Home Improvement Cost Per Lead UK: Prices by Channel

UK home improvement cost per lead depends on three things: the channel, your trade and how many rivals receive the same enquiry. The number that actually matters is cost per sale. If you close 10% of the leads you buy, every job costs you 10 times your cost per lead, before any follow-up leakage.

Most home improvement businesses know roughly what a lead costs them. Almost none know their cost per sale. That second number is where the real damage hides.

Here's how each UK channel charges, why the headline price misleads, and the maths nobody does.

How UK home improvement lead channels charge

We are not going to quote precise per-lead prices, because they move by trade, postcode, season and platform terms, and anyone quoting one national figure is guessing. What matters more is how each channel charges you, because the pricing mechanism decides your real cost.

Trade directories: Checkatrade and TrustATrader

Checkatrade and TrustATrader work mainly on membership. You pay a subscription to be listed and vetted, and homeowners contact you directly from your profile. The cost per lead is your membership fee divided by the enquiries it produces, which means a quiet month makes every lead expensive and a busy month makes them cheap.

The upside is that a directory enquiry has usually chosen you, often on the strength of your reviews.

Lead marketplaces: Rated People, MyBuilder and Bark

Rated People, MyBuilder and Bark sit closer to pay per lead. A homeowner posts a job, and tradespeople pay to respond or to be shortlisted, through per-lead charges, shortlist fees or credits depending on the platform. Check each platform's current terms, because the details change.

The word doing the heavy lifting is "shared". The same job is usually seen by several firms, and more than one of them can pay to compete for it. You are buying a seat at a table, and there are other chairs.

Google Ads

Search leads are exclusive: when someone fills in your form from a Google ad, no competitor gets a copy. Intent is strong, which is why the auction is competitive, and high-value trades in busy areas pay the most per click.

Meta lead ads (Facebook and Instagram)

Meta leads usually come in cheaper per lead than search, because you're interrupting people rather than catching them mid-search. The trade-off is intent. A homeowner who tapped an instant form while scrolling needs faster replies, more follow-up and more patience before they book anything. We cover that in why Facebook leads are not converting.

Cheap CPL, expensive conversion. It balances out more often than the ad reports suggest.

Cost per lead is a vanity metric. Here's the cost per sale.

Run the numbers on a shared lead and watch what happens. The figures below are illustrative, so swap in your own.

Say you pay £50 for a shared lead and close around 10% of them, which is common when several firms chase the same job. You need 10 leads to win one job. Your real cost per sale is £500, on a lead you thought cost £50.

Now layer on the leak nobody measures. Contractors lose 30 to 50% of their leads to poor follow-up, before those leads ever get a fair chance to close. Missed calls, one voicemail then silence, enquiries that came in on a Saturday and got picked up on Tuesday.

If 40% of your paid leads never get properly worked, only 6 of every 10 get a real chance, so that £500 cost per sale rises to over £800. The platform dashboard still shows a healthy CPL.

The timing problem makes it worse

Here's the part that turns expensive into wasteful: 63% of people requesting information won't buy for 3 or more months.

Most sales processes give up after one or two attempts inside the first week. So the majority of leads, the ones on a longer timeline, get paid for, contacted once, then forgotten. They didn't say no. Nobody was there when they were ready to say yes.

Every one of those leads sits in your CRM right now, fully paid for.

The cheapest lead in home improvement is already in your CRM

Work out what a reactivated lead costs. You already paid the acquisition cost months ago. The homeowner already raised their hand. The only missing ingredient is a follow-up system persistent enough to reopen the conversation. Our database reactivation guide explains how that system works.

That's exactly what we built Setterly to do. Our AI holds real SMS conversations with the aged and unworked leads in your CRM, qualifies them, and books them straight into your calendar. We've booked 3,000+ appointments and handled 260,000+ SMS conversations doing it.

What this looks like in practice: Cloudy2Clear

Cloudy2Clear, a UK misted double glazing repair franchise, had thousands of old enquiries sitting dormant. We re-engaged 6,769 of them. 64% replied, 673 booked appointments, and the campaign generated £639,350 in pipeline, with £107,000+ closed. The detail is in our Cloudy2Clear case study.

No new ad spend. No new directories. Just the leads they'd already paid for, finally followed up properly. Glazing firms can see how this applies to their trade on our windows and doors page.

How to think about CPL from here

Keep buying leads where the maths works for your trade and territory. But measure cost per sale as your headline number, and fix the follow-up leak before you scale spend. Pouring more budget into a pipeline that loses 30 to 50% of what enters it is the most expensive mistake in home improvement marketing. If you're weighing up the platforms themselves, read whether Checkatrade, Bark and Rated People leads are worth it.

You can see exactly how our reactivation process works on our how it works page. We only charge per booked, qualified appointment, priced on your average job value, so the economics stay on your side from day one.