HVAC Leads, Where They Come From and What They Cost

HVAC leads come from five places: marketplaces (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Networx, Modernize), Google Local Services Ads, Google search ads, exclusive call sellers, and sources you own. Reported prices run from about $15 to $300 a lead, but the number that decides whether a source pays is what you spend per booked job.

I sold exclusive phone leads to contractors for years and listened to thousands of the recorded calls. The pattern was plain. The roofers who made money on bought leads called back first, within minutes. Slow callers lost the job to whoever got there first. HVAC sales leads work the same way. The lead is only half of it. Your phone is the other half.

This page covers what each source costs, how to compare them fairly, and how to spend so a year of buying leaves you with something. For the wider picture across trades, see our guide to contractor leads.

What HVAC leads cost from each source

Reported HVAC lead prices run from about $15 to $300, depending on the source. These figures come from the agencies and vendors that track them. Marketplaces and Local Services Ads bill per lead. Search ads bill per click, and you count the leads yourself. The biggest difference is who else gets the same homeowner.

Source	How it bills	Reported cost per lead	Who else gets it
Angi / HomeAdvisor	Pay per lead (weekly) or annual subscription	$15 to $100, plus a yearly membership guides put near $300	Up to five pros
Thumbtack	The price you set per lead, inside a weekly budget	Whatever you set; no contract	Customer can contact five pros in the first four hours, more after
Networx	Prepaid lead credits	$10 to $100+ shared, $15 to $120+ exclusive	Up to four on shared leads
Modernize	Custom program, dynamic price under a ceiling you set	Quoted per program, built around your annual revenue	Up to four contractors
Google Local Services Ads	Per valid lead (calls, messages, bookings)	$51 HVAC average (SearchLight); $45 to $111 (99 Calls clients)	One business
Google search ads	Per click	About $34 to $149 by campaign type (SearchLight)	Yours alone, but you compete for the click
Exclusive call sellers	Per live call, often a weekly flat rate	Quoted by service area; Still Writers lists $45 to $300 for exclusive pay-per-lead	One contractor

Angi and HomeAdvisor

Angi publishes no HVAC lead price. Guides report $15 to $100 per shared lead, plus a yearly membership. Angi’s help center, as quoted by the consultancy More Booked Installs, says each request is matched with no more than five pros. These are HVAC shared leads in the plainest sense.

The billing terms are where owners get burned. You are charged whether or not you open or respond to a lead. Your monthly budget is a target, not a hard cap, so you can run a little over it. Pay-per-lead pros can ask for a credit, not a refund, within 45 days. That only works for listed reasons like bad contact info or wrong location, and only if you tried to call within 24 hours. Annual-subscription leads get no credits. And if you go to sign up with HomeAdvisor, you now land on Angi’s sign-up page.

Thumbtack, Networx and Modernize

Thumbtack lets you set the price per lead and a weekly budget. When the budget runs out, leads stop. There is no subscription or contract. But a customer can contact five pros in the first four hours, and more after that. Refunds within 45 days are at Thumbtack’s “sole discretion.”

Networx sells prepaid credits. Its help page lists $10 to $100+ for a shared lead and $15 to $120+ for an exclusive one, with 14 days to report a bad lead. Modernize sells by consultation, publishes no price and sends each request to up to four contractors. Get the terms in writing before you pay.

Google Local Services Ads

Local Services Ads are the boxes with the “Google Verified” badge at the top of the search page. SearchLight’s February 2026 benchmark, reported by PipelineOn, put the HVAC average at $51 a lead across 409 accounts. 99 Calls, which manages these accounts, reports $45 to $111 for its clients. SearchLight notes smaller markets can run near $30 and competitive metros $90 or more.

Each lead goes to one business, and you pay per valid lead. HVAC gets heavier screening (background checks, insurance, licenses), which takes 3 to 4 weeks on average. Google suggests a budget for about 10 leads a week. At the $53 all-trade average, that comes to about $2,300 a month.

Here is the rule that matters most. Since October 2026, a call you miss during your listed business hours is charged as a lead if the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds. Voicemail counts too. Google also says missed calls “may negatively affect your responsiveness,” which affects where you show up.

