The only company in American audio advertising willing to print its own price beside a competitor's is SiriusXM Media, and it does so on the pricing page of AudioGo, the self-serve platform it runs. That page carries a market-by-market table of average CPMs, and in Philadelphia it puts broadcast radio at $20 per thousand listeners reached and its own streaming inventory at $12. New York reads $17 against $12, Detroit $26 against $14. A seller publishing a comparison it wins in every row is not a neutral source, and it is still the most useful document a first-time radio buyer can read, because every other number in this business arrives verbally, from a salesperson, after you have said how much you want to spend.
Two Purchases Hiding Inside One Invoice
Airtime and production are separate transactions with separate economics, and conflating them is the error that makes a first radio buy feel like a swindle. Airtime is inventory priced against ratings and demand, so a thirty-second slot in Philadelphia drive time in November costs more than the same slot in January, and a station's willingness to discount tracks how much inventory sits unsold that month. Production is a fixed piece of work: a script, a casting decision, a directed performance, a mix built to a broadcast spec. One of those prices moves weekly and the other does not move at all.
Stations understand this better than their customers do, which is why most of them offer to produce the spot for free when you buy a schedule. A free spot is read by whoever is between shifts, over a library music cue, in a single pass, and it sounds like the other local commercials recorded in that room the same week. The airtime is the expensive half of the purchase and the creative decides whether the airtime does anything, so handing the creative to the party selling you the airtime, for nothing, is the cheapest decision in the process and usually the most costly.
The One Price Table Anybody in Audio Prints
Radio stations do not publish rate cards and agencies do not publish their markups. The platforms selling streaming audio publish a floor and nothing above it, and AudioGo states its minimum plainly: $250 to set up a campaign, with the actual cost set by an auction the buyer cannot see before paying. A buyer walking in cold therefore has two public reference points, the platform minimum and the platform's own CPM table, and has to build everything else out of arithmetic.
The gap that table advertises is also narrower than it looks, because a CPM measures a thousand impressions delivered rather than a thousand people persuaded, and the two mediums deliver them into different rooms. Nielsen's Audio Today 2026 report credits broadcast radio with reaching 93 percent of American adults every month and attributes more than 80 percent of ad-supported audio time inside vehicles to AM and FM. Citing Edison Research's Share of Ear study for the fourth quarter of 2025, the same report puts radio at 61 percent of daily ad-supported audio listening among adults 18 and over, against 21 percent for podcasts and 15 percent for ad-supported streaming. An $8 CPM saving on inventory reaching a listener at a desk, in headphones, with a skip button under a thumb, is not obviously a saving if the thing being advertised is a dinner decision made in a car.
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Turning a CPM into a Weekly Number
A station quotes a cost per spot and a platform quotes a CPM, so comparing them means converting one into the other, which is the only math in radio buying a buyer has to do personally. Take the audience the station claims for the daypart you are buying, usually given as average quarter-hour persons or as a cume figure, multiply the spots by that audience to get gross impressions, divide the cost by those impressions and multiply by a thousand. That is the CPM you are actually paying, and it is the number to set beside the $20 Philadelphia figure above.
Run the arithmetic backward to size a first buy. A local advertiser who wants a listener to hear the spot three times in a week needs frequency rather than reach, and frequency comes from concentration: one station, one or two dayparts, enough spots per week that the repetition lands inside a short memory. The same budget spread across four stations and every daypart buys a bigger number on a media plan and fewer people who remember anything. Which hours actually behave the way advertisers assume is covered in our guide to the best time to run radio ads.
Six Sentences That Move a Rate
The published-price problem cuts both ways. Because nothing is fixed, everything is negotiable, and a buyer who asks nothing is quoted the rate card. Ask what the station's unsold inventory looks like for the flight you want, because a schedule placed into a soft month is discounted and one placed into November against political and retail money is not. Ask for the rate on a longer flight, since twelve weeks priced as twelve weeks almost always beats four weeks priced three times. Ask whether the quote is run-of-schedule or daypart-specific and get the answer in writing. Ask how many bonus spots come with the buy and when they run, and what the cancellation terms are. Ask who else in your category is on the station, which is the question salespeople least expect and the one most likely to produce a useful answer.
What a buyer should not do is name a budget first. A station asked what $2,000 will buy produces a schedule costing $2,000, while a station asked what a week of mid-morning on that signal costs produces a price the arithmetic above can test. Our breakdown of radio station advertising packages covers what the bundled offers contain and which parts have real value.
Thirty Seconds in Richboro
The spot is the part of the purchase a buyer controls completely. Here is an original :30 for a fictional dry cleaner, performance notes in brackets.
“SATURDAY”, :30 radio, fictional client, one voice plus announcer.
SFX: a car door, a turn signal ticking.
MAN [reasonable, explaining himself to nobody]: The gray suit is in the back seat.
SFX: the signal keeps ticking.
MAN: It has been in the back seat since the second week of September.
MAN [a beat, the arithmetic landing]: The wedding is Saturday.
SFX: the signal stops. Nothing for half a second.
ANNOUNCER [flat, helpful, no sympathy in it]: Keller Cleaners in Richboro. In by ten, out by five, including the one in your back seat.
ANNOUNCER: Keller Cleaners. Two one five, five five five, oh one nine four.
Seventy-four words, one idea, and the idea is same-day turnaround rather than price or quality. The listener sits in a car because that is where the listener is, and the announcer declines to acknowledge that anything funny happened, which is a direction note rather than a writing note. A spot built this way earns its frequency, since a listener who recognizes the premise on the second pass has already been sold once. The craft rules underneath it sit in how to write a radio ad.
Where a Schedule Loses Money Without Anyone Noticing
Three line items account for most of the waste in a first radio buy. The first is run-of-schedule placement, which lets a station fill unsold overnight inventory with your spots and report the airings you paid for, so a buyer who accepts ROS without a daypart floor has bought impressions that technically happened. The second is the traffic deadline. Traffic needs the audio file, a spot title, dates and rotation instructions, and larger groups also want an Ad-ID code; a spot that arrives late does not run and the airtime is still billed. The third is the make-good, the credit a station owes when a spot it sold does not air, and credits are issued against a written schedule and nothing else.
A buyer running one schedule a year is negotiating against someone who negotiates all day, which is the argument for handing the buy to somebody who does it weekly. Our media placement page covers how we run it on a client's behalf, and the per-channel figures behind the big sellers are set out in iHeartRadio advertising cost.
Where That Leaves You
Buying radio ads is four decisions in order: separate the airtime from the creative, convert every quote into a CPM you can compare, concentrate the budget until frequency happens inside one week, and get the schedule in writing before the spot is delivered. The one published table in the business puts a thousand broadcast impressions in Philadelphia near $20 and a thousand streaming impressions near $12. Neither figure says whether the ad is any good, and that is the variable with the widest range of outcomes attached to it.
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