What a Lead Actually Costs in 2026

Every platform quotes you a cost per lead. None of them quote you a cost per booked job. On the cheapest channel in the trade, the gap between those two numbers is 4.4 times.

You spent £600 on leads last month. You booked four jobs. Somebody asks what your cost per lead is and you say "about thirty quid" because that is what the platform dashboard says.

Your cost per lead was £30. Your cost per job was £150. Those are wildly different businesses, and only one of the two numbers pays your wages.

This post gives you the real 2026 figures for four ways of buying work, then the four-line worksheet to check your own. No channel comes out clean.

01 / The four prices nobody quotes you

Start with paid search, because it is the most measured channel in the trades and the numbers are public.

The 2026 benchmark for consumer home services is $144 per lead. That is an average across every trade and every campaign type, which is why it is nearly useless as a target. Break it apart and the range is enormous.

Note the bottom two rows. HVAC leads from people searching your company name cost about $34. HVAC leads from people searching "AC repair near me" cost $149. That is a 4.4× spread inside one Google account.

Branded search is not lead generation. It is a toll you pay to appear above your own name. Strip it out and your real acquisition cost is the non-branded number.

Now the UK lead platforms, where the pricing model is different and the sticker price is much smaller.

A £9 Bark lead against a $149 Google lead looks like an easy decision. It is not, and the reason is the next section.

A note on currency: the paid-search figures are US-sourced and the platform figures are UK-sourced. Do not convert them and compare. The ratios inside each set are the point, not the absolute numbers.

02 / A shared lead is a quarter of a lead

When Bark or Checkatrade sells you a lead, it sells the same lead to three or four other firms in your area. This is the business model, not a bug. The platform is paid four times for one job.

So the £18 you paid did not buy you a job. It bought you a one-in-four chance at a job, against three rivals who all got the customer's number at the same minute.

Win your fair share, one in four, and your £18 lead is a £72 job. That is before you count the two hours of quoting on the three you lost.

There is a second cost, and it is worse than the first. Four firms got the same number, so the customer is now shopping on price. You do not win that job by being the best boiler engineer in the town. You win it by being the cheapest, or by ringing first.

03 / Cost per lead is a vanity metric

Here is the number that should end the argument. It comes from $6.72M of Google Local Services Ads spend across 888 home service contractors, measured in February 2026.

Local Services Ads are the best channel on this list by lead price. They convert at 20–25% against 6–8% for ordinary paid search. And they still cost 4.4 times more per customer than per lead.

Three things sit inside that gap, and none of them appear on any platform dashboard: leads that were shared, leads you never answered, and leads you quoted and lost.

You control two of the three. That is the good news buried in a bad number.

04 / Rented versus owned: the line that crosses

Every channel in this post falls into one of two buckets, and the difference is not price. It is what happens to the price over time.

Rented channels are an auction, so their price only moves one way. Cost per lead rose for 69% of advertisers last year, by an average of 10.5%.

Owned channels behave in the opposite way, and the first three months are genuinely worse. Here is the shape, honestly drawn.

Read the left-hand side of FIG 04 carefully, because it is the honest part. In month one an owned channel is far more expensive per job than buying leads. You are paying a fixed fee against almost no results.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. The argument for owning the channel is not that it is cheap on day 30. It is that month 12 exists, and by then the same fee is buying three times the work.

05 / What the map box actually costs

The map pack is often sold as "free traffic". It is not free, and here is the real bill.

Local SEO leads average $20 to $40 against $55 to $110 for Google Ads, and 75% of small businesses report it produces more leads than paid advertising. Those are the good numbers.

The cost behind them is a retainer of $1,500 to $3,500 a month, with single-location contractors usually at $2,000 to $2,500. That is not zero. It is a fixed monthly commitment you pay in month one, when it produces almost nothing.

There is one part that genuinely is free, and it is the part most firms skip. Claiming the profile, filling every field, posting weekly and answering reviews costs nothing but time. We covered that groundwork in the free listing post.

Do that first. If the free version of the channel produces nothing after 60 honest days, do not buy the paid version of it.

06 / Your four-line worksheet

Open last month's numbers. One channel at a time, four lines. It takes about ten minutes and it settles most marketing arguments permanently.

Now the rule of thumb to judge the answer against. Compare cost per booked job to your average job value.

1. Under 10% of job value. The channel is working. Spend more on it this month.
2. 10% to 20%. Acceptable, if the customer comes back or the job leads to bigger work.
3. 20% to 30%. Marginal. Fix your answer rate and close rate before you spend another pound.
4. Over 30%. You are working for the platform. Cut it or renegotiate it.

Run the same four lines on every channel you use. Most firms find one channel quietly carrying the business and two quietly draining it. You cannot see that from a cost-per-lead figure, which is exactly why the platforms report it.

What to do this week

• Run the four lines on your single biggest channel. One month, real numbers.
• Split your Google Ads report into branded and non-branded. Judge only the non-branded cost.
• Count how many of last month's leads you answered inside ten minutes. That is your cheapest available fix.
• Claim and fill every field on your Google Business Profile before you buy a single extra lead.