Search this question and the top result is an agency page that gives one range in its opening paragraph, a different range in its table, and a third in its FAQ, none of them explained. That is not a pricing guide. It is a page built to rank for a question its author would rather not answer.
Here is the answer in three parts. How agencies structure a retainer, and who carries the risk under each model. What the market publishes, which is not much. And our own $2,400 a month retainer taken apart line by line, because an itemised number is the only kind you can compare.
- Agencies charge four ways: fixed retainer, percentage of ad spend, hourly, or performance. Each moves the risk somewhere different, and most agencies publish none of it.
- Our Grow retainer is $2,400 a month: $1,100 SEO and content, $650 paid search, $400 conversion optimisation, $250 AI search visibility. Reporting and a named strategist are included, not lines.
- Ad spend is never inside the retainer. It goes from your account to the platform at cost. A markup on it is a second, hidden retainer.
- What moves the number is a second market, more content or paid social, which make up the $5,800 Scale tier. Urgency and company size do not.
- Before signing, ask five things: ad spend at cost, setup fee, notice period, who does the work, and what leads the report.
The four ways agencies charge
None of these is dishonest in itself. The problem is that most agencies run one of them and publish none of it. Among the fifty top-listed agencies in our study, 78.6% published no prices at all.
What the market publishes
For SEO-only retainers, the entry tiers among agencies that publish one had a median of $2,200 a month in our study, from a small sample of four, with tiers up to $10,000 a month. WebFX publishes an SEO entry floor of $3,000 a month. For a full marketing retainer covering search, paid, conversion and reporting, published figures are rarer still, which is why the ranges that rank are so wide.
Hold those numbers loosely. A figure with nothing inside it cannot be compared with one that is itemised, and the point of what follows is that ours can be.
Our $2,400, line by line
Grow is $2,400 a month on a rolling thirty-day term. Four lines carry a price and three are included.
Add the four priced lines and you get $2,400. There is no line for account management, because the strategist is the account manager. There is no line for reporting, because reporting is how the work is judged rather than a service sold on top of it.
Every line above has a standalone price on the pricing page. That is the test of an itemised retainer: each part can be bought alone, so each part has to justify its number.
The full list, every plan and every line, is published here.What moves the number
$2,400 is the floor for a single-market business with one website. Three things move it, and each is a scope change rather than a negotiation.
- A second market. Selling into the UK from the UAE, or the US from the EU, is currency, VAT, hreflang, local search and local proof handled as one job. That is $1,400 a month on top of Grow.
- More content. Ten pieces a month instead of four, for a business with several distinct services, is $1,200 a month.
- Paid social and retargeting. $800 a month, with ad spend again at cost.
Those three together with Grow are the Scale retainer at $5,800 a month. What does not move the number is how large the business looks, how urgently it needs results, or anything discovered after the scope is written down.
The four pricing models and the five questions are our editorial description of how agency retainers are commonly structured, not survey data. The $2,200 median entry-tier SEO retainer (n=4), the $10,000 top tier and the 78.6% no-published-price figure are from our August 2026 study of 50 top-listed web design agencies, linked in the text. The $3,000 WebFX floor is from WebFX's own published pricing, captured 24 August 2026. The $2,400 Grow retainer and its four priced lines, the $5,800 Scale retainer and its three additional lines, and the $1,350 standalone SEO rate are our published prices, listed on the pricing page.
The fees to ask about before you sign
Retainer quotes are rarely wrong on the headline. They are wrong in the terms around it. Five questions settle most of it.
- Is ad spend billed at cost, or marked up? A markup is a second, hidden retainer.
- Is there a setup or onboarding fee? Ours is zero.
- What is the notice period, and is there an annual term? Ours is rolling thirty days.
- Who does the work day to day, and will I speak to them? Ask for the name.
- What leads the monthly report? If the answer is impressions or rankings, ask how those become money.
Our answers to all five are on the pricing page rather than in a call, which is the whole point of publishing them. The website cost guide does the same job for the one-time build, and the SEO cost piece does it for that line alone.