How Much Do Electrical Leads Cost? Every Channel Priced

Electrical leads cost anywhere from roughly free (referrals) to $250 each (competitive Google Ads markets), with most paid channels landing between $25 and $100 per lead. Google Local Services Ads typically run $25 to $100 per lead, Google Ads $50 to $250, shared marketplaces like Angi and Thumbtack $20 to $80, and Facebook $15 to $60 at noticeably lower intent. SEO has a real monthly cost and a per-lead cost that falls the longer you run it.

Those ranges are wide on purpose. The price of a lead moves with your metro, your trade mix (a panel-upgrade lead costs more than a ceiling-fan lead because it is worth more), the season, and how many competitors are bidding that week. Any article that quotes you a single number is describing one market at one moment.

And per-lead price is the less useful of the two numbers this guide covers. A $30 lead that books one job in eight costs you $240 per job. A $90 lead that books two in three costs $135. The channel that looks expensive on the invoice is often the cheap one on the P&L, and the worked math below shows exactly how to run that comparison for your own shop.

The per-lead price of every channel

Here is every channel electricians commonly buy leads from, priced as honest ranges rather than best-case screenshots. Treat the low end as a soft suburban market and the high end as a competitive metro during busy season.

Two structural things hide inside that table. First, the exclusive-versus-shared column changes the economics more than the price column does. A $40 shared lead competing against three other electricians is usually worse value than a $80 exclusive one, and our shared vs exclusive leads guide works through why. Second, SEO is the only row where the per-lead number moves in your favor the longer you run it, because you pay for the work once and the rankings keep producing.

What each channel actually charges, and why

Each channel prices leads differently, and knowing the mechanism helps you predict where your market will land inside the range.

Google Local Services Ads: $25–100 per lead

LSA charges per lead, and only for leads, meaning a phone call over a minimum length or a message through the platform. Google sets the price by market and job type, so an emergency call in Dallas costs more than a light-fixture inquiry in a small town. The leads are exclusive, they call you directly, and you can dispute obvious junk (solicitors, wrong trade) for credit. For most electricians this is the best first dollar of paid spend, and the setup, the dispute process, and the ranking levers are covered in our Local Services Ads guide.

Google Ads: $50–250 per lead

Google Ads charges per click, so your lead cost is click price divided by your landing page conversion rate. Clicks for electrician searches commonly run $10 to $40 in the US depending on metro and term; at a 15 to 25 percent landing-page conversion rate, that math lands most shops between $50 and $250 per lead. The range is wide because you control both inputs. A tight campaign pointed at a fast page that answers the searcher can sit near the bottom; a broad campaign dumped on a homepage sits past the top. The upside nothing else offers: you choose the exact searches you buy, so a shop that wants panel upgrades can spend only on panel-upgrade searches.

Angi and Thumbtack: $20–80 per shared lead

Marketplace leads look cheap per unit because you are splitting the customer with competitors. Angi typically sells the same homeowner to several contractors; Thumbtack charges when a customer contacts you or when you respond to their request, with prices scaling by job value. The per-lead price is real, but so is the race. The electrician who calls back in five minutes wins a disproportionate share, and the one who calls back at 6pm pays for a customer who already hired someone. Both platforms can work as fill-in volume for a shop with fast response habits, and the tactics that make the economics survivable are in our Angi leads guide.

SEO: a monthly cost with a falling per-lead price

SEO pricing works backwards from every other row. You pay for the work ($1,000 to $3,000 per month for an agency, or your own hours if you DIY) and the leads that work produces are free at the margin. In month three that might be $2,000 for 15 leads, an ugly $133 each. By month twelve the same spend might produce 60 or more, and every lead after that makes the average cheaper. Shops that sustain it for two years routinely see blended organic lead costs in the $10 to $40 range, from searches with the same intent Google Ads charges $50-plus to reach. The full playbook is in our electrician SEO guide; the catch is simply that the curve starts slow and most owners quit inside it.

Facebook ads: $15–60 per lead, at lower intent

Facebook leads are the cheapest paid leads on the table and the least ready to buy. Nobody scrolls Facebook looking for an electrician; your ad interrupts them, which means the form fills you collect include daydreamers, price-checkers, and people who forgot they submitted. Booking rates of 10 to 20 percent are normal. Facebook earns its place for offer-driven work you can sell proactively (whole-home surge protection, generator consultations, EV charger promos), where a cheap lead plus a follow-up sequence beats waiting for search demand.

