Almost nobody publishes their prices, and then everybody wonders why buyers don’t get in touch. If you have searched for what a fractional marketing director costs in the UK, you have mostly found pages offering to discuss your requirements. Here are the numbers.
The UK market currently advertises somewhere between about £1,500 and £7,000 a month, depending on how much of the person you are buying, with day rates around £750 to £1,250. What follows is what each band buys, how it compares with a permanent hire once you count the true cost of employing someone, and the part most articles leave out: when a fractional marketing director is the wrong answer and you should keep your money.
What the UK market currently advertises
Two UK firms publish their bands openly, which makes them a fair read on the market.
McCracken Marketing lists advisory work at £1,500–£3,000 a month, an embedded director at one day a week at £2,000–£3,500 a month, and two days a week at £4,000–£6,000 a month. They aim at businesses turning over £1m to £25m.
Communications Edge publishes £3,000–£7,000 a month, or £750–£1,250 per day, and targets businesses between £500k and £20m turnover.
Those two sets of numbers sit on top of each other. Roughly a day a week of a genuinely senior marketer, in the UK, in 2026, costs a small business a few thousand pounds a month. Anyone quoting materially less is usually selling a freelance marketing manager with a director’s job title; anyone quoting materially more is usually selling an agency retainer with a director’s name on the front page.
The three engagement shapes, and what each one actually buys
Advisory, or light touch
A monthly session with the leadership team, a plan you can hold people to, and someone at the end of an email between times. At the low end of the range, a couple of days a month.
What it buys is judgement: which of the fifteen things you could do are the three that matter, whether the agency proposal in front of you is worth signing, whether your pricing is the real problem rather than your lead generation. What it does not buy is anyone to do the work. Advisory only pays for itself if you already have someone who executes well once pointed in the right direction.
Embedded, one day a week
The most common shape. The director is in your systems and your team meetings, holds the plan and the budget, briefs the agency, and reports to you like any other director.
The honest limit of one day a week is that it is one day. Strategy, quality control, managing suppliers and the reporting line all fit. Writing your emails, running your paid social and rebuilding your website do not. Hand a day a week a delivery workload and you get a stressed contractor and a plan that never gets written.
Embedded, two days or more
Here you are buying leadership plus real hands-on delivery, or leadership across a complex operation: multiple products and audiences, a rebrand, a merger, a membership body with a renewal cycle and an events programme pulling in different directions. That is the £4,000–£6,000 band.
A salary is not the cost of an employee
The usual comparison is “fractional at £3,000 a month versus a full-time marketing director’s salary”. It is wrong before it starts, because a salary is not what an employee costs, and in the UK the gap between the two widened in 2025 and has not narrowed since.
From 6 April 2025, the employer secondary Class 1 National Insurance rate rose to 15% from 13.8%, and the secondary threshold (the point at which you start paying it) fell to £5,000 a year from £9,100. The Employment Allowance rose at the same time, to £10,500 from £5,000, which softens the blow for eligible smaller employers, though it is a fixed offset, not a proportional one. Both changes remain in place for 2026–27: see the government’s rates and thresholds for employers and its 2026 to 2027 equivalent.
Take a hypothetical salary of £70,000, chosen to make the arithmetic legible rather than as a benchmark. Employer NI is 15% of the excess over £5,000: £9,750. Under the old rate and threshold it would have been 13.8% of the excess over £9,100, or £8,404.20. The same hire now costs roughly £1,350 a year more in employer NI alone, before pension contributions, holiday, sick pay, equipment, recruitment fees and the salary itself.
Then the cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet: the risk of getting it wrong. A senior hire who is not right takes months to spot and months to exit. A fractional engagement takes a month’s notice, which is why you should refuse a twelve-month tie-in.
None of which makes fractional automatically cheaper. Two days a week at £6,000 a month is £72,000 a year for two-fifths of a person, and if you genuinely need five days of marketing leadership, a permanent director is the better buy. Fractional wins where the honest requirement is one or two days of seniority, and you cannot buy a fifth of a good director any other way.
The benchmark problem: what should we spend on marketing?
