Contractor leads: buy them, or own where they come from

Contractor leads come from six places. They are referrals, marketplaces like Angi and Thumbtack, pay-per-lead sellers, paid Google ads, your Google Business Profile and AI search tools. Reported prices run from free to a few hundred dollars a lead. The number that tells you if you made money is cost per signed job.

I’m Julian. I sold exclusive phone leads to roofing, HVAC, plumbing and remodeling contractors for years. I listened to thousands of the recorded calls. This page shows what each source charges and how to run the math on your own invoices. It also shows when to put lead money into local SEO on accounts you own instead.

What a lead costs and what a signed job costs

A lead price tells you very little on its own. The real number is cost per signed job: everything you spent on a source, fees included, divided by the jobs you signed from it. A cheap lead that rarely closes can cost more per job than an expensive lead that closes often. So run the math source by source.

The formula in one line

Cost per signed job = total spend ÷ jobs signed.

Total spend means all of it. The yearly membership. Every lead fee. Ad spend. Any setup charge.

Here is a simple case. You spend $2,000 and get 20 leads. That is $100 a lead. You sign 4 jobs. That is $500 per signed job.

Now keep the same $100 lead and double your close rate from 20% to 40%. Your cost per signed job drops to $250. The vendor didn’t change a thing. You did.

Most owners know what they pay per lead. Far fewer know what they pay per job. That second number is the one to bring to every vendor call.

Shared vs exclusive contractor leads, worked example

A shared lead is sold to several contractors at once. An exclusive lead is sold to one. Exclusive contractor leads cost more per lead, but that alone doesn’t make them better or worse.

One roofing marketing firm ran a worked example. The inputs are examples, not benchmarks, but the logic holds:

	Shared lead	Exclusive lead
Price per lead	$90	$225
Homeowners you reach	70%	85%
Roofers bidding	4	2
Reached homeowners you sign	12.5%	25%
Lead cost per signed job	about $1,029	about $1,059
Add 2 hours per reached homeowner at $50 an hour	about $1,829	about $1,459

The exclusive lead costs 2.5 times as much. Per signed job, it costs about the same. Count your time and it comes out ahead.

The break-even rule is short. An exclusive lead is worth up to the shared price times how many more jobs per lead it brings you. In this example, that is about $219. Pay more than that and shared wins. Pay less and exclusive wins.

Watch the appointment math, too. One roofer on r/Roofing was quoted $130 per exclusive residential lead by a seller who claimed 20% to 25% become appointments. That works out to $520 to $650 in lead fees per appointment, before you close a single one.

And keep this in mind: exclusive means fewer competitors, not none. The seller can’t stop the homeowner from calling two other roofers. Before you sign anything, compare the terms different lead services offer.

Where contractor leads come from, and what each charges

There are six main sources. Referrals cost time, not cash. Marketplaces and lead sellers charge per lead. Google charges per lead or per click. Your Google Business Profile and AI search charge nothing per lead, but they take work and months to build. The table shows reported prices and who reported them.

Source	How you pay	Reported cost per lead	Who reported it
Referrals and repeat customers	Your time to ask and follow up	Free in cash	Common practice
Angi and HomeAdvisor	Yearly fee of $287.99 plus a fee per lead	$15 to $120, roofers report $65 to $300	FTC (fee); agencies, software vendors and roofers on forums (prices)
Thumbtack	No membership; you set your lead price	$15 to $80	Software vendors and roofing marketing firms
Pay-per-lead sellers	Per lead or per phone call	Roofing: $75 to $110+ shared, $150 to $300+ exclusive	ActiveProspect, a lead software vendor
Google Local Services Ads	Per valid lead, weekly budget	$53 average; $39 to $59 by trade	SearchLight Digital, a marketing vendor
Google search ads	Per click	$90.92 average; roofing $228.15	LocaliQ, an ad agency
Google Business Profile and local search	Your time or a monthly agency fee	No per-lead charge	Google’s free listing
AI search (ChatGPT and others)	Same work as your site and reviews	No per-lead charge	Built on what you already own

Referrals and repeat customers

Referrals are the oldest source. In the 2025 Homeowner Roofing Survey from Roofing Contractor, 79% of homeowners said they would look for a roofer through word-of-mouth referrals. 54% would go back to a firm they used before. And 72% of roofers said word of mouth is their main way to get work. That survey covers roofing only.

