CAC Benchmarks 2026: SaaS Ratios and Ad Costs by Industry

What Counts as a Good CAC in 2026?

There is no single good customer acquisition cost. A CAC figure means something only next to what the customer is worth, how quickly the spend comes back and how the figure was calculated. The headline rows below use different measures, named in each row: sales and marketing spend per dollar of new annual recurring revenue (ARR), payback months and lifetime value to CAC for SaaS; ad spend per closed-won deal for B2B paid media; ad-platform cost per acquisition for ecommerce; cost per lead for search ads; and each company’s own definition in its SEC filings.

For B2B SaaS, Benchmarkit’s annual survey reports acquisition efficiency several ways, each with its sample size. Its 2026 edition covers 342 B2B SaaS and AI-native software companies reporting calendar 2025 results. The median company spent $1.63 in sales and marketing to win $1 of new-customer ARR and needed 16 months of gross margin to earn that spend back. Median lifetime value was 4.1 times CAC, above the 3:1 ratio usually quoted as a minimum.

Paid-media figures measure something narrower: they leave out salaries and tools, and count only customers credited to ads. Triple Whale’s median Meta ads cost per acquisition for ecommerce brands was $38.99 in the year to July 2026, while Metadata’s B2B advertisers spent $31,939 in lead-generation ads for each closed-won deal their CRMs credited to those ads.

Blended vs Paid CAC: Definitions That Change the Number

Blended CAC divides all acquisition spend by all new customers, whatever brought them in. Paid CAC divides paid-channel spend by the customers those channels are credited with. Finance teams usually see the first and ad platforms report a version of the second. Neither is wrong, but they answer different questions: a paid figure looks cheaper when it leaves out salaries and tools or takes credit for customers who would have arrived anyway, and dearer when customers it helped win are credited to another channel.

Three more choices change the result: whether the denominator is new customers, new revenue or orders; whether salaries, commissions, agencies and software are loaded into the cost; and whether revenue from existing customers is counted. SaaS benchmarks divide by new ARR instead of the customer count, so a ratio such as $1.63 is not inflated simply because each deal is larger, although Benchmarkit still finds it rising with contract value (see the next section). The definitions behind the figures on this page are below.

When you report CAC internally, state the numerator, the denominator and the period beside the figure, and keep the definition fixed from quarter to quarter. Otherwise a change of definition can look like a change in performance.

SaaS CAC by Deal Size and Company Size

In its 2025 edition, Benchmarkit called annual contract value (ACV) the company attribute most correlated with its CAC metrics. In calendar 2025, companies selling below $5,000 a year recovered CAC in a median 11 months and spent $1.17 in sales and marketing per $1 of new-customer ARR. At $50,000 to $100,000 ACV, median payback was 22 months and the new-customer ratio $2.81, which Benchmarkit puts down to long cycles, field sales costs and procurement complexity.

The relationship is not a straight line. In the 2025 survey of calendar 2024 results, deals above $250,000 ACV paid back in a median 18 months, faster than the $100,000 to $250,000 band at 24 months. The middle half of each band, shown in brackets, overlaps widely with its neighbours, so treat your band as a starting point rather than a target.

Company size shows less clearly. Companies under $5 million ARR had the highest median new-customer CAC ratio ($1.76), barely above the $1.75 of companies with $5 million to $20 million ARR, and companies above $100 million ARR the highest median lifetime value to CAC (8.0x).

SaaS CAC by Go-to-Market Motion and Growth

Hybrid companies, which combine self-serve sign-up with a sales team, had a lower median blended CAC ratio than sales-led companies in 2025 ($0.86 against $1.46) and the highest lifetime value to CAC of the three motions (6.8x). Benchmarkit says the usual driver is lower sales cost for the first purchase, followed by an expansion motion run by marketing and customer success.

Vertical SaaS, built for one industry, costs more to acquire: a median $2.22 per $1 of new-customer ARR and 18 months of payback, against $1.62 and 14 months for horizontal software. It also earns more over the customer’s life, at 5.6 times CAC against 4.1 times. This vertical-versus-horizontal split is the closest a sourced SaaS benchmark comes to CAC by industry.

Faster growth did not come from overspending on acquisition in this sample. Companies growing more than 50% a year had the shortest median payback of any growth band, at 10 months, and a new-customer ratio of $1.40, level with companies growing 31% to 50%.

CAC Payback and LTV:CAC Trends

SaaS acquisition efficiency improved in 2025 after worsening in 2024. Benchmarkit’s median payback went from 14 months in 2023 to 18 in 2024 and back to 16 in 2025, and the new-customer CAC ratio fell from $2.00 to $1.63. Benchmarkit credits go-to-market rationalisation rather than higher spending, and notes that companies in its sample reduced sales and marketing and R&D spending relative to revenue during the year.

Public company figures are not like for like. In Benchmarkit’s 2025 survey, 77 public SaaS companies had a median payback of 34 months against 18 for private respondents, because public payback is usually calculated on net new ARR after churn and down-sell, while private companies use new-customer ARR.