Be sceptical of the entire consulting industry here, ourselves included. There is no credible UK primary source establishing what percentage of revenue a small or medium business should spend on marketing. Not “5 to 10%”. Not “2 to 5% for B2B”. Trace any of them back and they dissolve into one agency blog quoting another. If a firm gives you a percentage-of-revenue rule for SMEs as established fact, they have made it up. Ask for the source before you ask for anything else.
What does exist is a large-enterprise benchmark, worth knowing precisely so you do not misuse it. The Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, published on 11 May 2026, puts marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, up from 7.7% in 2025, effectively flat. Read the sample before you read the number: 401 CMOs and marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe, surveyed between January and March 2026, the large majority at organisations with revenue above $1 billion. That is a benchmark for very large companies. It is not a target for a £3m business, and applying it to one would be arithmetic without meaning.
The UK numbers that are more use to a smaller business tell a split story. The IPA Bellwether Report for Q2 2026, published on 16 July 2026, found a net balance of +6.9% of UK companies revising marketing budgets upwards: 23.8% increased, 16.9% cut, 59.4% held flat. Cautious growth, with most firms standing still. Against that, the FSB’s Small Business Index for Q4 2025 recorded small business confidence at −71, the lowest since 2020, with 64% citing taxation as a cost pressure, a record high in that survey.
Budgets creeping up while confidence sits on the floor is exactly why fractional leadership has grown: senior judgement on a marketing budget, in a year when nobody wants to add a permanent salary.
When a fractional marketing director is the wrong answer
Three situations where we would tell you not to bother.
You need hands, not a head. If you know what to do and simply have nobody to do it, hiring a strategist is an expensive way to receive a plan you already have. Hire a marketing executive, a good freelancer or an agency instead. The test: ask five people on your leadership team what marketing should focus on next quarter. Same answer from all five, and you have a delivery problem, not a direction problem.
You are pre-product-market-fit. If you are still finding out who buys and why, marketing leadership cannot save you, and a plan built on an unproven proposition just spends money faster. That work belongs to the founders, in conversation with customers.
You cannot free up anyone’s time to work with them. This is the one that kills engagements. A fractional director needs access to you, your data, your sales team and your customers. Without a couple of hours a fortnight from you and someone internally to answer questions, the engagement produces documents rather than results, and you conclude, wrongly, that fractional does not work.
What to ask before you sign, and the red flags
Ask these five things:
- What will be different in 90 days, and how will we both know? A senior person can answer this in the first meeting, without a discovery phase.
- Who does the work you specify? You, our team, a freelancer, an agency? Settle that before the fee, or you will pay director rates for a brief nobody actions.
- What have you done for a business our size, and can I speak to them? Not a logo wall. A named client and a phone call.
- What do you need from us? The good ones answer clearly: this much of your time, access to these numbers, a decision-maker in the room.
- How does this end? Build capability and hand over, or stay indefinitely. Both can be legitimate. Vagueness is not.
And the red flags:
- No named client outcomes. Anyone who has genuinely led marketing at a senior level can tell you what changed, by how much, at a business they can name.
- A day rate with no defined deliverable. Buying days is not buying outcomes. The rate should attach to something you can point at.
- A twelve-month tie-in. The point of fractional is flexibility. A month’s notice after an initial three months is reasonable. A year is someone protecting their revenue at your expense.
- A percentage-of-revenue rule presented as fact. Ask for the source.
- Blurred lines between consultant and agency. If the recommendation is always work their own agency delivers, they are a salesperson with a strategy deck.
Where we fit, and what to do next
A note on our own model, since you are comparing. Ampus is two partners: Annie Tokatlian, a Chartered Marketer with fifteen years leading brand and growth for membership and cultural organisations, and Chris Bryce, a former trade body chief executive who has led organisations through major regulatory change. The effect is that a client can get senior marketing leadership and senior organisational change help in one engagement. That matters more often than you would think, because a fair number of marketing problems turn out, on inspection, to be operating model problems wearing a marketing hat.
Work out first whether your problem is direction or delivery. If it is delivery, do not hire a director. If it is direction, use the bands above, insist on a named outcome in 90 days, and refuse the twelve-month tie-in.
If you want a straight answer on which of the two you have, get in touch and ask. It usually takes one conversation.