OpEx Benchmarks by Revenue Band: DTC G&A in 2025

Ask ten DTC founders what their "OpEx" is and most of them describe their ad spend. That is the dangerous part. The overhead that quietly kills margin is not marketing, which you can pause in a week. It is G&A: general and administrative expense, the fixed base of payroll, software, rent, and overhead that does not move when you turn the ads off. This post benchmarks that overhead by revenue band, so you can see what your G&A should actually cost at your stage and where the traps sit.

What "OpEx" actually means in a DTC P&L

Operating expense is one of the most abused terms in ecommerce finance. Some founders mean every dollar that is not product cost, including marketing. Others mean only the back-office overhead. The version that matters for benchmarking, and the version this post uses, is G&A: non-marketing payroll, software and SaaS, rent, insurance, and professional services. It excludes COGS (product, inbound freight, duty) and it excludes marketing (paid media, agencies, creative).

Why carve it out this way? Because marketing is a variable lever you control month to month, and product cost moves with volume. G&A is the sticky part. It is the cost base you are committed to whether you do $400K or $600K next month. When I talk to founders running a brand this size, the thing they keep getting wrong is treating a SaaS renewal or a senior hire as a small monthly number instead of what it really is: a fixed claim on every future dollar of revenue until they cut it.

One definitional warning before the numbers. Two benchmark camps exist and they produce very different figures. The broader camp (A2X and Ecom CFO) counts all non-COGS, non-marketing overhead and lands near 23% for sub-$10M brands. A narrower "fixed cost allocation" camp lands at 8% to 12% for the same brands because it strips non-marketing payroll out. We use the broader definition throughout, because that is the one that matches how a real P&L reads.

The benchmark: G&A by revenue band

Here is the anchor. Sub-$10M DTC brands ran a median 23.0% G&A in 2025, down from 25.36% in 2024, per the A2X / Ecom CFO 2026 ecommerce P&L benchmark. That is a real, named, published figure built from anonymized DTC P&Ls. It is the most precisely cited number in this post, though as a private benchmark report it is not independently auditable the way a public-company 10-K is.

Extend it across the bands and a counterintuitive pattern shows up. Overhead does not fall in a straight line as you grow. In the $10M to $50M window the ratio barely moves (dropping from 23% to 22%) while G&A dollars jump roughly 9%. The operating leverage that growth is supposed to deliver does not appear.

The sub-$1M band carries the highest ratios because there is no revenue to spread fixed cost across. The surprise is the $10M to $50M band: the ratio barely improves (22% median versus 23% for the band below) while G&A dollars rise roughly 9%. The operating leverage that scale is supposed to buy does not show up yet. That is the scaling trap, and it deserves its own section.

Why G&A creeps up in the $10M to $50M window

This is the band where founders get blindsided. You cross $10M, the business feels like it has arrived, and you start hiring for the company you expect to be. A VP of operations. A real finance function instead of a part-time bookkeeper. An ERP upgrade. A move from your scrappy 3PL to better fulfillment infrastructure. Each decision is defensible on its own. Together they push G&A dollars up faster than revenue.

The benchmark data backs this up. In the most recent A2X cohort read, G&A costs in the $10M to $50M band rose roughly 9% in absolute dollars while revenue growth was slowing. The band-level median, 22%, is barely better than the 23% for smaller brands. The operating leverage that faster revenue is supposed to deliver does not materialize. That is the opposite of what the growth story promises, and it is where an interim CFO usually earns their fee.

The pattern we see again and again is what one founder called the overhead hangover: hiring ahead of revenue during a good stretch, then getting stuck with the fixed-cost base when growth normalizes. Operators who lived through it tell us the same thing, that they hired for the business they thought they would be, not the one they actually were. The fix is not to stop investing. It is to tie each fixed-cost commitment to a revenue trigger, so the VP hire or the warehouse lease lands when the top line can carry it, not three quarters early.

What public DTC companies actually report

Private benchmarks are directional. Public filings are exact, because the G&A line is audited and tagged. Two public DTC brands show the full range of what overhead can look like at scale, and they could not be more different.

REVOLVE GROUP is the lean case. On $1.13B of FY2024 revenue it reported $142.1M of G&A, or 12.6% of revenue, one of the leanest overhead structures any public DTC brand carries. The mechanism is classification: REVOLVE's P&L reports Fulfillment (3.3% of revenue), Selling & distribution (17.3%), and Marketing (14.8%) as separate lines outside G&A. REVOLVE owns and staffs its fulfillment centers; those costs appear under "Fulfillment" on the income statement, not inside G&A. FIGS is the other end. At $555.6M of FY2024 revenue it reported $142.9M of G&A, or 25.7%, double REVOLVE's ratio. Part of that gap is also a reporting choice: FIGS books technology and engineering costs inside G&A, which inflates the line versus peers who put tech elsewhere. The two figures are not like-for-like: on a total-opex basis, REVOLVE ran roughly 48% of revenue in FY2024 while FIGS ran roughly 67%, a real and meaningful gap, but narrower than the G&A line alone implies.