These are the best free contractor leads you’ll get. The cost is effort. You have to ask, follow up and thank people. The catch is that you can’t buy more referrals next week when the schedule goes thin.

Marketplaces like Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack

Marketplaces sell home improvement contractor leads from homeowners who fill out a request. Angi and HomeAdvisor charge a yearly fee of $287.99 plus a fee for each lead, according to the FTC. Angi publishes no price list. Agencies and software vendors report $15 to $120 a lead. Roofers report more, from $65 up to about $300.

The billing rules matter more than the price. According to Angi’s help center, as summarized by one agency, each request goes to up to four or five pros. You are charged once you and the homeowner both show interest, whether or not you respond. Angi won’t credit a lead when the homeowner doesn’t answer, hired someone else first, or is still collecting quotes.

Thumbtack works differently. It charges no membership, and you set your own lead price. Its help page says “the price you set for a lead is the exact amount you’ll pay.”

One more thing for the record. In a 2023 FTC order against HomeAdvisor, the FTC alleged the company told pros its leads became jobs at rates much higher than it could back up. HomeAdvisor agreed to pay up to $7.2 million.

If you want the short answer on the best app for contractor leads, Angi and Thumbtack are the two most contractors try first. The best one is the one with the lowest cost per signed job in your trade and your town. You only learn that by tracking it.

Pay-per-lead and phone-lead sellers

These companies run their own ads, collect homeowner requests, and sell them to you per lead or per call. This is the business I was in. When you buy contractor leads this way, price depends on trade, job type and whether the lead is shared.

For roofing, ActiveProspect, a lead software vendor, gives about $75 to $110 or more for a shared lead and $150 to $300 or more for an exclusive one.

From the selling side, I can tell you “exclusive” means whatever the contract says. On Modernize, for example, the homeowner agrees to calls from “Modernize and up to four home improvement companies.” Get the seller’s definition in writing.

Google Local Services Ads and search ads

Google Local Services Ads (LSA) are the ads with the Google Guaranteed badge at the top of the page. You pay per lead: a call, message or booking request. Google sets the price and you set a weekly budget. Google search ads are different. You pay for each click, whether or not the person calls.

SearchLight Digital’s February 2026 LSA benchmark covered 888 contractors and 126,650 leads. The average lead cost $53, from $39 for electrical to $59 for drain and sewer. Cost per paying customer was $233. On regular Google search ads, the same vendor found $149 per non-branded lead and $804 per customer.

LocaliQ’s home services benchmarks put the average search ad lead at $90.92, and roofing at $228.15. The two data sets use different methods. Treat them as ranges, not a final price.

For budgeting LSA, one agency gives this rule: monthly max equals your weekly budget times 30.4, divided by 7. A $750 weekly budget is about $3,257 a month. You can dispute leads that are clearly invalid.

Google Business Profile and local search

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that shows in the map results. Setting it up costs nothing. Ranking takes months of work on the profile, your website and your reviews, and no one can promise you a date.

The bar is lower than most owners think. In our study of 9,700 contractor Google profiles, 14% of contractors already in the top 20 had no website listed. 8% were rated 4.0 stars or lower. Those were the ones ranking.

Reviews carry a lot of weight. In BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey, 47% of people said they won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. 54% go to the business’s website after reading good reviews. Both are things you control.

AI search

AI search means tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers. They give a short list of companies when someone asks. In the BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 45% of US consumers said they used ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations. A year earlier it was 6%.

ChatGPT does not sell leads. But it can name your company when someone asks. From what I’ve seen in search work, these tools tend to name businesses they can check. That means a real website, steady reviews and listings that agree with each other. Nobody can promise a mention. If you want to dig in, read about getting found in AI search.

