Average Customer Acquisition Cost by Industry

The average customer acquisition cost depends almost entirely on who you are asking about. Consumer ecommerce brands acquire customers for around $64 to $68. B2B SaaS averages $239. Legal services runs near $749, and education crosses $1,100. Those are the combined figures published by First Page Sage from agency client data, updated January 2026 for B2B and July 2025 for B2C, and the spread across them is the most useful thing about the whole dataset.

This guide gives you the published numbers by industry, splits them into organic and paid, and then explains something most benchmark posts skip: why the same industry gets quoted at three different CAC figures depending on which table someone copied.

Average CAC by industry, B2C

These figures come from First Page Sage's B2C report, compiled from 103 agency clients over 2021 to 2025 and last updated July 2025. Organic covers SEO and organic social; paid covers PPC, search, and paid social.

Average CAC by industry, B2B

The B2B report covers 29 industries and was updated January 2026. It publishes three figures per industry: organic, inorganic (paid), and a combined average weighted across both.

Why the same industry gets quoted at $64, $86, and $274

Search for ecommerce CAC and you will find all three of those numbers presented as fact, often on pages published the same month. They are not contradictions and none of them is wrong. They come from three different tables.

$64 is the B2C organic figure. $86 is the B2B combined figure. $274 comes from a separate SaaS-specific table in the same B2B report, which covers 22 software categories and measures ecommerce software vendors, not ecommerce stores. A page that copies one row without the column header or the table it belongs to produces a number that is technically accurate and practically useless.

This matters more than it sounds. If you benchmark a DTC brand's $95 CAC against the $274 figure, you conclude you are doing brilliantly when you are merely average. The habit worth building is to check three things before you trust any CAC benchmark: which report it came from, whether it is organic, paid, or blended, and what date it carries.

What is a good customer acquisition cost?

A good customer acquisition cost is one that produces an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1, meaning a customer returns three dollars of gross-margin lifetime value for every dollar you spent winning them. The absolute figure is meaningless on its own. A $1,400 CAC is healthy for enterprise software with a six-figure contract value and ruinous for a store selling $40 orders.

Below 1:1 every customer loses money. Between 1:1 and 3:1 the payback is slow enough to strain working capital. Above 5:1 is usually a sign of underspending rather than excellence, because it suggests profitable demand is sitting unclaimed. Pair the ratio with CAC payback period, since a strong ratio spread over four years is still a cash-flow problem, and read the full breakdown of the LTV:CAC ratio for how to set your own floor.

Why is organic CAC lower than paid CAC?

Organic CAC is lower in almost every industry in the dataset because the cost structures are different in kind. Organic channels carry a largely fixed cost, a content team and time, that keeps producing visitors after the spending stops. Paid channels charge again for every single visitor, and the price per visitor rises as more advertisers enter the same auction.

The gap widens exactly where competition is fiercest. Legal services runs $189 organic against $457 paid in B2C, and $584 against $1,245 in B2B. Education shows the widest B2B spread at $862 organic versus $1,985 paid. In a handful of categories the relationship inverts, notably B2B ecommerce at $87 organic against $81 paid and pharmaceutical at $196 against $160, which typically indicates a market where organic search competition is heavier than auction competition.

The practical read is not "stop paying for ads". It is that paid CAC is the number under most pressure over time, so a business whose entire acquisition sits in paid channels has a rising cost base by default. That is also why the fastest lever on CAC is rarely the ad account itself: lifting the conversion rate on the page the ad points at reduces cost per customer without touching the bid, which is why a disciplined conversion rate audit of your landing copy and CTA usually pays back faster than another round of creative testing.

How to compare your CAC to a benchmark honestly

Most benchmark comparisons fail on definitions rather than data. Before you place yourself against any of the tables above, settle four questions and keep the answers fixed:

• Blended or paid? Blended CAC divides all acquisition spend by all new customers. Paid CAC counts only paid media and the customers it produced. Comparing your blended figure against someone else's paid figure will always flatter you. The worked examples are in our guide to calculating blended CAC.
• Do salaries count? They should. Marketing and sales payroll, commissions, and tooling belong in acquisition cost. Excluding them is the single most common reason a reported CAC looks better than reality.
• Which period? Spend and new customers have to cover the same window, or you are dividing one quarter's costs by another quarter's results.
• Customers or conversions? CAC counts paying customers. Cost per acquisition often counts leads, trials, or signups, and is always the smaller number.

Once those are settled, run your own figure through the customer acquisition cost calculator, which returns CAC and the LTV:CAC ratio together so you are reading the benchmark in context rather than in isolation.

Why measured CAC drifts even when nothing changes

Teams running several ad platforms often find their calculated CAC moving month to month without any real change in performance. The usual cause is attribution overlap rather than marketing. Google Ads books conversions to the click date and allows windows up to 90 days, Meta offers 1, 7, or 28 day click windows, and TikTok caps at 7 days. Add up the customers each platform claims and the total exceeds the number of people who actually bought, which pushes your calculated CAC below the truth.

Dividing total acquisition spend by the customers your billing system actually recorded avoids the problem entirely, because real customers cannot be double counted. That is the same reasoning behind blended ROAS, and the reason platform-reported and store-reported figures never quite agree. If your CAC is coming out higher than the benchmark for your industry, the levers worth pulling first are laid out in reducing customer acquisition cost.

The short version

Use the tables as orientation, not as targets. Find your industry, match the column to how you actually calculate the number, note the report date, and then judge the result against your own lifetime value rather than against someone else's business. A CAC that clears 3:1 against your LTV is a good CAC whether it reads $64 or $1,143.