This article is for the SaaS CFO’s. What’s the right level of G&A spend for SaaS businesses? The answer is of course “as low as possible”, but realistically there is a necessary baseline of SaaS spend. Below is G&A as a percent of revenue in 2025, 2024 and 2023 for SaaS companies that have gone public since October 2017 and are still public (57 in 2025). Observations follow:
G&A is hovering at ~20%. The median spend on G&A as a percent of revenue has been roughly 20% over the years, although it came in at 18% in 2025. The average is nearly identical.
Profitable companies do a better job. In 2025, profitable companies spent about 15% of revenue on G&A, in line with historical performance. Unprofitable companies however are much higher, at 20% of revenue. In our view this shows that unprofitable companies need to tighten up; unprofitability to drive growth is something we encourage, but G&A does not drive growth and there really is no reason to have more G&A than a profitable peer. Unprofitable companies carrying extra G&A are burning cash with no return. That 5-point gap should arguably be zero.
Unprofitable companies are getting better though. Median G&A as a percent of revenue has dropped from 23% in 2022 to 18% in 2025. That’s a meaningful 5-point improvement over three years across the whole cohort. And it’s coming completely from the unprofitable companies who have managed to consistently drop their spend as a percent of revenue.
The absolute dollar figures still rise. Median G&A spend in absolute dollars went from $112mm in 2023 to $126mm in 2024 to $146mm in 2025. Dollars are going up even as the percentage comes down, purely because revenue is growing and larger companies just require more G&A. It’s physics.
The floor is ~9%. Very few companies in the dataset get below 8–10% of revenue on G&A regardless of size or profitability. DataDog at 8% and Doximity at 10% are among the lowest in the cohort. That suggests somewhere around 8–10% is the structural minimum for a public company carrying audit, legal, compliance, and executive overhead. For private companies the floor is lower, but it may be negligible.
Stage matters. Smaller companies in the dataset tend to run higher G&A as a percent of revenue simply because fixed costs like audit and legal don’t scale linearly. The 15% benchmark is most relevant for companies at scale.
Obviously keep G&A spend as low as you can, but recognize that 15% of revenue on G&A is the baseline all SaaS companies should aim for. Make that your goal.
Thank you for your readership. See more blogs and SaaS data at blossomstreetventures.com. Other resources we’ve built for founders include: SoftwareMultiples.com; softwareMRRcalculator.com; FounderInvited.com, and TwoFoundersTalk.com. Founders are always welcome to reach out to sammy@blossomstreetventures.com as well.