Google search ads and exclusive call sellers

Search ads are pay-per-click. You pay each time someone clicks, then count how many clicks turn into calls or forms. SearchLight reports about $34 a lead on searches for your company name and $149 on searches without it. A LocaliQ study found median costs of $127.74 for AC work and $129.02 for heating.

Pay per call HVAC leads come from sellers like 33 Mile Radius. You get a live phone call sent only to you. 33 Mile Radius says its contractors set appointments on “70% to 80%” of leads, which is the seller’s own claim. It publishes no price and quotes by service area. Read the fine print, though. Per 33 Mile Radius’s FAQ, a call usually bills if it rings four times unanswered, goes to voicemail, or hits an answering service. Exclusive does not mean you only pay if you answer.

Why cost per lead is the wrong number

Cost per lead tells you what a phone number costs. Cost per booked job tells you what work costs. Divide your spend by the jobs you booked, not the leads you got. A cheap shared lead that rarely books can cost the same as an expensive exclusive one, or more. That math makes exclusive HVAC leads worth a look.

Take an example from the agency Still Writers. A $30 shared lead booked 1 time in 8 costs $240 per booked job. A $120 exclusive lead booked half the time also costs $240, “without seven wasted calls to get there.” Same cost per job. Very different week.

Booking rate is the lever. ServiceTitan data cited by the HVAC marketing consultant Schulze Creative put HVAC booking rates around 38%. Shops with fewer than five techs booked about 24%. Schulze’s own example: $10,000 buys 100 leads. At 35% booked, that is $286 per appointment. At 55%, it is $182. Schulze writes: “A $100 HVAC lead is not really a $100 lead if only one out of three ever makes it onto your schedule.”

On Local Services Ads, SearchLight’s sample booked 43.9% of leads. That works out to about $121 per booked job across all trades. Roofers see the same math on their own roofing lead costs, and plumbers see it too.

What I heard on the calls fits these numbers. Speed decided who booked. If you want more HVAC leads to turn into jobs, the fastest fix is usually answering faster, not buying more.

To work out your own number:

1. Add up total spend for each source over the last 90 days.
2. Count the leads each source sent and the jobs each one booked.
3. Divide spend by jobs booked. That is your cost per booked job.

HVAC replacement leads vs repair and maintenance leads

A full replacement runs about $5,000 to $12,500. A repair is often a service fee plus parts. So the same $80 lead is cheap if it turns into a new system and expensive if it turns into a tune-up. Residential HVAC leads arrive looking alike, so ask what mix you are actually buying.

This Old House Reviews puts a standard AC and furnace install at about $5,000 to $12,500. Bigger homes with premium equipment can pass $22,000. Dolead, a lead-gen company, gives the same range. That is why a three-figure lead can pay on a replacement and lose money on a maintenance visit.

Lead cost also varies by service. SearchLight’s Google Ads data, as summarized by Still Writers, put AC repair leads at $231 and heating repair leads at $144. Separate heating campaigns ran 27% cheaper per lead than blended ones.

Dolead’s advice is simple: “Ask every seller for the mix, in writing, and for the right to see it monthly.” A seller can shift from HVAC replacement leads to repair calls over a season without changing your price. You are buying something different for the same money.

Do not write off repair calls. Dolead calls a repair “the cheapest route to a replacement eighteen months later.” Maintenance plans bring low money per visit but come back every year (see how to price an HVAC maintenance plan). Just know that a replacement is not sold on the phone. It takes an in-home visit and a financing talk, and the lead price does not cover that time.

Why lead prices and volume swing with the seasons

HVAC demand follows the weather. A WebFX analysis of search data found “AC repair” searches rise 266% in July and “furnace repair” rises 137% in January. In those spikes, every shop bids for the same homeowner and prices climb. Between them, volume dries up and the calls are slower, planned replacements.

The seasonal search data shows cooling searches start climbing in March and April, and heating searches in September and October. “Heating system repair” swings 594% between its October high and January low. Maintenance terms stay steadier. Your local climate moves the peaks, since searches track heat around 85 degrees and cold below 45.

