How much a fractional CMO costs in the UK

If you are asking how much a fractional CMO costs, you have probably found that very few of them tell you. Most pages say “it depends” and ask you to book a call. I put my prices on my website, so I thought I would share what I know about the UK market and where I sit in it.

How much does a fractional CMO cost in the UK?

A fractional CMO in the UK usually costs between about £1,800 and £8,000 a month, depending on the size of your company and how much of their week you get. Smaller companies tend to pay a monthly retainer, while some fractional CMOs charge a day rate instead.

The most useful breakdown I found is a 2026 UK pricing guide from Leadership Services, because it splits retainers by company revenue:

• £1m to £5m revenue: £1,795 to £4,500 a month, for one or two days a week
• £5m to £15m revenue: £4,500 to £8,000 a month, for two or three days a week
• £15m to £50m revenue: £8,000 to £15,000 a month, for three or four days a week

One caveat is worth knowing. Nearly every pricing guide is written by someone who sells the service, and that includes this one and this post. Treat the numbers as a fair picture of the market rather than an official rate card.

What is a typical fractional CMO day rate in the UK?

The same guide puts UK fractional CMO day rates between £750 and £1,400. For small and growing companies, the average sits at about £935 to £1,020 a day. It also says London engagements cost 20% to 40% more than the same experience elsewhere in the UK.

Day rates are easy to compare, and that is why people search for them. They also have a problem. A day rate tells you what a day costs, but it does not tell you what gets done in that day. Two people on the same rate can deliver very different amounts of work.

How does that compare with a Head of Growth salary in the UK?

Salary.com puts the median Head of Growth salary in the UK at £74,138 a year. On top of that, you pay employer National Insurance at 15% on everything above £5,000, according to the government’s rates for 2026 to 2027. That adds about £10,400, so the total is about £84,500 a year, or around £7,000 a month.

That figure still leaves out the pension, a recruiter’s fee if you use one, a laptop and the months it takes to hire. It also leaves out the risk of a senior hire who turns out to be the wrong fit.

For comparison, a year of my Growth Lead package costs £36,000 and a year of Growth Team costs £54,000. The cash difference is real, but it is only half the picture. A full-time hire gives you a whole person every day, and a fractional lead gives you a share of their week. The honest question is whether your company needs a whole person yet.

What I charge, and why there is no day rate

These are my prices, and they are the same ones you will find on my services page:

• Growth Lead, £3,000 a month. For companies that already have a marketer, a designer or a developer. I lead growth with your team.
• Growth Team, £4,500 a month. For founder-led companies with nobody else in marketing. I run growth for you and take on the execution myself.
• Growth Foundations, from £9,000. A fixed project over six to ten weeks, where I build your analytics, CRM and automation setup and hand it over to your team.

Both monthly packages start with a six-month term and a 30-day get-out. If it is clearly not working in the first month, either of us can stop, and you pay for that month only. If you come to a monthly package from Foundations, you get 15% off for as long as you stay.

I do not charge by the hour or by the day. Each package lists exactly what I deliver, and you pay for that work. If something takes me longer than I planned, that is my problem and not yours. It also means we never spend a weekly session arguing about timesheets.

I explain the difference between the two monthly packages in more detail in my post on what a fractional Head of Growth does. The short version is that they are two situations rather than two tiers. If you have a team, I lead it. If you do not, I become it.

What makes the cost go up

The package price covers my work. A few other costs sit outside it, and you should plan for them from the start:

• Ad spend. You pay the platforms directly, so you always see what is being spent.
• Software subscriptions. Tools like HubSpot or Mixpanel are billed to you, and I help you choose plans that fit your size.
• Specialist fees. When a channel needs a specialist, I bring in someone from my network and manage them for you. They quote separately.
• Larger design or development projects. These are scoped and priced on their own.

At Augmentive, I started by running Google Ads myself. After a couple of months I told the founder that the account needed a paid ads specialist more than it needed more of my time. Bringing one in added a fee, and it also freed me up for the analytics, email and testing work where I added the most.

When a fractional CMO is worth the money, and when it is not

In my experience, a fractional lead is worth paying for when:

• You have paying customers and at least one channel that works
• Nobody senior owns the growth numbers or the plan behind them
• There is not yet enough senior work for a full-time hire
• You want someone who will do the work as well as plan it

It is probably not worth it when:

• You do not have a product people use yet. At that stage the founder is the best growth person, and the money is better spent on the product.
• You need someone in the office five days a week. Then a full-time hire is the better deal, and I am happy to help you find one.
• You only need the setup built once. That is a fixed project, and I run it as Growth Foundations.

How we would start

The first step is a thirty-minute call. The prices are already on this page, so we can spend the call on your business instead of on money. If one of my packages fits, I send you a contract for what we agreed. If none of them fits, I will tell you that too.

If you want to see exactly what each package includes, have a look at my packages and prices, or book a call below. I will tell you honestly whether you need me, a full-time hire or nobody just yet.