Local advertising, the umbrella covering radio, local television, and the digital and streaming channels increasingly layered on top of both, is forecast to reach $186.1 billion in the US in 2026, according to BIA Advisory Services' most recent update, revised upward from an earlier $184.5 billion estimate. Strip out political advertising, which is unusually large this cycle due to the midterm elections, and the underlying market still grew 3.9 percent over 2025 to $176.4 billion. Local advertising, in other words, is not shrinking. The more useful question for a working voice actor is where inside that number the growth is actually concentrated, because it is not spread evenly.
Radio's Split Reality: One Format, Two Directions
Radio's own numbers illustrate the pattern clearly. BIA's 2026 forecast puts combined over-the-air and digital radio revenue around $12.2 billion, with over-the-air radio growing a modest 1.6 to 1.8 percent this year but on a longer-term trajectory BIA projects at roughly negative 2.8 percent annually, against digital radio growing about 2 percent a year on top of that. In 2025 specifically, over-the-air spot ad dollars actually declined 0.4 percent to $10 billion, while digital radio advertising hit a record $2.3 billion, 24.4 percent of total radio ad revenue, with companies like iHeartMedia reporting their digital sales growth offsetting a 5 percent decline in core radio revenue that same year.
"The local advertising marketplace continues to reflect a K-shaped consumer economy. Stronger spending from higher-income households is supporting discretionary categories like travel, leisure, and automotive, while value-oriented spending is shaping demand in retail, restaurants, and essential services."
Ducey's read matters for anyone booking local commercial voice work: the categories growing fastest, travel, leisure, automotive, are not evenly distributed across every local market or every kind of small business client, and a voice actor whose direct-client base skews toward value-oriented categories, retail, restaurants, essential services, may be seeing a genuinely different local economy than the top-line $186.1 billion figure implies.
Small Business Sentiment Is Worse Than Small Business Behavior
Borrell Associates' own small-business advertiser survey found a striking gap between how business owners feel and what they actually plan to spend. In one wave, 77 percent of surveyed local advertisers said they planned to maintain or increase ad spending over the next six months. In a later wave, even as 38 percent of small businesses said they intended to cut marketing budgets amid inflation concerns, the share actually planning to increase spend held steady at 17 percent and the share planning to decrease barely moved, from 16 to 15 percent, with more than 60 percent still planning to maintain current spending levels.
That production-side reality is worth keeping in mind against the sentiment numbers below: a small studio's booking calendar can look shaky for reasons that have nothing to do with the broader market, and the aggregate data is a better guide to the overall climate than any single slow week.
"We're not big on doom and gloom around here, but after a few months of digging through the data, we started connecting some dots, and they don't point in a great direction. Forty-five percent of the SMBs we surveyed said the next six months, the economic conditions are going to get worse, while only 16 percent said they're going to improve. Small businesses are more informed than ever. They're making decisions with data."
Elliott's data points to a small-business advertiser who feels pessimistic about the broader economy but has not, so far, cut ad spending to match that pessimism, at least not yet. For a voice actor whose direct-client base is mostly small, local businesses rather than national brands, this is a genuinely useful, if uncomfortable, signal: the sentiment your clients express in conversation may run more negative than the budgets they actually approve, which cuts against reflexively lowering your own rates in response to a client's stated worry about the economy.
Podcast and Digital Audio: The Clearest Growth Story
The most unambiguous growth inside this market sits in podcast and digital audio advertising specifically. US podcast ad spend is forecast at $3.40 billion in 2026, rising toward $4.69 billion by 2030, roughly 40 percent cumulative growth over that period, according to VAB data reported by industry press. Total US digital audio ad spend, podcasts plus streaming audio services, is forecast at $8.02 billion in 2026, growing to $9.79 billion by 2030, with podcasting's own share of that total rising from 42 percent in 2026 to 47 percent by 2030. Podcast advertising's boom and what it has meant for voice talent is worth reading alongside this data specifically because it is the one part of the audio ad market with genuinely unambiguous, sustained growth across every measure available, in sharp contrast to over-the-air radio's decline.
