How Much Does Social Media Management Cost in the UK?
UK agencies charge £600-£2,000 a month, freelancers £250-£800, and an in-house hire lands nearer £3,000 once you count National Insurance and holiday cover. The number that actually decides what you should pay isn't on any price list — it's what a single customer is worth to you over a year.
Dave Smith
# How Much Does Social Media Management Cost in the UK?
Here's the thing about social media management pricing: almost nobody publishes it.
Go looking and you'll find a dozen agency sites with a lovely "Get in touch for a bespoke quote" button sat exactly where the numbers should be. Two hours later — after the discovery call, the deck and the follow-up email — you finally learn it's roughly three times what you had in mind, and you've got a proposal PDF you'll never open again.
So let's just say the numbers out loud.
What UK businesses are actually quoted
Freelancers: around £250–£800 a month
The lower end usually buys you a handful of scheduled posts and not much else. At the upper end you're getting strategy, captions, some design work and someone who'll actually reply to comments. Freelance day rates in the UK tend to sit between £200 and £400, so it's worth thinking of a monthly retainer as "how many days of their attention am I buying?" — usually one or two.
Agencies: around £600–£2,000+ a month
This is where most small businesses get their sticker shock. That price typically covers a content plan, a set number of posts across two or three platforms, community management and a monthly report. Bigger agencies with video production or paid ads baked in will happily quote £3,000 and up.
In-house: £26,000–£35,000 a year, plus everything else
A junior social media executive's salary is only the headline. Add employer's National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday cover, software licences and the time you'll spend managing them. Realistically you're looking at £35,000–£45,000 all in — call it £3,000 a month for someone who also needs training and won't know your business for the first three months.
Software only: £0–£100 a month
Scheduling tools sit at the cheap end. But it's worth being honest about what you're buying: a scheduler is an empty box. It'll publish whatever you put in it, at the time you choose. It won't write anything, and the writing is the bit you're avoiding.
Why the quotes vary so wildly
Mostly, you're buying hours. A £600 retainer and a £2,000 retainer often deliver a fairly similar-looking feed — the difference is how much thinking went in, how much original photography or video is included, and whether anyone is monitoring your comments and messages between posts.
The other big variable is volume. Twelve posts a month across one platform costs a fraction of thirty posts a month across four. If a quote feels high, ask what happens if you halve the post count. Often the price drops more than you'd expect, because content creation is the expensive part.
What's usually not in the price
This catches people out more than the headline figure does:
- Ad spend. Management fees and the money that actually goes to Meta are separate. An agency might charge 10–20% of your ad budget on top of the retainer.
- Photography and video. Many retainers assume you'll supply the images. If you don't, you're paying for a shoot or getting stock photos you'll quietly hate.
- Setup fees. £300–£1,000 for onboarding, brand guidelines and account access is common in year one.
- Minimum contract terms. Three or six months is standard. Some go to twelve. Social media takes time to work, which is a fair argument — but it does mean a bad fit is expensive to escape.
Always ask for the total first-year cost, not the monthly figure. They're rarely the same story.
Working out what you should pay
Forget the market rate for a second and do this sum instead.
What's a customer worth to you over a year? A plumber might say £180. A wedding photographer, £1,800. A B2B consultancy, considerably more.
Now: how many extra customers a year would social media need to bring you to cover a £600-a-month retainer? For the plumber that's forty customers — a genuinely tall order from organic social alone. For the photographer it's four, which suddenly sounds very achievable.
That single sum tells you more about what you can justify than any agency price list will. If the number feels impossible, don't stretch to the retainer and hope. Spend less and stay consistent instead.
The awkward middle ground
Most UK small businesses land somewhere uncomfortable: they can't justify £600 a month, but they also aren't going to write and post three times a week themselves. They know it, too. That's why so many business Facebook pages have a last post dated eighteen months ago.
The honest options in that middle are: do less, but do it reliably. Batch a month of content in one sitting rather than agonising daily. Or use a tool that generates the content as well as scheduling it, so the empty box problem goes away.
That last one is roughly why Aunty Social exists — it learns about your business from your website, writes posts in your tone of voice and publishes to Facebook, Instagram and X for £29 a month. It's not a replacement for a good agency if you can afford one. It's for the far more common situation where the alternative is nothing at all.
The short version
Freelancers £250–£800 a month. Agencies £600–£2,000+. In-house around £3,000 a month once you count everything. Software under £100.
Whatever you spend, the thing that determines whether it works isn't the size of the number. It's whether the posting still happens in month six, when the novelty's worn off and you're busy. Pick the option you can keep going.