Pick an Agency · Insights · CHART · Aug 2026
Do Bigger Agencies Get Better Ratings? Team Size vs. Average Rating in 2026
Analysis of 29,848 rated agencies shows how team size relates to average client ratings across five size bands.
Agencies of all sizes average between 4.99 and 5.00 stars, meaning team size has virtually no effect on client ratings in 2026.
A common assumption in professional services is that larger agencies, with more resources and specialist staff, earn stronger client satisfaction scores. To test this, we looked at 29,848 rated agencies across five team-size bands in the Pick an Agency directory. The data tells a different story than the assumption suggests.
Ratings Are Nearly Identical Across All Size Bands
Across all five team-size categories, average ratings sit within a single hundredth of a point of each other. Agencies with 1 to 10 employees, 11 to 50 employees, and those with 500 or more employees all share an average rating of exactly 5.00. Agencies in the 51 to 200 and 201 to 500 bands average 4.99. The spread between the highest and lowest band is 0.01 stars.
In practical terms, a client choosing an agency based on average rating alone would find no meaningful difference between a solo-founder boutique and a 500-person enterprise firm. The data provides no support for the idea that size predicts satisfaction scores.
Larger Agencies Collect More Reviews Per Agency
While ratings converge, the volume of reviews per agency does rise with size. Agencies in the 1 to 10 band average 27 reviews each, while those in the 201 to 500 band average 43 and the 500-plus band also averages 38. The 11 to 50 band averages 30 reviews and the 51 to 200 band averages 31.
This means larger agencies have ratings built on a wider base of client feedback, which could make their scores marginally more stable. However, because all bands converge on the same top-end scores, the additional review volume has not produced differentiated outcomes.
Sample Sizes Vary Widely by Band
The 11 to 50 employee band is by far the largest group, with 16,550 rated agencies, followed by the 1 to 10 band at 10,231. The mid-to-large bands are considerably smaller: 2,243 agencies in the 51 to 200 band, 376 in the 201 to 500 band, and 448 in the 500-plus band.
The two largest bands account for the overwhelming majority of the sample, so their 5.00 averages anchor the overall picture. Conclusions drawn from the 201 to 500 and 500-plus bands should be treated with more caution given their smaller agency counts.
What This Means for Agency Buyers
For clients using ratings as a shortlist filter, team size is not a useful proxy for satisfaction. A 5.00-star rating is achievable and common at every scale, from a 10-person shop to a firm with more than 500 employees.
Buyers looking to differentiate agencies should look beyond aggregate star scores and examine review count, recency, and the specific services reviewed, since the headline rating figure is effectively uniform across all size bands in this dataset.
The data
| team_size | rated | avg_rating | avg_reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500+ | 448 | 5.00 | 38 |
| 1-10 | 10231 | 5.00 | 27 |
| 11-50 | 16550 | 5.00 | 30 |
| 201-500 | 376 | 4.99 | 43 |
| 51-200 | 2243 | 4.99 | 31 |
Methodology
Data covers 29,848 agencies listed in the Pick an Agency directory that have at least one rating, grouped into five self-reported team-size bands. Ratings and review counts are directory-reported averages and may reflect survivor or ceiling effects given the concentration of scores at or near 5.00.
- The 201-500 and 500+ bands each contain fewer than 500 agencies, making them less statistically robust than the smaller-agency bands.
- Ratings cluster at 5.00 across all bands, suggesting a possible ceiling effect or self-selection by agencies most motivated to collect reviews.
Free to cite with a link to Pick an Agency. Methodology details: /methodology.
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