The Five-Year Slide, by the Numbers
Chief Marketer’s coverage of Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, a poll of 401 CMOs, found martech spending had reached “a five-year low, from 26.6% in 2021 to 19.4%” of marketing budget. CMSWire’s separate coverage of the prior 2025 wave, a poll of 402 CMOs, put the figure at 22.4% for that year, filling in the middle point of the trend: 26.6% in 2021, 22.4% in 2025, and 19.4% in 2026.
Neither figure comes from a direct read of Gartner’s own published report. Gartner’s newsroom page returned a bot-protection block on every attempt this research made, so both numbers reach this page through trade-press coverage that explicitly names the underlying Gartner survey and its sample size for its respective year.
Falling Share, Rising Intent
The 2026 wave’s topline number tells one story, a shrinking share of budget for martech relative to five years earlier. A second finding inside the same wave tells a different one: 62% of the 401 CMOs surveyed said they still planned to increase martech investment even as its overall share of the budget fell. Chief Marketer’s own coverage frames that gap as a real tension, CMOs pulling back on martech’s relative share of spend while still growing what they put into it in absolute terms.
Because 2025 and 2026 are two separate annual survey waves with different sample sizes, 402 CMOs versus 401, rather than the same cohort tracked longitudinally, read the 26.6 to 22.4 to 19.4 trend as a snapshot comparison across Gartner’s repeated annual survey rather than a single group of CMOs measured three times.
The Numbers
Martech claimed 19.4% of marketing budget in 2026, a five-year low, down from 26.6% in 2021, per Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey (401 CMOs) as reported by Chief Marketer.
A year earlier, martech’s share stood at 22.4% of marketing budget, per the same Gartner CMO Spend Survey (402 CMOs) as reported by CMSWire, giving a three-point trend line of 26.6% in 2021, 22.4% in 2025, and 19.4% in 2026.
62% of the 401 CMOs surveyed in the 2026 wave said they still planned to increase martech investment, even as the share of budget it commands fell.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Chief Marketer, citing Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey
- CMSWire, citing Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey