Social media management pricing: what the market actually charges

The bands, before the caveats

Across North America, quotes for ongoing social media management sit between roughly $300 and $8,000 a month. WebFX, one of the few agencies that publishes a rate page rather than a contact form, puts the working range at $500 to $5,000 a month, with hourly work at $35 to $150 and per-post pricing at $40 to $150. Their own service starts at $3,000. That page is worth opening, because most of the market won't show you a number at all.

Almost every quote you'll receive falls in one of five bands, and the band tells you more about who is doing the work than the deliverable list does.

These are market observations from what providers publish and what owners forward to us, not our prices. Ours are further down and on the pricing page, where they've always been.

The four options, priced for Canada

Every quote you get is one of four arrangements wearing different words. Here is what each actually costs a Canadian owner.

A freelancer, roughly $500 to $1,500 a month. A few posts a week, invoiced monthly, no employer costs at all. The invoice is the entire price, which is why this comparison looks so lopsided until you get to availability. You're sharing them with five other clients, and one person is rarely strong at writing, design, video editing and reading analytics. When they get busy or move on, the feed goes quiet the same week.

An in-house hire, and this is where owners guess wrong. Job Bank publishes what these roles actually pay. A social media coordinator earns a median of $35.58 an hour nationally, with the low end at $20.50 — call it $42,600 to $74,000 a year full-time. A social media manager is classified as a management occupation and sits far higher, at a $55.29 median, which is about $115,000. Then add the employer's share. On a $55,000 salary, CPP at 5.95 percent above the $3,500 exemption is about $3,060 and EI at 1.4 times the employee premium is about $1,255, using the CRA's 2026 rates. Vacation pay is a further 4 percent of wages in Ontario. Software, a laptop and a camera come out of the same budget. A $55,000 hire lands near $5,300 a month all in, and about fifty weeks of output. The full arithmetic is here. American owners swap those two payroll lines for the employer half of FICA, 6.2 percent for Social Security plus 1.45 percent for Medicare, then add state unemployment insurance and health coverage — and health coverage is the line that makes the rest look like rounding.

An agency retainer, commonly $1,500 to $5,000 a month. A strategist, a designer and a writer touch the account, which is genuinely different from one person doing all three. The trade-off is attention: a small account gets junior attention at a big shop, and anything outside the scope list becomes a change order.

A managed service. A fixed monthly fee for a defined scope, produced by a team rather than a person. No employer costs, no hiring risk, and the work continues when somebody is away. You are one of several clients, and nobody is standing in your lobby at 4pm with a camera.

What actually changes as the price goes up

Owners assume they're buying more posts. Post count barely moves between $500 and $3,000. It's the other five things that change.

• Video. Edited short-form is the single biggest cost line in this whole category. A properly cut 30-second reel takes hours, not minutes, which is why the $400 tier hands you stills
• Who touches the account. At the low end, one generalist writes, designs and schedules. Higher up, a writer writes and an editor edits, and the work looks like it
• Strategy versus output. Cheap plans produce. Expensive plans decide what to produce, then produce it
• Response time. Two weeks for a change request versus two days is a staffing decision, and staffing is what you're paying for
• Measurement. Under $1,000 you often get a screenshot of the follower count. Above it you should get reach, saves, clicks and where the bookings came from

A scope matrix you can hold a proposal against

Print this, then read the quote in your inbox against it. The gaps are where the surprises live.

What cheap actually buys you

A $300 plan isn't a scam. It's a narrow product, sold honestly by people running volume, and for some businesses it's exactly right. You get a presence: the account stays alive, the hours are current, something goes up on Tuesday.

Here's what usually isn't in it. No video worth the name. Captions written from a prompt with your business name dropped in. A calendar shared across many clients, so your barbershop and a barbershop two neighbourhoods over get versions of the same post. No one answering DMs. No one noticing that the post about the new service got triple the saves.

If a presence is the job, buy the presence and spend the rest on something else. Owners get burned when they buy $300 of presence while expecting $3,000 of demand.

Retainer, per post, or a slice of your ad budget?

Four billing shapes are common, and each one quietly changes how the work gets done.

A monthly retainer is the default. It buys a defined scope every month and it's the easiest to budget, though it can drift into autopilot if nobody reviews the scope twice a year. Per-post pricing runs $40 to $150 on WebFX's published rates, depending on whether video is involved. It's honest and easy to audit, and it pushes both sides toward volume rather than results. Hourly billing suits one-off projects and punishes you for asking questions.