Two lessons sit in this table. First, scale alone does not buy you a lean ratio. FIGS is a large brand running 22% to 26% overhead. Second, even the lean operator drifts: REVOLVE's G&A crept from 10.5% in FY2022 to 12.8% in FY2025, because G&A grew 36% over three years while revenue grew 12%. G&A creep is not a startup problem. It is gravity. It pulls at every brand at every size, and holding the line takes active management even at a billion dollars of revenue. FIGS proves the reverse is possible too: it held G&A flat in absolute dollars from FY2024 to FY2025 and the ratio fell from 25.7% to 22.6% on 14% revenue growth. That is what real operating efficiency looks like.

The three levers that drive G&A efficiency

If overhead is structure, then efficiency comes from three structural choices, not from cutting line items one at a time.

The first is fulfillment structure. For private brands, using a 3PL keeps warehouse headcount and facility cost variable rather than locking them into fixed overhead, which keeps G&A tight. The public-company lesson is related but different: REVOLVE owns and staffs its fulfillment centers, but reports those costs under a dedicated "Fulfillment" line separate from G&A rather than blending them in. Either way, the principle is the same: keep fulfillment cost visible and explicitly tracked so it does not silently inflate your overhead benchmark. Owning a warehouse can be the right call eventually, but if those costs blur into G&A, your ratios become impossible to benchmark against peers.

The second is software. A right-sized SaaS stack matters more than founders expect, because software bloat is specifically a $10M to $30M problem. When we have struggled with this ourselves, what worked was a quarterly stack audit: every tool has to justify its seat count and renewal, or it gets cut. Operators who run lean tell us they treat unused subscriptions the way they treat dead inventory, as cash leaking out the side.

The third is leadership timing. Delaying full-time senior hires, using a fractional CFO or controller until somewhere around $15M to $20M, keeps your most expensive fixed costs off the books until the revenue can carry them. This is the single highest-impact call in the $10M to $50M band, because a premature six-figure leadership hire is exactly the commitment that turns into the overhead hangover.

Your G&A health check

Run the simple version. Take your revenue band, find the target G&A range, calculate your actual G&A percentage, and look at the gap. Then ask whether being above benchmark is justified or a red flag.

The chart above shows why the ratio matters so much. The P&L anatomy is illustrative: COGS at 35%, marketing at 25%, and shipping and returns at 13% are modeled cost splits that together with the 23% G&A benchmark land on roughly 4% EBITDA, the actual median Finaloop found for 7-figure DTC brands in 2024. The 23% G&A and 4% EBITDA are sourced anchors; the other line-item splits show a representative cost structure, not separately benchmarked figures. There is almost no room. A 5-point overrun on G&A does not dent your margin, it erases it. That is the whole case for getting overhead right.

Being above benchmark is fine when the spend is buying future revenue you can see: an ops team built ahead of a wholesale launch, a finance hire that is closing the books faster and catching margin leaks. It is a red flag when it is buying nothing you can point to: software nobody logs into, an office sized for headcount you planned but never hired, a senior salary that predates the revenue to support it.

Founders obsess over CAC and ignore G&A, but G&A is the number that decides whether growth turns into profit. Marketing you can pause in a week. Overhead you are stuck with for a year. Get your overhead architecture right before $10M, or you will pay for the restructure later, with interest.

Sources and methodology

The sub-$10M G&A anchor comes from a named, published ecommerce benchmark. The 23.0% median G&A for sub-$10M brands in 2025 (down from 25.36% in 2024) and the roughly 9% G&A dollar increase in the $10M to $50M cohort are from the A2X / Ecom CFO 2026 Ecommerce P&L Benchmark Report, built from anonymized DTC P&Ls. This is the broader G&A definition (all non-COGS, non-marketing overhead), which is the one used throughout this post.

Public-company G&A is pulled directly from SEC filings. REVOLVE GROUP and FIGS both report a distinct GeneralAndAdministrativeExpense line, which most DTC public companies do not. Figures are from their annual 10-K filings via SEC EDGAR for REVOLVE (CIK 1746618) and SEC EDGAR for FIGS (CIK 1846576). REVOLVE: 10.5% (FY2022) to 12.8% (FY2025). FIGS: 23.9% (FY2022) to 22.6% (FY2025).

Profit-structure context comes from a large DTC P&L dataset. The 4% median EBITDA for 7-figure brands and 7% for 8-figure brands, used in the $5M P&L anatomy, are from Finaloop's ecommerce profit benchmarks, covering several billion dollars of analyzed revenue across 7- and 8-figure DTC brands.

A second benchmark camp uses a narrower G&A definition, and we flag the difference on purpose. The Finaloop DTC benchmark dataset puts fixed overhead at 8% to 12% for $5M+ brands because it strips non-marketing payroll out of the count. We use the broader A2X definition as the primary anchor because it matches how a real operator reads a P&L. The two figures are not in conflict; they measure different scopes.

Limitations. The 23% figure is a blended median for the entire sub-$10M cohort, not broken out by $1M to $2M versus $5M to $10M. Public-company G&A is exact but reflects accounting choices (FIGS books technology inside G&A; REVOLVE reports Fulfillment as a separate P&L line rather than inside G&A), so the two G&A figures are not like-for-like: on total operating costs the gap is real but narrower than the G&A comparison alone implies. Owner salary treatment also varies: private benchmarks often include it, while public-company G&A does not, since founders draw from equity, not the G&A line.

Frequently asked questions