What Market Research Costs, by Type #
What you pay for market research depends less on the vendor than on the type of research. Four types cover most needs.
| Type | What you get | How it is priced |
|---|---|---|
| Federal data (Census, BLS) | National and industry statistics, unanalyzed | Free; the cost is the analyst time to assemble it |
| Industry reports | A finished analysis of one industry | Per report; ours are $239 to $799 |
| Research subscriptions | Access to a library of reports or statistics | Annual fee |
| Custom studies | Surveys, interviews or focus groups on your own question | Quoted per project |
Published prices for other report publishers and subscription services are compared in our IBISWorld, Statista and market research platform comparisons.
The Cost of Doing It Yourself #
Federal data is free, but assembling it is not. Market research analysts and marketing specialists earned a mean $43.03 an hour (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025), so every 10 hours of desk research costs about $430 in wages before benefits and overhead.
The occupation group includes marketing specialists, so the figure is a guide to the cost of the skill, not a quote for a particular hire.
Ten hours goes faster than people expect, because most of it is not spent reading. It is spent deciding which NAICS code actually describes the business, which is rarely obvious and frequently wrong on the first attempt. Then pulling the same industry from several programs that publish on different schedules and different classification editions. Then working out why two federal figures for the same industry disagree, which is usually because one counts establishments and the other counts firms, or because a cell has been suppressed to protect an individual business and the total no longer adds up.
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What You Are Paying For in a Report #
A report is not a repackaging of a single free table. What it buys is the assembly and the checking.
Assembly. One industry's record is spread across County Business Patterns, the Economic Census, BLS wage and occupational releases, FRED and, where public operators exist, SEC filings. Each publishes on its own cycle, in its own units, on its own classification edition.
Reconciliation. Those sources disagree in predictable ways, and resolving the disagreement correctly is the difference between a usable figure and a wrong one. Vintages have to be stated rather than blended, and a projection has to be labelled as a projection rather than presented as a published statistic.
Checking. Every figure in our reports is reconciled against the stored source values before the document is produced, and each one carries the dataset and the year it came from, so a reader can trace any number back to the agency that published it.
That last property is what makes a report usable in a document somebody else will review. A figure a reviewer can check does not become an argument in a meeting.
What Changes the Price of an Industry Report #
Report prices follow depth. Our Basic report covers one industry nationally from Census, BLS and FRED data. Standard adds state-level breakdowns, competitor information from SEC filings and trade data. Premium is custom-only and goes further on competitors.
Marketplace reports, already built for an industry, are priced below custom reports, which are generated for any industry code within 48 hours. The difference is not the quality of the work but whether the work has already been done: a report that exists can be sold again at a lower price, while a new one has to be produced.
The other variable is the industry itself. Federal coverage is uneven, and an industry where a concentration ratio is published and public operators file with the SEC supports a deeper report than one where neither is true. That is a property of the data, not of the price, and it is why depth is described per tier rather than promised per industry.
When Free Federal Data Is Enough #
For a large class of questions, buying anything is unnecessary, and it is worth knowing which class.
Federal statistics answer questions about structure: how many businesses operate in an industry, how many people they employ, what they pay, how large the industry is by receipts, how concentrated it is, and how those figures are distributed across states. For market sizing, competitive structure and workforce cost, the free sources are authoritative and no commercial source improves on them, because the commercial sources are usually built on the same base.
They do not answer questions about behavior. Customer preferences, brand share, willingness to pay, why buyers switch, what a competitor charges: none of that is collected by any federal program, and no amount of careful analysis of Census tables will produce it. Those questions need a survey or a custom study, and that is the point at which commissioning research is the right decision rather than an expensive habit.
Who Sells Market Research #
The US had 4,401 market research and public opinion polling locations with paid employees (Census CBP, 2023). Revenue for the industry was $25.2B (Census Economic Census, 2022).
Research is also produced outside this industry, by consultancies and by in-house teams, which these figures do not capture. A management consultancy conducting market analysis for a client is classified as a consultancy, and an in-house analyst is counted in whatever industry their employer belongs to. The published industry is therefore a floor on the amount of market research done in the country rather than a measure of it.
The sellers divide into a few recognizable shapes: subscription libraries covering many industries, report publishers selling per industry, survey and fieldwork agencies running primary research, and data platforms licensing statistics. They are not competing for the same purchase, which is why a like-for-like price comparison across them is usually a comparison of different products.
How We Priced It #
Our prices are from our current price list. The analyst wage is the mean hourly wage for occupation code 13-1161 in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release for May 2025; the median for the same occupation is $37.87. Industry counts and revenue are Census County Business Patterns (2023) and Economic Census (2022) figures for NAICS 541910.
Competitor prices are not quoted on this page. Where we compare against a named vendor, the comparison lives on that vendor's page and states what we could and could not verify from a source we can read.