Industry comparison

How does your agency compare?

Four numbers, and you will see where you sit against published UK agency benchmarks. The sources are listed at the bottom, along with what they do and do not tell you.

Read this before you read the results These are published industry ranges, not a survey distribution. That means they show you roughly where normal sits — not your exact percentile. Anyone presenting ranges like these as a precise ranking is overstating what the data supports.

Your numbers

People in the agency 12

Including founders and part-time, as full-time equivalent.

Retained clients 8

Clients on a recurring monthly arrangement.

Average monthly retainer £2,000

Across your recurring clients, ignoring one-off projects.

Gross margin 55%

Revenue less direct delivery cost, before overheads.

Net profit margin 12%

After everything, including owner salaries.

Revenue from your largest client 25%

The single biggest client as a share of total revenue.

Overall

—

Against the benchmarks

Context, without a benchmark

Recurring revenue—

Revenue per head—

Implied gross profit—

No published benchmark exists for these. The sources behind the comparison above report margins and retainer sizes, not revenue per head. Rather than invent a threshold and colour it green or red, these are shown as plain figures for you to judge. A tool that fabricates a benchmark is worse than one that admits it has none.

Where these figures come from, and what they cannot tell you

Sources. UK agency benchmark reporting and accountancy analysis of the sector, 2026, plus published agency pricing guidance.

Gross margin 50–70% is described as normal for service-led agencies.
Net margin 10–20% is described as healthy; 15–25% is typical of agencies positioned for growth or sale.
Retainers of £1,250–£3,500 a month are cited for core services, with larger programmes running well above that.
51.4% of agencies cite client budget pressure as a significant challenge.
A worked example in the same reporting shows 2.1x markup on direct people cost — £14,000 of people time billed as a £30,000 retainer.

What this cannot tell you. These are ranges reported across the industry, not a distribution we have sampled. So the marker shows you roughly where you sit relative to what is considered normal, and nothing more precise than that. Agency definitions of gross margin also vary considerably, which makes cross-agency comparison rougher than the tidy numbers suggest.

Client concentration has no published benchmark in the sources above. The thresholds used here are the conventional rules of thumb applied when valuing a business, and are flagged as such rather than dressed up as sector data.