Lead costs by trade

Lead costs change by trade because job size and competition change. Roofing leads cost the most in the reported data. On Google search ads, LocaliQ puts roofing at $228.15 a lead, against $127.74 to $129.02 for HVAC and plumbing. Roofing, HVAC and plumbing each have a page with the full numbers, and every other trade has its own industry page with what owned search costs and includes. Here is the short version.

Roofing

Reported roofing contractor leads run from about $15 to $300, depending on the source and whether they’re shared. LocaliQ puts roofing search ad leads at $228.15, with clicks at $10.70. One agency that runs LSA plans on about $79 a roofing lead.

One buyer on r/RoofingSales, germantiger22, says he buys leads for three roofing companies. He posted his count: “spent 2500 for 37 leads of which 9 closed. We are talking full roof installation at an average of 22,000 per deal.” That is about $68 a lead and about $278 a signed job. It is one buyer’s numbers, not a market price. The full breakdown is on our roofing leads page.

HVAC

HVAC contractor leads on LSA averaged $51 in SearchLight’s February 2026 benchmark. 44% of those leads booked, and the average ticket was $2,110. February is heating season, which lifts HVAC numbers. On search ads, LocaliQ puts air conditioning leads at $127.74 and heating at $129.02. See the HVAC leads page for more.

Plumbing

Plumbing LSA leads averaged $57 in the same benchmark. 44.5% booked, with an average ticket of $1,714. LocaliQ puts plumbing search ad leads at $129.02, with 7.63% of clicks turning into a lead. See the plumbing leads page for more.

Remodeling

Remodeling contractor leads are the hardest to price, because jobs range from a bathroom to a whole house. LocaliQ’s general construction category runs $165.67 per search ad lead. Remodelers can find more on our remodeling page, and can compare remodeling software with published prices for running the jobs they win.

Why callback speed decides who wins bought leads

On shared leads, the first contractor to reach the homeowner usually gets the job. On every bought lead, a slow callback burns the price you paid. Speed is the one part of the math you fully control. It moves your close rate, and close rate moves your cost per signed job more than the lead price does.

I listened to thousands of the recorded calls from the leads I sold. The pattern was plain. The roofers who made money on bought leads called back first, within minutes. The slow ones lost the job to whoever called first. Same leads, same price, very different results.

Angi says the same thing to its own pros. It tells them most closed leads go to the first pro to contact the homeowner. It also says calling within 15 minutes “more than doubles your chances of connecting.”

Roofers who buy leads say it more bluntly. SnacksnStocks on r/RoofingSales: “If you’re not gonna be immediate to the phones & I mean with in a couple minutes of receiving it… Don’t bother. You’ll end up hating it.”

And traker998 in the same forum: “The key to buying leads, exclusive or not, is to follow up in exhaustion. It’s a numbers game and often involves 10 phone calls before an appointment.”

Go back to the shared lead example. Say calling first lifts your win rate from 1 in 4 to 1 in 3. Your cost per signed job drops from $1,029 to $771. No new vendor. Just faster calls.

Before you buy another lead, set up these five things:

1. One named person who answers new leads during work hours, even when you’re on a job.
2. An automatic text-back that goes out the moment a lead lands.
3. Lead alerts on your phone, not only in an inbox you check at night.
4. A goal of calling every lead within minutes, with the time logged.
5. A follow-up plan of several calls and texts over a few days for the ones who don’t pick up.

How to judge any lead source with your own numbers

Track every lead from every source to a signed job, or a lost one, for 90 days. Then compare each source’s cost per signed job to the gross profit on a typical job. If the cost per job eats too much of your profit, cut the source or fix your callback speed first.

To set a ceiling before you buy, use this formula:

Max cost per lead = average job revenue × gross margin × share of gross profit you’ll spend to win a job × close rate.

Say your average job is $5,000 at a 40% margin. That’s $2,000 gross profit. You’re willing to spend 25% of it, or $500, to win a job. You close 25% of leads. Your max is $125 a lead. Anything above that loses money, no matter how good the leads sound. If you do not know your margin yet, here is how to figure your markup and margin.

