, six of them only in care. Barry writes the Quick Wins email every week and still answers the phone.
The questions people ask. Answered in a line or two.
How much does care home marketing cost per month in the UK?
There is no reliable survey for care homes. Across all sectors, Expert Market’s guide puts UK agency retainers at £1,000 to £10,000 a month.
Ours starts at £99 a month for a Pronto page, and the Marketing Assistant is £999 a month for a single home. Monthly cost should always be quoted separately from any one-off build.
If a vacant room costs you your weekly fee, the question is how many months of that you are willing to absorb before acting.
For many homes, the honest answer is fewer months than they first thought.
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?
Price alone will not tell you. The real cost of a website is in the thinking, the words and the photography, so ask who does each of them.
Then test it the way a family would. Can a worried daughter find what she needs and see what to do next?
Do group homes cost less per home?
Set-up and any shared monthly work should. With us, a Group set-up is £4,950 for up to three homes and £995 for each extra home, and the Marketing Assistant falls to £549 for each additional home. The Group monthly fee is a flat £199 per home.
If a whole quote scales in a straight line, ask why.
