How Much Should Contractors Pay for Qualified Leads?

The first question contractors ask is what a lead costs. The more useful question is what a lead is worth to their company, because the same price can be cheap for one window company and ruinous for another in the next county.

The three numbers you need first

You cannot borrow these from an industry article. Pull them from your own last twelve months.

1. 1.Average job value. Total revenue divided by jobs sold, for the trade you are buying leads for.
2. 2.Gross margin. What is left after materials and install labor, before overhead.
3. 3.Leads per sold job. How many leads your team works to produce one signed contract. If you do not track it, count backwards: leads worked, appointments set, quotes given, jobs sold.

If the third number does not exist yet, that is the first thing to fix. Without it, every lead purchase is a guess.

The arithmetic

The ceiling per lead is:

(Average job value x gross margin x target marketing share) divided by leads per sold job.

Target marketing share is the portion of gross profit you are willing to spend to acquire the job. That is a decision, not a formula. A company chasing growth might accept a large share. A company protecting cash might not.

A worked example

The figures below are placeholders chosen to show the arithmetic. They are not market data. Replace every number with your own before drawing any conclusion.

Read that as a ceiling, not a target. A lead priced at the ceiling uses up the entire allowance and leaves nothing for a bad month. Work to a target well under it, and use the ceiling as the line you will not cross.

Two things move the answer more than any negotiation with a supplier:

• Leads per sold job. Improving from eight to six raises the ceiling in this example by a third without changing anything about the leads. That improvement comes from calling faster and quoting better, not from buying differently.
• Job value. Selling whole-home projects instead of partial ones raises the gross profit the lead has to justify.

Why lead prices differ between suppliers

• Trade. A roofing lead and an ADU lead have different job values and different advertising costs behind them.
• Market. Advertising costs more where more companies are bidding for the same homeowner.
• Criteria strictness. Every criterion you add removes some homeowners from the pool. Tighter criteria cost more per lead and waste less of your team's time.
• Exclusivity. A lead sent to one contractor per lead costs more than the same inquiry sold to four. That comparison is worked through in exclusive versus shared leads.
• Order size. How many leads the order is for.

This is why our pricing page explains the model rather than publishing a number. A price quoted without knowing your trade, service area, criteria and order size is a guess dressed up as an offer.

What the published price lists actually say

Most of what you will find searching for home improvement lead costs is a range with no source attached. The figures below are different: they are lifted from one seller's own two programme pages, which price the same 132 categories twice, once shared and once exclusive. Read on 20 October 2026 from its Pay Per Lead programme page and its Exclusive programme page, in that seller's own category names rather than ours.

Three things fall out of that table, and they are more useful than any single number in it.

Exclusivity roughly doubles the price, in every category and not just some. Whatever else is arguable about lead pricing, the market has already priced sole access to a homeowner at about twice a share of one. That is worth holding against the usual claim that exclusive leads are a comfort premium. Our own working of the same comparison is in exclusive leads versus shared leads.

Job size moves the price inside one trade more than you might expect. Window Installation, Multiple runs about two and a half times Window Installation, Single on the same list. The homeowner replacing one window and the homeowner replacing fourteen both call it window replacement, and they are not the same appointment. That is the argument for settling project size in your criteria before launch rather than discovering it on the first call.

Roof repair is about half the price of roof installation, across all four roof types, on both programmes. If your company does not want repair work, paying an installation price for a repair request is the most common way to overpay in roofing.

ADU leads are not publicly priced anywhere we can find. Those 132 categories include no ADU, accessory dwelling unit or granny flat entry, and no other seller publishes one. The nearest listed proxies are Home Additions and Garage Construction, both in the table above. Treat those as the shape of the market rather than an ADU price: an ADU is a longer sale with a planning stage in front of it, and the closest published category is not the same product. Anyone quoting you a confident national ADU lead price is estimating. What the sale actually looks like is in ADU contractor leads and the long sale.

A last word on sourcing. Searching this question returns ranges that disagree with each other by a factor of ten, and almost none of them names whose price list it is reading or when. If a page gives you a lead price without both, it is a guess wearing a number.

What quietly raises your real cost per lead

The invoice is not the whole cost. These are the leaks that show up in cost per sold job:

• Slow first contact. A lead called the next day has had a day to call someone else.
• No named owner. Leads landing in a shared inbox that everyone assumes someone else is working.
• Loose criteria. Paying for drives to projects you were never going to sell.
• Buying past capacity. Leads bought when the calendar is full can go cold before they are scheduled.
• No source tracking. If every lead is "marketing", you cannot tell which channel earns its budget.

Fix those before renegotiating a price. They can be worth more than a discount.

How to judge a lead source fairly

1. 1.Agree criteria that match the jobs you want. See what makes a qualified lead.
2. 2.Order a number of leads your team can work well, not the biggest block available.
3. 3.Tag the source in your CRM so every lead from that order is identifiable a year from now.
4. 4.Run it for at least one full sales cycle, including the time between quote and decision.
5. 5.Judge it on cost per sold job, then compare with your other sources on the same basis.
6. 6.Change one thing at a time, between orders. Review the results, then agree one change before the next order, such as the service area or the order size.

What no price can buy

No lead supplier can promise a signed contract, and you should be wary of one that does. What a supplier can be held to is the definition of a qualified lead, the exclusivity of it, the delivery method, and what happens when a lead misses the agreed criteria. At Home Lead Supply, if a lead misses the agreed criteria, it does not count toward your order, and another qualified lead takes its place.

The rest is your sales process, and it is where two companies buying identical leads can end up far apart.

The short version

Work out your own ceiling before you ask for a price. Judge any source on cost per sold job over a full sales cycle. Improve leads per sold job before you shop for a cheaper lead, because speed and follow up can move the number further than price negotiation.

When you are ready to compare a real offer against your own math, tell us your trade, your service area, and the jobs you want in the contractor application, or read how it works first.