2024 Learning Budget Benchmarking

We all love budget season! And we all love benchmarking so we know what to ask for (or demand) in those budget discussions.

The below tables are based on 167 data points — a small-ish data set, yet enough to paint a fairly accurate picture of budget levels in different industries for different levels of talent leaders.

Notes about the data set:

1. The 167 data points are from one-on-one meetings between the Tigerhall team and our customers, people we’ve met at conferences, and forms filled out as part of information gathering.
2. They represent 167 different leaders in 167 different companies, across industries.
3. All of them work in learning, talent development, talent management, enablement and employee experience. Meaning their full titles are titles like Chief Learning Officer, SVP of Talent Development, SVP of Enablement, Head of Learning & Development, Head of Sales Enablement, Director of Commercial Capability Building, Director of Talent, and so on.
4. All of them are based in the US.
5. This data is collected during the first 6 months of 2023 — January to June, 2023.
6. The figures represent annual budgets.
7. Currency is USD.

The reason we’ve focused on personal budgets that these people are in control of is that there are too many different ways of splitting company wide learning budgets. It would be hard to compare a firm that has one big centrally funded Center of Excellence with a firm that allocates a smaller learning budget to every manager. Many times the learning budget is also a mix of a central budget for company-wide skills and leadership development, and local budgets in each business unit for functional skills. The line item for learning can therefore show up in many, many P&Ls, and there is usually not a clear definition of what a learning line item should consist of either. Items like conferences, internal workshops, team development and mentorship opportunities many times show up in that grey zone.

That being said, 74.7 % of respondents said their total company-wide learning budget is $5M+, and 5.6 % said it’s $15M+.

Average Personal Budget, by employee org size

The definition of “personal budget” is a budget that the person themselves are entirely in charge of, can sign off on, and can — within reason — spend as they wish. The process to unlock the budget can include approvals as a formality, but does not include requirements to gain official buy-in and sign-off from more senior stakeholders.

There are, however, large differences between various industries.

Top 3 industries on learning budgets:

1. Professional Services
2. Chemicals & Commodities
3. Telecommunications

Bottom 3 industries on learning budgets:

1. Retail
2. Non-profit
3. Hospitality & Entertainment

Thus, it seems — perhaps not surprisingly — that learning budgets are closely linked to an industry’s gross margins and overall salary levels.

And some final nuggets of insight:

• The most common personal budget across this group is $1M (9.87 %)
• 28.79 % have a personal budget of between $1–5M
• 6.06 % have a personal budget above $7.5M
• 8.09 % have a personal budget below $150,000

Would you like to know the exact benchmark and comparisons for your title/level + industry + organization size + organization revenue? Email me on nellie@tigerhall.com and I’ll share your precise budget benchmark with you.