What a Lead Actually Costs in the Trades

Almost nobody in this industry will tell you what a lead costs, and the handful who publish a number usually cannot tell you where it came from. We went looking for figures with an actual sample size behind them, because “industry average cost per lead” repeated across a dozen agency blogs is not data, it is an echo.

Here is what we found, what it means for your market, and the reasons a single national number is close to useless even when it is honestly reported.

Key takeaways

• The most defensible cost per lead data for home services comes from LocaliQ’s home services search advertising benchmarks, built from 3,211 US search campaigns running between April 2024 and March 2025.
• In LocaliQ’s benchmarks, HVAC runs $127.74 per lead, plumbing $129.02, roofing and gutters $228.15, and electricians $93.69, and every one of those figures covers Google Search ads only.
• Electricians pay the highest cost per click in the group at $12.18 but the lowest cost per lead because 9.08% of clicks convert, while roofing converts at just 3.70%.
• Reporting on Local Services Ads found lead costs up roughly 40% since 2023 in competitive markets, contractor adoption rising from 28% in 2021 to about 70%, and 67% of contractors reporting worse lead quality.
• No credible public cost per lead figure exists for shared lead marketplaces, because Angi does not disclose lead pricing and the Federal Trade Commission’s case documents against HomeAdvisor redact lead price and conversion rates.
• The fair comparison is your own trade, in your own market, against your own previous quarter, and cost per booked job matters more than cost per lead.

The numbers, with the sample size attached

The most defensible dataset we located is LocaliQ’s home services search advertising benchmarks, built from 3,211 US search campaigns running between April 2024 and March 2025, with a minimum of 103 campaigns per category. That methodology is stated openly, which already puts it ahead of most of what ranks for these questions.

• HVAC: $9.68 cost per click, $127.74 cost per lead, 6.56% conversion rate
• Plumbing: $10.49 per click, $129.02 per lead, 7.63% conversion
• Roofing and gutters: $10.70 per click, $228.15 per lead, 3.70% conversion
• Electricians: $12.18 per click, $93.69 per lead, 9.08% conversion
• Home services overall: $7.85 per click, $90.92 per lead, 7.33% conversion

One thing to be clear about before you write any of those down: these are Google Search ads only. Not Local Services Ads, not organic, not shared leads. Mixing channels into one “cost per lead” is the single most common way these figures get misused, including by people quoting them at you.

Read the spread, not the average

Look at electricians and roofers side by side. An electrician pays the highest cost per click in the group and gets the lowest cost per lead, because nearly one in ten clicks converts. A roofer pays a similar click price and pays two and a half times as much per lead, because fewer than four in a hundred convert.

That gap is not an advertising problem. It is the shape of the purchase. Somebody with a dead outlet is ready now. Somebody pricing a roof is beginning a decision that will take weeks and involve two or three other companies. No amount of ad optimisation collapses that difference, and any agency that promises to bring your roofing cost per lead down to the electrical number is either confused or counting on you being.

The practical version: compare yourself to your own trade, in your own market, against your own previous quarter. Nothing else is a fair comparison.

What actually moves your number

1. Market density. A metro with eight well-funded competitors bidding on “emergency plumber” produces a different click price than a county with two. Published national figures flatten this completely, and it is often the biggest single variable.
2. Season. A July HVAC lead and a shoulder-season HVAC lead do not cost the same thing. Judging a channel on one month, particularly your worst month, is how good channels get cancelled.
3. Job type. Service call leads and replacement leads have different costs and wildly different values. If your reporting blends them you cannot tell whether an expensive lead was actually your most profitable one.
4. Channel. The same business can run $57 leads on one platform and $183 on another in the same week. We laid out those figures, and the reason the cheaper one is not automatically the better one, in the piece on what a booked job really costs.
5. Branded versus non-branded. Leads from people searching your company name are cheap and largely not incremental, because many of those people were going to call you anyway. An agency reporting blended cost per lead without separating branded traffic is showing you a flattering number that means very little. We wrote about that particular sleight of hand in what your marketing report is hiding.

The costs are moving, and not in your favour

Whatever your number is today, the direction of travel is worth knowing. Reporting on Local Services Ads found lead costs up roughly 40% since 2023 in competitive markets, contractor adoption rising from 28% in 2021 to about 70%, and 67% of contractors reporting lead quality getting worse.

That combination, more bidders chasing the same homeowners with declining satisfaction about what arrives, is the actual story of paid lead generation in this trade right now. It also explains why the companies weathering it best are the ones with a channel nobody can bid them out of. And it is why the recent changes to Local Services Ads, which removed two of the dispute categories contractors used to win, land harder than they look.

What we could not verify, and will not pretend to know

We went looking for cost per lead figures on the shared lead marketplaces and could not responsibly publish any. Angi does not disclose lead pricing. The Federal Trade Commission’s own case documents against HomeAdvisor redact the average lead price and the conversion rates, which means every specific marketplace figure circulating online traces back to somebody’s blog rather than a source.

We also could not find a credible published figure for cost per lead on Local Services Ads across the industry, or for the organic share of home service leads. Those numbers exist inside individual companies. They do not exist in public in any form we would put our name to. Anyone quoting them to you with confidence is quoting an agency blog.

The number that matters more than this one

Cost per lead is the number your agency reports. Cost per booked job is the number that pays your people. A $57 lead that books 44% of the time is cheaper than a $30 lead that books 8% of the time, and it is not close. If you only ever fix one thing about how you measure marketing, make it that.

We talk with home service owners every day, and the most common gap we find is not a bad channel. It is an owner who knows their cost per lead to the dollar and has never once calculated what a booked job costs them.

Send us your last three months of marketing invoices and reports and we will work out what you are actually paying per booked job, by channel. Free, and whether or not you ever hire us. If your numbers are healthy we will tell you that and you will have spent one email finding out. Call 866-676-9134 or send them through here.

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