Sellers and agencies report that prices rise in those spikes. Still Writers puts “emergency AC repair” clicks at $15 to $40 each. Dolead’s point is the one to keep: a fixed monthly lead number “overbuys in the shoulder months and runs out in the fortnight that matters.”

In a heat wave, your crew is the limit, not your budget. If you buy more calls than you can install, you get a backlog and slow callbacks on leads you already paid for. So set a budget by season, with a cap tied to how many jobs your crew can run that week. Judge each source by month, not by year. Give any new source a full season, not one month. And use April and October to push tune-ups and maintenance plans while the schedule has room.

What to check before you buy HVAC leads

Before you buy HVAC leads, get answers in writing. Dolead lists six questions every seller should answer, and we add two more: whether a missed call bills, and who owns the data. If a seller will not answer in writing, that tells you what you need to know. Ask each one:

• What is the replacement-to-repair mix, and can I see it every month?
• Is the lead exclusive, and if not, how many others get it and for how long?
• How fast does the lead reach me after the homeowner asks?
• Does the lead include system type and the age of the unit?
• What is the credit policy, how many days do I have, and is it a credit or a refund?
• What is the service radius, and can I set it?
• Does a missed or unanswered call bill? (On Local Services Ads and at 33 Mile Radius, it can.)
• Who owns the customer data and call recordings if I leave?

If you want the lead companies laid out next to each other, we keep a side-by-side comparison of lead services.

What a year of lead spend builds if you own it

At about $2,300 a month for 10 Local Services Ads leads a week, a year costs about $27,600. When you stop paying, the leads stop. The same money can go toward sources you own: your Google profile, your reviews, your website and your customer list. Those stay when the check stops.

Here is our math. $2,300 times 12 is about $27,600. If your shop booked at SearchLight’s 43.9% sample rate, that is roughly 19 booked jobs a month. But at month 12, the money bought leads and nothing else. A shared-lead plan at $2,400 a month, the kind of example More Booked Installs uses, runs $28,800 a year with the same result at the end: nothing left over. When I sold leads, they stopped the day the check stopped. That is how renting works.

The basics are wide open. In our study of 9,700 contractor Google profiles, all of them already ranking on the map, 14% listed no website and 17% had a homepage with no main heading. Plenty of contractors on page one have not done the simple work.

Owned sources are the free HVAC leads people talk about. Free in cash, not in time. Your Google Business Profile, the listing that shows on the map, is yours. So are your reviews. Travis Ringe, co-owner of ProSkill Services in Arizona, told ServiceTitan: “Google really rules the roost and I want all my reviews on Google.” He also said you have to “deliver a full experience worthy of writing a review.”

Your past customers are the other owned source. Bill Highsmith of Jupiter-Tequesta Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electric sent one “We Miss You!” email to past AC customers. “We thought if we get 10 calls out of this, then awesome,” he said. “After one week, the revenue on that one email brought in about $4,000.” That is one shop’s result, published by a software vendor. It is not a promise. But those were customers he already had.

My view, after selling leads and running SEO for an HVAC lead-gen company: buy leads as a bridge, not a foundation. Judge them by cost per booked job. Answer the phone. And put part of the money into something you keep.

If you want help with the owned side, Contractor Lead Partners (CLP) does this for one contractor per trade per market. Our published plans run $18,000, $36,000 or $60,000 a year, with ad spend separate and no guarantees of rankings, leads or revenue. You own every account. Owned sources are slower than ads, so keep your ads running while you build. If you need jobs this week, do not hire us. Buy leads and answer fast. Our page on marketing for HVAC companies covers the slower route in more detail.

Do this today

Pull the last 90 days of leads from every source you pay for. For each one, write down five numbers: spend, leads, calls answered, jobs booked, and jobs sold split by replacement and repair. Divide spend by jobs booked. Drop or cap the worst source.

Then check one more thing before you go back to work. Look at the hours listed on your Local Services Ads profile and make sure a person answers the phone in every one of them. A missed call in those hours is a lead you pay for and someone else books.