What This Actually Means for Voice-Over Work
No market research firm, BIA, Borrell, IAB, or Nielsen, breaks out voice talent or commercial audio production spend as its own line item inside these figures; all of them track media buys, not the production costs behind the ads themselves. The clearest honest signal in the data is directional rather than a specific dollar figure: local advertising overall is growing, that growth is concentrated in digital and streaming audio channels rather than traditional over-the-air radio, and podcast advertising specifically is the standout growth category within audio. A voice actor building a local and regional commercial client base has a real, sourced reason to weight outreach and sample-building toward digital-first and podcast-adjacent local advertisers over traditional radio spot work, which the data shows shrinking in real terms even as the overall market grows.
Negotiating rates with direct clients and finding those clients without going through a marketplace both matter more in a market where growth is concentrated rather than evenly spread, since the highest-growth categories, travel, leisure, automotive, and podcast-adjacent digital audio specifically, are worth prioritizing over a general, unfocused local-business pitch.
↗ Try the tool
Rate Calculator
Pricing local commercial work confidently matters more when client budgets are uneven across categories. The Rate Calculator gives a defensible, current number so a client's stated economic worry does not automatically become your discount.
Open Rate Calculator →Frequently Asked Questions
Is traditional radio advertising actually dying?
The data shows real, sustained decline in over-the-air radio ad revenue, roughly a negative 2.8 percent annual trajectory by BIA's estimate, but not a collapse; it remains close to a $10 billion annual market in the US on its own. It is shrinking relative to digital radio and podcast advertising, not disappearing outright, and traditional radio spot work is likely to remain a real, if slowly shrinking, category for years yet.
Which local business categories should I focus outreach on?
The data points toward travel, leisure, and automotive as currently strong discretionary categories, and toward any client already investing in podcast advertising or streaming audio as a sign of a more digitally forward marketing approach generally. Retail, restaurant, and other value-oriented categories are not disappearing, but the data suggests treating them as a steadier, lower-growth part of a client mix rather than the primary growth opportunity right now.
How much of a local ad's budget typically goes to voice talent and production?
No major market research firm publishes this breakdown, so any specific figure should be treated as illustrative rather than an audited industry number. Production vendors in the radio commercial space have cited typical all-in production costs, script, voice talent, studio time, and sound design combined, somewhere in the low thousands of dollars for a standard spot, but this varies enormously by market size and client budget.
Sources and Further Reading
- BIA Advisory Services, reported via Radio Ink, Once Again, BIA Lifts 2026 Radio Ad Outlook On Midterm Bounty (September 14, 2026): the $186.1 billion total 2026 local ad forecast and the $9.7 billion political spending estimate.
- Radio Ink, BIA Raises Radio's 2026 Local Ad Forecast On Political Strength (April 9, 2026): the Rick Ducey quote.
- Marketron, The 2025 Radio Revenue Outlook and Review: 2025 over-the-air and digital radio revenue figures.
- Radio Ink, Borrell: Local Digital Ad Growth Slows as Share Wars Begin (May 5, 2026): the Corey Elliott quote and the 72% digital-share figure.
- Barrett Media, Borell Associates: 77% of Local Advertisers to Steady or Increase Spending (July 22, 2026) and Radio Ink, Borrell: Small Business Sentiment Sours, Ad Spend Doesn't (August 12, 2026): the small-business sentiment-versus-spend data.
- PPC Land, Podcasts to take 48% of US digital audio ad spend by 2030, VAB report shows: podcast and digital audio ad spend forecasts.
Corrections
Figures above are reproduced from the cited BIA Advisory Services, Borrell Associates, and industry press reports with their original attribution; BIA and Borrell use different methodologies and their specific numbers should not be treated as interchangeable. Quotations are reproduced from the cited published sources. Spot an error? Tell us through the contact page and we will correct it with a note.