Lifetime value to CAC rose to a median 4.1x in 2025, from 3.6x to 3.7x in each of the three previous years. For the lifetime-value side of these ratios, including retention, see our customer lifetime value benchmarks.

B2B Paid Media: Cost per Lead vs Cost per Customer

Cost per lead is the figure most ad dashboards show, but it says little about CAC. Metadata’s 2026 benchmark covers 153 B2B advertisers and $57.6 million of 2025 ad spend, and for advertisers whose CRM is connected it follows ad-generated leads through to closed-won deals. A LinkedIn lead cost $202, spend-weighted; each customer won from LinkedIn lead-generation spend cost $58,572.

The cheapest lead is not always the cheapest customer. Across all channels, the cold prospecting segment Metadata labels “native” paid $176 per lead, less than retargeting at $196, yet each customer cost $62,392 against $27,087 from retargeting. Target company size matters more at the customer stage than at the lead stage: on LinkedIn, campaigns aimed at companies with 51 to 200 employees paid $144 per lead and about $31,000 per customer, while those aimed at companies with 1,001 to 5,000 employees paid $211 per lead and about $78,000 per customer.

These are media costs only, from one platform’s customers, about two-thirds of them B2B technology companies. Add sales and marketing salaries and tools before comparing them with a fully loaded CAC. For platform detail, see our LinkedIn Ads benchmarks; for campaign planning, see our paid media services.

Acquisition Cost by Industry: What the Data Supports

We found no publisher that states its sample and method and releases fully loaded CAC by industry. The tables that circulate under that name are mostly one agency’s client averages, with no sample size and a fixed weighting towards the agency’s own services, or have no source at all (see the checks below). What does exist by industry is paid-media acquisition cost: cost per acquisition for ecommerce categories and cost per lead for service businesses.

Triple Whale publishes medians from more than 40,000 ecommerce brands that use its analytics. On Meta, the median cost per acquisition ran from $26.80 for e-learning and online courses to $51.86 for electronics and for medical devices between August 2025 and July 2026, and rose year on year in 14 of 17 categories. Google Ads CPA was lower overall at $28.14, from $20.97 for books and music to $39.72 for electronics.

Triple Whale itself notes that CAC includes all acquisition spend, not just ad costs, so treat these figures as the paid-media part of ecommerce CAC. For click, impression and conversion data behind them, see our Facebook ads benchmarks and Google Ads benchmarks.

Search Cost per Lead by Industry

For service businesses, the nearest sourced industry figure is cost per lead from search ads. WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2026 benchmarks cover 13,474 US search campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads from April 2025 to March 2026, reported as medians. Cost per lead ran from $26.84 for arts and entertainment to $131.63 for attorneys and legal services. The overall figure of $66.69 was down from $70.11 in the 2025 edition, the first fall WordStream has measured in five years.

A lead is not a customer. To turn these figures into CAC, divide by your own lead-to-customer rate and add the sales and marketing costs that sit outside the ad account; our conversion rate benchmarks cover the conversion side. Alphabet’s own disclosures show the price of a search click still rising, but more slowly: Search cost per click rose 7% in 2025 and 3% in the second quarter of 2026.

What Companies Report in Their Filings

A handful of listed companies report CAC or a payback period, each on its own definition. They are not benchmarks for their industries, but they show what disclosed acquisition costs look like in consumer finance, insurance distribution, telehealth, subscription publishing, fashion rental and retail energy.

Two consumer finance companies report CAC in dollars. Dave, a banking app, reported about $19 per new member in 2025, with payback under four months, and $19 again in the second quarter of 2026. Oportun, a lender whose CAC includes its telesales and retail operations, reported $117 per loan or card in 2025, counting returning borrowers as well as new ones. Hims & Hers says its payback, measured on online gross profit, has run at about 6 or 7 months for four years, against a target of under one year. Rent the Runway reports cohort ratios instead: its fiscal 2025 cohort had returned 0.3 times its CAC after six months, while its fiscal 2021 cohort recovered CAC between six and twelve months.

Check the definitions in the Blended vs Paid CAC section before comparing these. MarketWise loads salaries and commissions into CAC, Rent the Runway excludes marketing staff, and SelectQuote’s multiple counts only the direct cost of leads.

Measurement Changes Behind Platform CPA

Ad-platform CPA depends on which conversions the platform can see. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, released with iOS 14.5 in April 2021, requires apps to ask permission before tracking users across other companies’ apps and websites, and Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020. Chrome has not followed: in April 2025 Google said it would keep users’ existing cookie choice and not introduce a new prompt.

This is one reason platform CPA and CRM-based cost per customer measure different things: the platform counts the conversions it can attribute to its own ads, while the CRM counts the deals or orders it records. Reconcile the two before treating either as CAC. Our guide to AI attribution modelling covers multi-touch approaches.

Widely Quoted CAC Figures, Checked

Several CAC benchmarks circulate without a source, or with a source that measures something else. Each one below is checked against the publisher’s own page.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the sources below.