Job size changes everything. Keep the same margin and close rate, and spend 20% of gross profit. A $500 repair supports about $10 a lead. A $10,000 project supports about $200.

A close rate in a sales pitch is a claim, not a fact. That’s what the FTC order was about. So ask every seller these four questions, and get the answers in writing:

1. How many other contractors get each lead, and at the same time?
2. Which leads get credited, and do credits expire?
3. What else shows up on the bill, like yearly fees, setup or minimums?
4. What does it cost to leave, and how much notice do you need?

For side-by-side vendor terms, see our comparison of contractor lead services.

What a year of lead spend builds if you own it

Lead spend is rent. The leads stop the day the payments stop. The same money spent on your website, Google profile and reviews builds things that stay with you. But owned channels start slower. They take months to show results, and nobody can honestly promise when.

Here is where I land. Buying leads is a fair way to fill the schedule this month and a poor way to build a business for next year. Buy them while you can call back in minutes and track every signed job. And move part of that same money into something you own.

mason_bourne, who says he runs a marketing company, put the ceiling on bought leads well on r/RoofingSales: “if you are very fast to respond and have mid to low-end pricing, you will make enough to justify it, but not enough to grow.”

Take $36,000, which is $3,000 a month for a year. Here’s what it buys in rented leads, using the numbers above:

Where the $36,000 goes	Cost per customer or job	About how many
Google LSA (SearchLight average)	$233 per paying customer	154 customers
Google search ads, non-branded (SearchLight)	$804 per customer	44 customers
Shared or exclusive roofing leads (worked example)	$1,029 to $1,059 per signed job	34 to 35 jobs
One roofing lead buyer’s count (r/RoofingSales)	$278 per signed job	130 jobs

Those jobs are real money. When the spending stops, though, so do the leads.

Now the same $36,000 on the Growth plan at Contractor Lead Partners (CLP). Month one is onboarding. In months two through twelve, the work comes to 44 new pieces of content and 44 existing pages optimized, plus 44 Google Business Profile posts for each location. It also covers 22 to 33 earned links, a review request system, your top 40 citations fixed, a technical fix sprint followed by a monthly crawl, AI search tracking of 25 prompts a month, call tracking with a monthly call review, a monthly rank grid and report, and a quarterly strategy call. That’s what gets done, not a promise of what it brings. Every account sits in your name. We hold manager access only.

CLP’s plans are $3,000 or $5,000 a month, all listed on our pricing page. We don’t guarantee rankings, leads or revenue. Nobody honest does.

A roofer on the RoofingTalk forum said it in 2019: “The best approach is for a roofing contractor to own their market.” Another poster in the same thread wrote: “We switched our focus to websites as our primary means of new customers a few years back and that’s worked much better.”

What to do with your lead invoices today

Pull last year’s lead invoices and your list of signed jobs. For each source, add up the total spend, fees included, and divide it by the jobs you signed from that source. Then count how many of those leads you called back within a few minutes.

If your callbacks are slow, fix that before you blame the vendor. Send the four questions above to any seller you’re paying. Then decide what share of next year’s lead money goes into something you own, and open the page for your trade in the section above.

By trade

• HVAC Leads, Where They Come From and What They Cost: HVAC leads run about $15 to $300 each. See Angi, Thumbtack, Google and call-seller prices, and why cost per booked job is the number to judge.
• Plumbing Leads, Where They Come From and What They Cost: Plumbing leads cost about $15 to $400 each. Prices for Local Services Ads, Angi, Thumbtack and call vendors, plus how to find your cost per booked job.
• Best lead generation for contractors: 5 services compared: Best lead generation for contractors: no one service wins. Compare what Angi, Thumbtack, Networx, Google LSA cost and who else gets the lead.
• Roofing Leads Prices and What a Signed Roof Really Costs: Roofing leads cost about $15 to $300 each. See how Angi, Thumbtack, Google and Facebook bill, and how to work out what a signed roofing job costs you.