The fourth shape deserves its own paragraph. Paid social and search management is commonly billed as a percentage of what you spend — 10 to 20 percent of ad spend is the standard, usually with a monthly minimum underneath it. Read that arrangement carefully. It pays your provider more when your budget goes up, whatever happens to your bookings. If you accept it, pair it with a number that matters to you and review it quarterly. We price ads as a flat fee for exactly this reason.

Turn the retainer back into hours

This is the single most useful thing you can do with a proposal, and it takes a minute.

Ask how many hours a month your account gets, and who those hours belong to. A $1,200 retainer where a writer and an editor spend twelve hours between them is $100 an hour of skilled attention, which is a fair market price. The same $1,200 where one generalist spends four hours is $300 an hour, and you're paying agency rates for template work.

Providers who have thought about their own business answer this in a sentence. Providers who haven't will describe a team, then a process, then a philosophy, and never land on a number. That evasion is the answer. You don't need the hours to be high — a well-run production line can do more in eight hours than a scattered one does in twenty — but you do need someone willing to say what you're buying.

The costs that live outside the retainer

Almost every quote excludes these, and almost every quote mentions them in a place you'll skim past.

• Ad spend, which goes to Meta or Google, not your provider
• Photo and video shoot days, quoted per day and rarely included below $3,000 a month
• Stock imagery, music licensing and design tool seats
• Boosting posts, which some providers bill as a separate service
• Extra revisions past the number in the contract
• Landing pages, email tools and any automation that follows up on a lead
• The raw files and the design templates, which you may or may not own when you leave

There's a one-line way to surface all of it: ask for a written list of everything that could appear on an invoice but isn't in the retainer. A provider who has run this business for a while has that list already, because they've had the awkward conversation before. A provider who improvises an answer is telling you the awkward conversation is still ahead, and it will happen in month three with a number attached.

Contract length and who owns what

Twelve-month lock-ins are still normal in this category. Month-to-month is worth a small premium the first time you work with someone, and a provider confident in month four doesn't need month one to be a signature.

Ownership is the question owners ask too late. Get all of this in writing before you sign, not when you're leaving:

• The ad accounts are yours, with the provider added as a user. If they own the account, your campaign history and your audience data leave with them and the next team starts from zero
• The social accounts and the domain are registered to your business, not to somebody's personal email
• The finished content and the source files — the project files, not just the exported JPEGs
• The website, hosting and content, transferable on request
• Notice period, and what the last month looks like

Ask about the raw files before you sign, not after. It's the cheapest question you'll ever ask.

How to compare two quotes that look identical

Two providers quote $1,200. One is a bargain and one is a waste, and the proposal won't tell you which. Six questions will.

• How many finished, edited videos per month? Get a number, not "video content included"
• Who writes the captions, and can I see three they wrote for another client this month?
• How long from my request to a first draft?
• How many revisions before it costs extra?
• Who approves before it publishes, and how do I see it?
• What's the contract term, and what happens to the files if I leave?

Then ask for samples made for a business like yours. Portfolios show the best month of the best client. A sample made for you shows what they'd actually send. The longer list of questions covers the money and exit terms in more detail.

Where our line sits

We publish the numbers because comparison shopping is the whole point of a post like this one.

• Organic Growth, $1,000/mo CAD. Sixteen designed posts, five reels, five search-built blog articles and one newsletter a month, your website built and edited on request, a monthly strategy call and a monthly report
• What else is in that line. Branding and a brand kit you keep, local SEO and your Google Business Profile, and review management
• What is not. Landing pages and paid reach are Paid Growth at $1,000 a month, with the ad budget separate, paid by you to the platform. Automated lead follow-up is Automation, from $1,500 to build then $500 a month. B2B Sales is $2,000 to set up then $1,000 a month. Each line is bought on its own and taking more earns no discount

That lands us between the freelancer band and the small-agency band. The reason we can is production cost: AI drafts, our team edits and decides, and nothing publishes until you approve it from your phone. Ten minutes a week, first drafts back in one to two business days, something shipping every week. We're in Toronto, with people in British Columbia, and we work across Canada and the US.

Two honest limits. Search takes about 90 days to move, so the first month is production you can see rather than results you can bank. And if three posts a month is genuinely all you need, a good freelancer will beat us on price — that's a real answer, and we'd rather give it now than in month four.

Sources

• WebFX, Social media management pricing and PPC pricing
• Government of Canada Job Bank, wage reports for social media coordinator and social media manager, updated 19 November 2025
• Canada Revenue Agency, CPP contribution rates and EI premium rates, 2026
• Ontario Ministry of Labour, Your guide to the Employment Standards Act: vacation
• Internal Revenue Service, Topic no. 751, Social Security and Medicare withholding rates