How Much Should a Truck Dealership Spend on Marketing in 2026?

If you run a franchised medium- or heavy-duty truck dealership, most “how much should a dealership spend on marketing” articles aren’t written for you. They’re built on car-store numbers (hundreds of units a month, a buyer who shops five lots, a TV budget), and they don’t translate to a business that retails a Class 8 truck at $178,775 to a fleet that’s bought from you before.

So here are the truck numbers, straight from the source: NADA’s ATD Data 2025, the annual financial profile of America’s 2,104 franchised medium- and heavy-duty truck dealerships.

The quick answer

The average truck dealership spent $122,655 on advertising in 2025. That’s about $10,221 a month, or roughly 0.2% of total sales.

The number to actually budget with is the per-unit one: $859 in advertising for every new truck retailed. Multiply that by the new trucks you plan to retail each month and you have a benchmark budget that scales with your store instead of an industry average that doesn’t.

That’s the benchmark, not the target. Where you should land depends on your markets, your mix of new, used and service, and, most of all, whether you can tell which dollars are producing deals.

What truck dealers actually spend

Three years of ATD Data, for the average franchised medium- and heavy-duty dealership:

	2023	2024	2025
Advertising per dealership	$86,167	$105,963	$122,655
Advertising per new truck retailed	$512	$584	$859
Advertising as % of total sales	0.1%	0.2%	0.2%
New Class 8 trucks sold per store	168	182	143
Average new Class 8 selling price	$158,993	$164,178	$178,775

Two things jump out.

Spend is up 42% in two years. Dealers put $86,167 into advertising in 2023 and $122,655 in 2025.

Cost per truck is up 68%. That’s the bigger story, and it’s not only because dealers spent more. The average store sold 143 new Class 8 trucks in 2025, down from 182 the year before, as industry medium- and heavy-duty sales fell 13.6% to 416,467 trucks. More advertising spread across fewer trucks is how $512 a truck became $859.

What that $859 costs you per truck

A per-unit number only means something next to what the unit earns. For the average new Class 8 truck retailed in 2025, ATD Data reports:

• $10,803 in retail gross profit
• $4,178 in retail net profit

So the $859 of advertising behind each new truck is about 8% of its gross and about 21% of its net. Put another way: roughly one dollar in every five a dealer netted on a new truck went back out as advertising.

That’s the math that makes wasted spend expensive in this business. A car store losing a few hundred dollars a unit to bad targeting is spreading it across a thousand units. A truck store is spreading it across 143.

And used trucks?

The average truck dealership also sold 44 used Class 8 trucks in 2025. They’re a harder sell on paper: a used Class 8 averaged $64,163 at retail with $5,318 of gross and, after expenses, a net loss of $2,690 per truck retailed.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t market them. Used trucks bring in trade cycles, new customers and service work. It means used-truck marketing has to be the most precise money you spend: spec-driven units on the channels where those buyers actually shop, not a blanket budget.

It also changes how you should read the benchmark. NADA’s $859 divides the whole advertising budget (new, used, service and parts) by new trucks only. Spread the same $122,655 across every Class 8 truck the average store sold (143 new + 44 used = 187), and it comes to about $656 per truck sold. If your store moves more used trucks than average, that’s the more useful number to budget from, and it’s the one the calculator below uses.

How that compares to car dealerships

For context, NADA’s companion report on franchised new-car dealerships puts 2025 car-store advertising at $586,246 per dealership and $739 per new vehicle sold, on an average new vehicle price of $48,205.

	Truck dealership	Car dealership
Advertising per store (2025)	$122,655	$586,246
Advertising per new unit	$859	$739
Average new unit price	$178,775 (Class 8)	$48,205
Advertising as % of sales	~0.2%	~0.8%

Truck dealers spend about a fifth of what a car store spends, but more per unit, on a unit that costs nearly four times as much. That’s what a relationship-driven, repeat, business-to-business sale looks like: fewer buyers, bigger tickets, and a lot less broadcast.

One more difference worth knowing: NADA breaks car-store spend down by channel (about three-quarters of it is now digital). ATD Data doesn’t break truck-dealer advertising down by channel, so anyone quoting you a “truck dealer channel split” is estimating, and that includes our recommendations below.

