What Should a Lead Actually Cost?

Almost every business owner I talk to can tell me what they're spending on ads. Very few can tell me what a lead is supposed to cost in their trade. That gap is the single easiest way to get taken advantage of, because if you don't know the number, you can't tell whether you're being served well or quietly bled.

So here are the actual figures for 2026, broken out by trade, for both Google and Meta. Then the more important part: why the average is close to useless on its own, and how to work out the only number that really applies to you.

Average job value, times your gross margin, times the share of leads you actually close. That's the gross profit one lead generates on average, and it's the ceiling on what you can afford to pay for one. Everything after this is context for that number.

Google Ads — cost per lead by trade

Google is intent-driven. Someone typed the thing they need, which is why leads cost more and generally close better. These are 2026 search benchmarks across thousands of home-services campaigns.

Google Local Services Ads — the pay-per-lead ones with the green check — are worth a separate look in the trades where they're available. Junk removal, for instance, tends to run $30–65 a lead there, often with better lead quality than standard search, because you only pay for actual calls.

Meta Ads — cost per lead by trade

Meta is interruption-driven. Nobody was looking for you, so leads are cheaper and usually softer — they need faster follow-up and more nurturing to close at the same rate.

The trades nobody publishes numbers for

Here's where I have to be straight with you, because plenty of sites won't be. Garage door, junk removal, auto detailing and boat detailing have no published Meta benchmark. Not a hidden one — it doesn't exist. The benchmark sets everyone quotes cover the big standardized categories, and these trades either get folded into a broader bucket or left out entirely.

You'll still find articles confidently listing a Meta cost per lead for all of them. Those numbers are either invented or lifted from a single agency's client. I'd rather show you the reasoning and let you do the same thing yourself.

The relationship that does hold, consistently, is that Meta lands materially below Google for the same trade — usually somewhere between a third and two-thirds of the Google figure — because you're interrupting rather than capturing intent. Apply that to the Google numbers we do have and you get a working range:

One number in there is worth pulling out: businesses running video creative on Meta report meaningfully lower cost per lead than those running statics — reported gaps of 30–60% in some categories. That isn't a coincidence, and it connects directly to how Meta actually decides who sees your ad. The system reads your creative to do the targeting, and video gives it far more to read.

If your trade still isn't in the table

A few of the trades I work with have no published figure on either platform — land clearing, pressure washing, tree work, dock and seawall. I'd rather say that plainly than invent a number for them.

What to do instead: find the published trade closest to yours on ticket size and urgency, and anchor to it. Land clearing behaves like roofing — big ticket, considered purchase, long cycle. Pressure washing behaves like cleaning services. Dock and seawall work sits near roofing again: permits, contracts, patience.

Then throw the anchor away as soon as you have thirty days of your own data, because your own numbers beat any industry average the moment they exist.

Back to your own number

Now put your figures into the calculator at the top, and watch the industry average stop mattering. A roofer with a $14,000 average job and a 30% close rate can pay $228 a lead all day and get rich doing it. A cleaning company with a $180 job and a 20% close rate cannot pay $47 without going backwards. Same tables, opposite conclusions.

"Our leads cost $90" is not information. "Our leads cost $90 and a lead is worth $310 to us" is a business. The first sentence starts an argument; the second one ends it.

This is also the honest answer to "can you get my leads cheaper?" Sometimes yes. But if your leads already cost a third of what they're worth, cheaper leads is the wrong goal — more of them is the goal, and that means spending more, not optimizing harder.

Why your numbers can look terrible when nothing is wrong

Four reasons, in the order I run into them.

1. 1

   You judged it too early — and then made it worse

   This is the big one. Every ad set needs roughly fifty conversion events before delivery stabilizes. Until then the numbers genuinely are erratic, and they're supposed to be. What happens instead: the owner watches for thirty-six hours, panics, changes the budget, changes the audience, swaps the creative — and every one of those edits restarts the clock. I'm confident this kills more campaigns than bad creative does. Give it three to five days untouched. It will look wrong before it looks right.

2. 2

   Your tracking is under-reporting

   Between iOS tracking prompts, browser blockers and privacy defaults, browser-side tracking loses a real share of conversions that actually happened. So the platform under-reports, your cost per lead looks inflated, and the algorithm is also optimizing against incomplete data — which makes it genuinely worse over time. Server-side tracking recovers most of that. If you fix one technical thing before spending more, fix measurement.

3. 3

   Your market is too small

   Meta needs a meaningful population to optimize against. If your service area holds a small number of reachable people, you'll face structurally higher costs no matter who runs the account. That's a market-size fact, not a strategy failure — and the fix is usually widening the radius or changing platform, not tweaking bids.

4. 4

   You are comparing the wrong seasons

   Comparing August to your December numbers in a seasonal trade tells you about the calendar, not the campaign. Compare to the same period last year, or to the run rate immediately before a change.

How to tell whether whoever runs your ads is doing a good job

You don't need to learn the platforms to evaluate this. You need to be able to get straight answers to a short list of questions. If the answers are vague, that's your answer.

• "What does a lead cost us, and what is a lead worth to us?" Both numbers. Anyone running your ads should know the second one, and if they've never asked you for job value, margin and close rate, they can't know it.
• "How many of last month's leads turned into actual jobs?" Leads are not the product. Booked revenue is. If nobody is closing that loop, you're optimizing for form fills.
• "Is our conversion tracking server-side?" If the answer is confused, your data is probably understating results and your costs look worse than they are.
• "What did you change in the last thirty days, and why?" There should be a short, specific answer. "Optimizing" is not an answer. Neither is a list of daily edits, which usually means the learning phase never completes.
• "How much of the budget went to creative?" On Meta especially, creative is the targeting now. An account with one ad running for eight months isn't being managed.
• "Show me the search terms we paid for." On Google, this one is unmissable. Ten minutes in that report tells you whether anyone is watching where the money goes.

The short version

• Benchmarks tell you if you're in the right universe. They don't tell you if your ads work.
• Job value × margin × close rate = what a lead is worth. That's your real ceiling.
• Home services lead costs rose about 10.5% year over year — roughly double the all-industry rate.
• Google leads cost more and close better. Meta leads cost less and need faster follow-up.
• Give a new campaign three to five days untouched, and about fifty conversions, before you judge it.
• If your leads cost far less than they're worth, the answer isn't cheaper leads. It's more of them.