How Much Do Companies Spend on Consulting?

TL;DR: Large enterprises typically spend 0.5–4% of revenue on consulting, depending on industry. Banks and pharma companies are the heaviest spenders at 2–4% of revenue. The global management consulting market reached approximately $492 billion in 2025 and is growing at 5–6% annually. Above $10M in annual consulting spend, the complexity becomes unmanageable without dedicated tools.

By Ulrik Soeraas, Managing Director and Co-founder of Scopecreeper

What is the average consulting spend for a large company?

There is no single "average" because consulting intensity varies enormously by industry. But the pattern is consistent: the larger and more regulated the organisation, the more it spends on consultants.

A company with £1 billion in revenue typically spends somewhere between £5 million and £40 million on consulting, depending on its industry. A bank at that revenue level will spend £15–60 million. A manufacturer will spend £4–12 million. The difference comes down to how much of the business relies on knowledge work, regulatory compliance, and technology transformation — all areas where consulting firms thrive.

At the portfolio level, consulting spend represents 5–15% of total indirect procurement costs for most large enterprises. That makes it one of the largest and least controlled categories of external spend. Companies track their office supplies more rigorously than their consulting engagements.

How big is the consulting market in 2026?

The global management consulting services market was valued at approximately $492 billion in 2025, according to Fortune Business Insights. Mordor Intelligence puts the broader consulting services market (including IT and strategy) at $371 billion for the same year, growing at a CAGR of around 4.8% through 2031. The numbers vary because analysts define "consulting" differently — some include IT outsourcing, some don't.

What's clear is the direction: up. Strategy consulting alone is expected to nearly double its 2017 value to over $90 billion. North America accounts for roughly 38–41% of global consulting revenue. Europe takes about 30%. Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region at nearly 7% annual growth.

The UK consulting market is worth over £20 billion annually, though it contracted 3.4% in 2024 amid delayed technology investments. The Management Consultancies Association projects 5.7% growth for the UK market in 2026.

How much do different industries spend on consulting?

This is the question procurement teams and CFOs actually need answered. The table below shows estimated consulting spend as a percentage of revenue for large enterprises (>£200M revenue) by industry.

Source: Scopecreeper analysis based on Source Global Research consulting spend benchmarks, Mordor Intelligence sector data, and company-level financial analysis (JPMorgan, Pfizer, Cisco). Individual companies vary significantly around these ranges.

Healthcare is the fastest-growing category of consulting spend (see our detailed industry breakdown). Source Global Research identifies it as the largest consulting buyer by sector. Energy consulting is growing at 10% annually, driven by energy transition, grid modernisation, and ESG requirements.

Retail is the most polarised sector. Digital-first retailers spend heavily on consulting. Traditional grocery and discount retailers spend very little.

What does this translate to in actual figures?

The percentages above translate to very different dollar figures depending on company size. Here's what the ranges look like at different revenue tiers:

The key insight: a £1B bank spends roughly £15–60M on consulting. A £1B energy company spends £4–12M. An £8B pharma company spends £150M+. A £400M retailer might spend £2–8M. This is why consulting spend management needs to be defined by spend level, not by industry or revenue.

How does consulting compare to other categories of indirect spend?

Indirect procurement — everything a company buys that isn't directly used to make its product — typically represents 15–30% of revenue. This includes IT, professional services, marketing, facilities, and travel.

Consulting and professional services make up 8–15% of that indirect spend. That puts it in the same bracket as IT infrastructure and ahead of categories like travel or office supplies.

The difference: most companies have mature processes for managing IT procurement, travel spend, and office supplies. Consulting is the one major category where most organisations have no dedicated tools, no centralised tracking, and no benchmarking data. They know what they spend on cloud hosting. They don't know what they spend on consultants.

Why is consulting spend so hard to pin down?

Companies don't report "consulting spend" as a line item. Banks bury it in "noninterest expense — other." Pharma companies hide it across SG&A and R&D. Tech companies spread it across "cost of revenue" and "operating expenses."

The classification problem makes it worse. The same consulting engagement might be coded as "professional fees" in finance, "technology services" in IT, "contractor costs" in HR, and "outsourced services" in procurement. Each department uses its own labels. Nobody is looking at the same data.

The UK government illustrates this at a national scale. HM Treasury put central government consulting spend at £1.36 billion. The Public Accounts Committee found other estimates as high as £2.23 billion — a 64% gap caused by exactly this classification problem. We cover the full public sector picture in a separate article.

If a national government with formal procurement controls and parliamentary oversight can't track its own consulting spend, the problem is clearly structural, not a matter of willpower.

What does this mean for my organisation?

If you're spending more than $10 million a year on consulting, you almost certainly don't have a complete picture of what that money is buying. Above that threshold, the typical company is running 50–500+ concurrent engagements, working with 15–50+ supplier firms, and buying through multiple independent departments. Nobody owns the full picture.

The pattern Scopecreeper sees when organisations first connect their invoice data is consistent: they discover 20–30% more consulting engagements than they knew existed. Hidden in various budgets, miscategorised, or simply forgotten. The detection engine analyses invoices across all systems, budgets, and labels, then surfaces the complete picture — including projects never entered into a formal system.

That first discovery step is where most of the savings start. You can't reduce what you can't see.

Want to know how your consulting spend compares to these benchmarks? Scopecreeper maps your entire portfolio from invoice data in days. Book a portfolio audit →