Where a truck dealer’s budget should go

This part is our recommendation, not a benchmark. It’s the order we’d fund things in for a single-point or small-group medium- and heavy-duty dealer, based on how commercial truck buyers actually find and choose a dealer.

1. Tracking first. Call tracking on every number and lead source captured in the CRM. If you can’t tie a call from a fleet manager back to the page or ad that produced it, every decision below is a guess. Reporting that ties spend to deals costs less than the first month of wasted spend it prevents.
2. Google Business Profile for every location: sales, service and parts. Fleet managers and owner-operators searching “truck repair near me” or “Freightliner parts near me” are ready to spend today. A complete, active profile for each rooftop is the cheapest high-intent visibility you can buy.
3. Spec-level inventory and service pages on your own site. Buyers search by configuration: make, model, sleeper, axle, engine. Indexed pages for your core truck lines and your service capability are how you win the buyer choosing a dealer, not just a unit. That’s what dealership SEO is for, and why it compounds.
4. Google Ads on spec, model and service searches. Tight, buyer-intent campaigns (not broad match) on the trucks you stock and the service you sell. Avoid the usual Google Ads mistakes and this is the fastest dollar-to-lead channel you have.
5. Listing sites for the inventory that needs them. TruckPaper and Commercial Truck Trader still earn their keep for spec-driven used units with a national buyer pool. Just know the leads are shared. We break down which inventory belongs on listing sites and which belongs on your own site.
6. Fleet retention. Email, service reminders and account follow-up for the fleets you already sell to. The cheapest truck you’ll ever sell is the next one to a customer who already bought from you.

Don’t forget service and parts. In 2025, service, parts and body shop made up 36.5% of the average truck dealership’s sales and 77.5% of its gross profit. A marketing budget that only pushes new trucks is aimed at the department that produces about a fifth of the gross.

A budget by store size

At the 2025 benchmark of $859 per new truck retailed, here’s where the math lands:

New trucks retailed per month	Monthly budget	Annual budget
4	$3,436	$41,232
8	$6,872	$82,464
12 (about the 2025 average store)	$10,308	$123,696
20	$17,180	$206,160
30	$25,770	$309,240

Treat these as a starting line. A store opening a new market, launching a service department push, or going after new fleet accounts should expect to run above it for a while. A store with a strong repeat fleet base and a good referral engine can run below it.

Run your own numbers

Plug in the new and used trucks you retail in a month and, if you know it, what you spend on marketing today. The calculator budgets at about $656 per truck sold (the 2025 average store’s advertising spread across its new and used Class 8 sales), so used volume counts too.

Are you over- or under-spending?

The benchmark tells you where the average store sits. These tell you whether your spend is working:

• Your cost per new truck is climbing but your units aren’t. You’re paying more to sell the same trucks. That’s usually a targeting or channel-mix problem, not a budget problem.
• Most of your leads come from listing sites. Every one of those buyers is looking at comparable trucks from other dealers at the same time. That dependency gets more expensive every renewal.
• Your service bays have open hours. Service and parts carry most of the gross. If the bays aren’t full, the marketing isn’t reaching the people who already own trucks.
• You can’t say which campaign produced last month’s deals. Then you can’t know whether you’re over- or under-spending, only that you’re spending.

Plan for 2026 now

NADA’s chief economist expects commercial truck sales in 2026 to come in slightly above 2025, with some fleets buying ahead of the cost increases tied to EPA 2027 regulations. If that pre-buy shows up, the dealers who are already visible for the specs and models fleets are searching will get the first call, and the ones scrambling to turn on campaigns that quarter will pay the most per lead.

The right truck dealership marketing budget isn’t a single number. It’s the benchmark ($859 per new truck, or about $656 per truck sold once you count used) adjusted for your market, pointed at the channels that produce trucks and service work, and measured closely enough that you know which dollars to move next month.

Sources: NADA, ATD Data 2025: Annual Financial Profile of America’s Franchised New-Truck Dealerships; NADA, NADA Data 2025: Annual Financial Profile of America’s Franchised New-Car Dealerships. Percentages marked “about” are our calculations from those reports.