Most fractional CMO engagements cost between $5,000 and $15,000 per month for one to two days of senior leadership per week. Hourly arrangements typically run $200 to $375 per hour, and a full-time CMO in South Florida costs $250,000 to $400,000 a year once salary, bonus and benefits are counted. That is the short answer. The better question is what each of those numbers actually buys, because that is where owners overpay or underhire.
The three pricing models you will actually see
Monthly retainer. The standard. A fixed fee for a defined leadership scope, usually one to two days per week. Typical range: $5,000 to $15,000 per month. This is the model that fits most established service businesses between $1M and $20M in revenue.
Day or hourly rate. $200 to $375 per hour, or $1,500 to $3,000 per day. Fits diagnostics, board-level advisory or a defined sprint. It gets expensive fast if what you really need is continuity.
Project or sprint pricing. A fixed price for a defined outcome: a positioning overhaul, a booking system rebuild, a launch. Typically $10,000 to $50,000 depending on depth. Good when the problem is contained. Wrong when the problem is that nobody owns growth.
What drives the number up or down
- Days per week. The single biggest factor. Two days a week costs roughly double one.
- Strategy only, or strategy plus execution. A CMO who also directs your paid media, CRM and reporting costs more and replaces more.
- Team and vendor stack. Directing an in-house marketer and three vendors is a different job than being the whole department.
- Track record. Operators who have built revenue at scale price above generalists, and are usually cheaper per result.
The comparison that matters: cost per decision, not cost per month
A full-time CMO at $300,000 a year makes sense when there is 40+ hours a week of executive marketing work. In most service businesses under $20M, there is not. There are 8 to 15 hours a week of decisions that genuinely require executive judgment, sitting on top of execution that should be systematized. Paying full-time compensation for a part-time volume of decisions is the most expensive mistake in the hiring column. The fractional model exists because the decision load and the salary stopped matching.
The agency comparison runs the other way. Agencies are priced like execution because that is what they are. If nobody senior is directing them, you are paying execution prices for strategy nobody is doing. I wrote a full breakdown of that trade-off in fractional CMO vs marketing agency vs in-house.
What a good engagement returns
Priced correctly, a fractional CMO is not a cost line. In my own client work: a med spa added 27 bookings in 21 days while cutting acquisition cost by 34 percent. A pilates studio lifted bookings 18 percent in 30 days. An e-commerce brand raised average order value 26 percent in under four weeks. The pattern is the same: the money was already being spent, it was just reporting to no one.
Questions to ask before you sign
- What revenue outcome do you own in the first 90 days, and how will we measure it?
- What do you direct versus what do you do? Who executes?
- What happens to my existing agency and tools?
- What does the reporting look like, and will I understand it without translation?
The bottom line
Expect $5,000 to $15,000 per month for real senior leadership, scoped to your business. Under $3,000, you are usually buying consulting hours, not ownership of an outcome. If you want to know what the right scope looks like for your business, a 15-minute conversation is where it starts.
