How Much Should a Church Spend on Social Media?

Most churches should budget somewhere between $0 and $200 a month for social media, and the majority land under $75. A church under 200 people can run a genuinely good social presence for about $25 a month in tools. The expensive part was never the software. It's somebody's time.

Below is what the pieces actually cost, three sample budgets you can copy, and the line items that are usually a waste of money.

The Short Answer, by Church Size

There's no industry benchmark for this. Anyone who quotes you one made it up. But here's what actually tends to work:

• Under 200 people: $0 to $30 a month. One graphics source, a free scheduler, no ads.
• 200 to 750 people: $30 to $100 a month. Graphics, a paid scheduler, occasional event boosts.
• 750 to 2,000 people: $100 to $300 a month. Add stock photography, video tools, and a real ad budget for big pushes.
• 2,000 and up: You probably have staff, and the salary line dwarfs everything else. Tools are rounding error.

Notice how small those numbers are. That's the actual point of this post.

What Do the Pieces Actually Cost?

Here's real pricing, checked September 2026. Prices move, so verify before you put anything in a budget request.

Graphics and content

This is the line item that saves the most volunteer hours, so it's usually the first thing worth paying for.

Sunday Social runs $15 a month for the ready-to-use plan (15,000+ finished graphics plus 120+ new assets each month, with a built-in scheduler) or $25 a month for editable templates, which adds Photoshop files, 3,000+ Canva templates, seasonal SZN Kits, sermon series graphics, and stock photos. There's a Shorts add-on at $10 a month if you want vertical video. Free 7-day trial on both.

Canva Pro is $144 a year for one person, or $250 a year per person on the Business plan. Worth knowing: Canva offers most premium features free to registered nonprofits, which many churches qualify for. Apply before you pay.

Scheduling

Buffer has a genuinely usable free plan: 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time. For a lot of churches that's enough. Paid starts at $5 per channel per month on Essentials, $10 per channel on Team.

Later starts at $18.75 a month billed yearly, though that's a promotional rate at the moment (25% off, so list is about $25). You get 8 profiles and 1 user on that tier.

If your graphics tool already includes scheduling, don't buy a separate scheduler. We broke down the tradeoffs in our comparison of church social media schedulers.

Stock photography

Somewhere between $0 and $30 a month. Unsplash and Pexels are free and fine. The catch is that generic stock rarely looks like church, and the good church-specific libraries are usually bundled into a graphics subscription rather than sold separately.

Ads

Wildly variable, and the only line item where "more money" straightforwardly buys "more reach." Most churches spend $0 here for eleven months and then $100 to $500 for an Easter or Christmas push. That's a reasonable pattern.

Three Sample Budgets

The $0 Budget

Canva free (or Canva's nonprofit plan if you qualify), Buffer free, Pexels for photos, your phone for video.

This works. It genuinely does. The cost is hours: you're designing everything from scratch, and design from scratch is slow. Best fit for a church with an actual designer volunteer who enjoys the work.

The $25 Budget

One graphics subscription with scheduling included. That's it. That's the whole budget.

This is the sweet spot for most small and midsize churches, and it's the one we'd recommend if someone put a gun to our head. You trade $25 for roughly six to ten hours a month of volunteer time, which is a spectacular trade.

The $150 Budget

Graphics and templates ($25), video/Shorts add-on ($10), a paid scheduler if you need multiple users and approval workflows ($20 to $40), and $75 to $100 set aside monthly for ads, pooled and spent around the three or four moments that actually matter.

This is a midsize church with a part-time comms person and a few volunteers.

The Real Cost Nobody Budgets For

Time.

A church social account that posts five times a week takes somewhere between two and six hours a week to run, depending on how much you're making from scratch. At even a modest $20 an hour, that's $160 to $480 a month in labor, whether you're paying for it or burning through a volunteer.

That reframes the whole question. A $25 tool that cuts four hours a week isn't an expense. It's the cheapest thing on the list.

This is also why the volunteer model breaks so often. Not because volunteers are unreliable, but because churches hand them a blank canvas and a Canva login and wonder why they quit in March. If that's your situation, we wrote a whole guide on running church social media as a volunteer in under two hours a week.

What's Usually a Waste of Money

Being direct here, at the risk of talking ourselves out of a sale:

• A social media agency, if you're under 1,000 people. Agencies typically start around $1,500 a month. For most churches that money is better spent on a part-time staff person who actually attends and knows the people.
• Premium analytics tools. The free native insights in Instagram and Meta Business Suite tell you everything a church needs to know.
• Buying followers, ever. It poisons your engagement rate and fools exactly nobody.
• A second scheduler you already have. Churches routinely pay twice for scheduling without realizing it. Go check.
• Expensive video gear, before you've posted video consistently for three months. A phone is fine. Prove the habit first, then upgrade.

Should Churches Spend Money on Ads?

Sometimes, and less often than you'd think.

Meta ads are good at one specific thing: reaching people who don't already follow you, in a defined geographic radius, around a specific event. Easter, Christmas, a new series launch, a grand opening. Those are worth money.

What ads are bad at: general brand awareness for a church. Spending $50 a month year-round on "come visit us" almost never produces anything measurable.

Save it up. Spend it in bursts. Three or four well-funded pushes a year beat a trickle every time.

How to Get This Approved

If you're the one asking a board or a pastor for $25 a month, don't lead with features. Lead with hours.

"We currently spend about five hours a week making graphics. This tool cuts that to under two. It costs $25 a month." That's a conversation that ends quickly and well.

And if you need to prove it before you ask, Sunday Social has a 7-day free trial so you can show up to that meeting with a month of finished posts instead of a pitch.

FAQ

What percentage of a church budget should go to social media?

There's no credible standard, and be suspicious of anyone who quotes one. Most churches fold social into a general communications line. A more useful question is whether your tools are saving more hours than they cost, and for most churches that answer is yes well before $100 a month.

Can a church run social media completely free?

Yes. Canva's free tier plus Buffer's free plan plus free stock photos covers the basics, and Canva offers most premium features free to qualifying nonprofits. The tradeoff is time: free tools mean building everything from scratch, which typically doubles the hours involved.

Is it worth paying for a church-specific graphics service instead of just using Canva?

It depends on whether you have a designer. Canva is a blank canvas and a great one. A church graphics library is finished work you can post today. Most churches want both, and we compared them directly in our Sunday Social vs. Canva breakdown.

How much should we spend on Easter or Christmas ads?

If you're going to run ads at all, these are the two moments worth funding. Churches commonly put $100 to $500 behind a single holiday push with a tight local radius. Start at the low end, watch what happens, and scale next year based on what you learn rather than what you hoped.