Roofing leads cost roughly five times what pool leads cost, and both figures are correct. Home services cost per lead varies more between trades than almost any other category, because job values vary just as much, and reading the table without that in mind leads people to the wrong conclusion about their own account.
The short version: cost follows what a job is worth. A high figure in your trade usually means the work is valuable, not that everybody else is bad at advertising.
This is for you if you run a trade business and want to know whether your numbers are normal.
Home services cost per lead, trade by trade
These come from LocaliQ’s home services report, which discloses both its sample and its window: 3,211 US search advertising campaigns running April 2024 to March 2025.
| Trade | Cost per lead |
|---|---|
| Roofing & gutters | $228.15 |
| Doors & windows sales | $200.34 |
| General contractors | $165.67 |
| Painting | $138.38 |
| Plumbing and heating | around $129 |
| Electricians | $93.69 |
| Handyman services | $54.05 |
| Cleaning services | $46.99 |
| Pools & spas | $45.15 |
| Home services overall | $90.92 |
Date it when you use it. This window closed in March 2025, so it runs roughly a year behind the general 2026 search benchmarks. Trade-to-trade relationships change slowly, so the ranking holds up better than the absolute figures do.
Why home services cost per lead varies fivefold
Job value explains almost the whole spread.
A roof is a large, infrequent, expensive purchase, often urgent, and the customer will get two or three quotes. Every roofer in the area wants that enquiry and bids accordingly, so the auction sits high. At a 25% close rate and thousands of pounds of margin, $228 is a comfortable price.
A pool clean is small, repeatable and quick to decide. Nobody can afford to pay $200 for that enquiry, so nobody does, and the price stays low.
Read the table that way and it stops being a league table of competence. It is a map of what a customer is worth in each trade.
The DIY problem, and what it costs you
Home services has a specific waste problem that other categories do not, and it is the fastest thing to fix.
An enormous share of searches in this space come from people intending to do the work themselves. How to fix a leaking tap. Roof repair cost. Best paint for a bathroom. All of those look relevant to a machine, and none of them will ever book a job.
The same goes for job seekers. Plumber jobs, electrician apprenticeship, HVAC training. In some trades that is a large fraction of total search volume.
Blocking those themes is the single highest-return half hour in a home services account. Negative keywords are how you do it, and most trade accounts I open have almost none.
Meta against search for trades
The cheapest home services result on my books was Meta, not Google: 173 leads at $25.60 each for a US home services business.
That is well under any search figure in the table. It is also a different kind of enquiry. Search catches somebody whose boiler has already failed. Meta catches somebody who has been thinking about the kitchen for a while, which is a longer conversation and a lower close rate.
So the comparison has to be made on cost per booked job. A $25 enquiry closing at 5% costs $500 a customer. A $129 enquiry closing at 30% costs $430. The cheaper enquiry was the more expensive customer, and the dashboard would never have told you.
I have also run home services in Pakistan at roughly ₨5 per lead across 8,356 leads, which is a useful reminder that these national averages describe one market rather than a law of nature.
Where the national home services cost per lead misleads you
Three ways, all common in trades.
Geography. A competitive metro area can run several times the national figure for the same trade, and a rural area well below. If you serve one city, benchmark against your own history rather than a national line.
Seasonality. Heating enquiries in January and roofing after a storm both arrive at prices unlike the annual average. Judging a month against a yearly figure produces panic in one direction or complacency in the other.
Emergency versus planned. Emergency work converts fast at a high price. Planned work converts slowly at a lower one. If your account mixes both under one target, whichever is larger hides the other entirely.
What good looks like in a trade account
The pattern is consistent and unexciting.
A negative keyword list that gets reviewed monthly, because DIY and job-seeker searches keep evolving. A landing page per service rather than one page listing everything, since somebody with a burst pipe should not have to navigate. Call tracking, because in trades most enquiries come by phone and untracked calls make a healthy account look broken. And fast callbacks, which matter more here than almost anywhere.
For wider context, WordStream’s 2026 study of 13,474 US search campaigns put home improvement at $90.92 and the all-industry average at $66.69. Trades sit above the general market, and they should, because the jobs are worth more.
Emergency and planned work are different businesses
Most trades run both, and averaging them together hides everything useful.
Emergency work behaves one way. Somebody has a leak, a failed boiler or no power. They search, they call the first two results, and they book within the hour. High intent, fast close, and they will pay a premium for speed rather than shop on price.
Planned work behaves completely differently. A new bathroom, a driveway, replacement windows. Weeks of consideration, three or four quotes, and a decision made around a kitchen table long after the enquiry.
Run both through one campaign with one target and the emergency work subsidises the planned work invisibly. Your average looks fine while half the account quietly loses money.
Split them. Different campaigns, different pages, different targets, and different expectations about how fast a lead should turn into a booking. It is the single most useful structural change in a trade account, and it takes an afternoon.
What to change this week
Four steps.
Find your trade in the table and compare, treating any gap as a question rather than a verdict.
Work out your ceiling from profit per job and close rate, then use that as your actual target instead of the benchmark.
Spend half an hour on negative keywords, starting with DIY, how-to and job-seeker terms.
Then check whether phone calls are tracked, because if they are not your reported figure is worse than your real one.
The wider piece on judging lead cost covers building that ceiling, the 2026 figures by industry put trades alongside everything else, and why your close rate sets the target explains why a $228 lead can be a bargain. If you want the search side run properly, Google Ads management is what I do, and you can book a teardown.