Guide
What trades actually pay per lead across the main platforms, why the cheap ones are usually the dear ones, and how to work out your real cost per job.
Ask what a lead costs and you get a number between five pounds and sixty, which is useless on its own. The price of a lead tells you almost nothing, because the same enquiry costs you a very different amount depending on whether three other firms got it, whether anybody answers the phone, and whether the job was ever real.
The number that matters is what you paid, in total, for each job you actually won. Here is how to work that out, and what the going rates look like.
Cost per lead is your total spend divided by the number of enquiries it produced. Simple enough. The trap is that it says nothing about quality, and the cheapest cost per lead in this market usually belongs to whoever counts the loosest things as leads.
A form fill with a mobile number nobody answers is a lead. A homeowner who has been spoken to, owns the property and wants a price this month is also a lead. They go in the same column and they are not the same thing, which is why cost per job won is the only figure worth comparing between suppliers. We go into that split properly in exclusive leads vs shared leads.
Rough going rates as of November 2026. These are ranges rather than prices because none of the platforms publish trade pricing in a form you can hold them to, and what you pay varies by trade, postcode and how competitive your area is. Treat them as a sense of scale, not a quote.
| How you pay | Rough cost | Shared? |
|---|---|---|
| Directory membership (e.g. Checkatrade) | Monthly subscription, tier and postcodes | Yes — homeowner picks from a list |
| Pay per shortlist (e.g. MyBuilder) | A fee each time you are shortlisted | Yes — typically several trades |
| Credits to quote (e.g. Rated People) | Plan plus credits per job | Yes |
| Credits to unlock a contact (e.g. Bark) | Credits spent before anyone answers | Yes |
| Your own Meta ads, run in-house | Ad spend plus your time | No |
| Managed ads with phone qualification | Ad spend plus a management fee | No, if exclusivity is written in |
For what it is worth, our own measured cost per qualified lead across live campaigns runs from £3.86 in joinery to £36.99 on a specialist warm-roof campaign, averaging £14.28. Those are real figures from the accounts, not a brochure range, and the expensive ones are published alongside the cheap ones on our results page. Trade by trade, they are on the roofing, landscaping, paving and joinery pages.
Three things make a cheap lead expensive, and they compound.
A £40 exclusive enquiry that somebody has already spoken to, converting at one in three, costs you £120 a job. A £12 shared one converting at one in twelve costs you £144 a job and a great deal more of your evening. The cheap one lost.
Take last quarter. Add up everything you spent on getting work — memberships, credits, lead fees, agency fees, ad spend. Then count the jobs you actually won from it. Divide. That figure, not the price of a lead, is what to compare against anything anyone sells you.
Most trades who do this honestly for the first time find the number is two to three times what they assumed, because the memberships and the lost shortlists never felt like job costs. They are. Our own fees are on the pricing page if you want a figure to put against yours.
Questions
For qualified, exclusive work, anything from under £10 to around £35 is normal depending on trade and area. A low figure is only good if the enquiries are exclusive and somebody has spoken to them — otherwise it is a cheap number attached to an expensive outcome.
Usually, yes, and the arithmetic is simple: a lead shared four ways needs to be a quarter of the price to break even, and it rarely is. You are also quoting against three other firms on price, which costs you margin on the jobs you do win.
Enough for a campaign to get out of its learning phase, which realistically means several hundred pounds across a few weeks rather than a small amount over a weekend. Stopping and restarting throws away the learning and you pay for it twice.
No. A flat monthly management fee plus your ad spend, which goes to Meta rather than to us. The cost does not rise with the number of enquiries, which is the main reason our clients’ cost per job falls over time.
Check your area
Running the same ads for two roofers in one town bids them against each other and makes both of their leads more expensive. So we do not do it. Tell us where you work and we will say straight away whether it is open.
Six questions, about a minute.
You will need £1,000 a month to put behind the ads.
Below that the guarantee does not hold, so we do not take the work.
Free, and useful whether or not you ever ring us
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