Referrals: near zero, and capped

A referral costs you whatever your thank-you costs (a gift card, a discount, sometimes nothing). Booking rates are the highest of any channel because the trust transferred with the recommendation. The limitation is volume: referrals scale with your existing customer base, arrive on their own schedule, and cannot be turned up in a slow month. Systematizing the ask raises the ceiling meaningfully, which is what our referral program guide covers, but no shop grows on referrals alone by deciding to.

Cost per booked job: the number that actually matters

Cost per booked job is your lead price divided by your booking rate, and it reorders the entire table above. A lead is a maybe; a booked job is revenue. Channels differ enormously in how many maybes it takes to get a yes, so comparing channels on per-lead price is comparing apples on the price of seeds.

Here is the same set of channels with defensible booking-rate assumptions and the math run through.

Walk through one row to see the shape of it. Say Angi sends you 20 shared leads a month at $40, so $800 spent. You reach 14, quote 8, and win 4, a 20 percent booking rate, which is healthy for shared leads. Your cost per booked job is $200. Meanwhile LSA sends 10 leads at $60, so $600, and because every one is a live caller who chose to dial you, you book 6. Cost per booked job: $100. Angi looked 33 percent cheaper per lead and came out twice as expensive per job.

Now push one step further, because job value belongs in the equation too. If your Facebook offer is a $700 surge-protection install and your Google Ads campaign targets $3,500 panel upgrades, a $280 booked-job cost on Ads (8 percent of revenue) is better business than a $150 booked-job cost on Facebook (21 percent). The full ratio worth tracking is marketing cost as a percentage of the revenue each channel books. Most healthy electrical shops land somewhere between 5 and 12 percent overall, and how to set that number deliberately is the subject of our marketing budget guide.

The uncomfortable part: almost no electrician can produce these numbers for their own business. They know what they spend per channel and what they billed in total, and the middle is fog. Which means channel decisions get made on per-lead price and gut feel, which is exactly how shops end up loyal to their most expensive channel and skeptical of their cheapest one.

UK lead costs: the same logic in pounds

UK electricians face the same channel economics with different names on the invoices. Google Local Services Ads and Google Ads work the same way, with per-lead costs typically in the £20 to £70 range for LSA and £30 to £150 for Ads depending on city and job type, with London and the South East at the top and smaller markets well below. The marketplace layer is where the map changes: Checkatrade charges a membership fee and drives volume against it, while MyBuilder charges per shortlist, so per-lead cost depends heavily on how much work each platform sends in your postcode. Our Checkatrade guide runs the membership math properly.

The cost-per-booked-job discipline translates directly. Divide what a platform costs you per month by the jobs it actually booked, put job value alongside it, and Checkatrade at £90 a month producing three booked jobs reads very differently from the same fee producing twelve. UK shops also have a demand source with no US equivalent worth pricing in: landlord EICR work is recurring by regulation, so a certification customer acquired once can be worth years of repeat certificates, which drags the effective acquisition cost per job toward zero the way referrals do.

How to lower your cost per booked job

The fastest reductions in cost per booked job come from the booking rate side, because most shops leak more money between lead and job than they overpay per lead. Four moves, in order of typical impact:

1. Answer the phone, and call new leads back inside five minutes. Speed to contact is the single biggest booking-rate lever on every channel, and it is brutal on shared leads. The first electrician to respond wins a large share of marketplace jobs. A missed-call text-back and a person (or service) answering during work hours can move booking rates by double digits.
2. Match the channel to the job type. Buy high-intent channels (LSA, search) for emergency and ready-to-hire work; use cheap low-intent channels (Facebook) only for offers you can nurture. A channel is rarely bad in itself. It is bad for the job you assigned it.
3. Fix the landing experience for anything you pay per click for. On Google Ads, doubling landing-page conversion rate halves your lead cost with the same budget. A page that loads fast, states the service, shows reviews, and makes calling effortless is the cheapest lead-cost reduction you will ever buy.
4. Build the channels that compound while you buy the ones that don't. Paid leads stop the day you stop paying. Rankings, reviews, and referral habits keep producing, which is why the long-run cheapest rows on the table are the ones that take months to start. Run paid for cash flow now, build owned channels underneath, and let the blend get cheaper every quarter.

That last point is the honest summary of this whole guide. Per-lead prices are set by the market and drift upward as more electricians compete for the same clicks. Booking rates and channel mix are set by you. The shops paying the least per booked job three years from now are mostly paying the same per lead as everyone else. They just stopped guessing about the middle of the funnel.