Angi answered this question itself in 2026. It just published the two halves in different places, to different audiences, and nobody put them next to each other.
The first half came from the Q2 2026 earnings call. CEO Jeff Kip, describing the platform's unit economics to investors: "Our average small pro is paying about $600 a month for 12 leads, and they're winning about two of those."
That is $50 a lead, a one in six win rate, and roughly $300 of lead spend behind every booked job. Add the annual membership and it is closer to $313.
The second half sits on Angi's own consumer site, in the cost guide it updated on 3 August 2026: "Hiring an electrician costs $351 on average, or between $163 to $538."
Angi's acquisition cost for the average pro is 85% of the average electrical job as Angi itself prices it for homeowners. That is the whole answer, and everything below is about which categories escape it.
The short answer
Angi is worth it for an electrician in three narrow cases: you are brand new with no reviews, you have genuinely idle capacity this week, or you are buying into a zip code you do not yet serve. Everywhere else, the arithmetic Angi described to its own investors does not survive contact with an average electrical ticket.
Angi told investors exactly what it costs to win a job
The $600 for 12 leads figure is not a critic's estimate. It is the company's description of its typical small pro, offered on an earnings call as evidence that things are improving. And they are, from Angi's side: Kip also said pros have gone "from winning roughly one in nine leads two summers ago to roughly one in six now."
Read that carefully. One in six is the improved number. It is what Angi reports after the January 2025 homeowner choice change, which stopped auto blasting every submitted form to every pro in radius and let the homeowner pick who may call. The win rate went up because the number of pros charged per request went down.
By the numbers
$300 versus $351. Angi's CEO put the average small pro at $600 a month for 12 leads and two wins. Angi's own cost guide puts the average electrician hire at $351. On the average job, as Angi defines both sides of it, lead cost eats 85% of the invoice before you buy a single wire nut.
Those two figures are not perfectly apples to apples: the $351 is Angi's blended consumer average across all electrical hires, weighted toward service calls and small installs, while the $300 is Angi's blended pro cost across all trades. The direction is unambiguous either way, and it sets the only question that matters here: what does the job on the other end of a $300 acquisition cost have to be worth?
At a 45% gross margin, $300 of acquisition needs a job over roughly $670 to break even on the first visit. Angi's own guide puts the average electrician hire at $351 and a minor job at $150 to $600. Most of the volume on the platform is below the line before you leave the shop.
The number that makes electrical different: Angi also prices your job
Angi does not only sell you the lead. It runs one of the largest consumer facing electrical pricing libraries on the internet, and the homeowner reads it before filling in the form you are about to buy. By the time that lead hits your phone, Angi has already told your customer what the job should cost. Here is what it is telling them, from its own cost pages:
| Job | What Angi tells the homeowner | What Angi buries further down the same page |
|---|---|---|
| EV charger install | $967 average, $554 to $1,380 normal range | Panel upgrade $800 to $2,000, new wire run $500 to $1,500, permit $100 to $200 |
| Panel upgrade | $1,200 to $2,000 | Moving a panel $1,500 to $4,000 |
| Whole house generator | $1,540 to $8,740 | Transfer switch $400 to $2,500 |
| Rewiring a house | $1,500 to $10,000 | Permits $200 to $900 on older homes |
| Outlet install | $200 to $300 | Outdoor outlet $150 to $260 |
| Service call | $50 to $130 per hour, about $150 for the first hour | Emergency call out adds $100 to $200 |
Look at the EV charger row. Angi's headline number is $967. The panel upgrade a full 1970s load center will absolutely require is a separate line item further down the page, as is the wire run to the garage. A homeowner who reads the top of that article and submits a form is carrying a $967 anchor. You arrive, find no space and a 100 amp service, and quote $2,400.
You did not lose that job on price. You lost it on a number Angi put in the customer's head, then charged you $80 to $100 for the privilege of arguing with.
Why the big-ticket categories are the trap, not the escape
The standard advice for every pay per lead platform is: switch off the small stuff, run only the high ticket categories, let one big job absorb the losses. For most trades that is right. For electrical it is backwards, and the most useful account of why came from an electrician on r/electricians who tracked his Angi numbers obsessively and still concluded the platform was worth using:
"Certain tasks aren't worth doing for Angi's. I've installed a bunch of car chargers and generators in my career and am happy to do them. But big ticket items don't work on Angis with a bunch of window shoppers. An EV lead through Angi's can be like $80 to $100+ and everyone WANTS a car charger, but none of them realize the work it takes to install and how much it costs. You will lose money on Angi's if you advertise yourself for certain job types: car chargers, generators, remodels."
That is an operator who made money on Angi telling you the profitable categories are the losers. The mechanism is specific to this trade: the variables that decide the price are invisible at form time. A roofer can price off a satellite image. An electrician cannot price an EV charger, a generator or a rewire without seeing the service size, panel capacity, run length and local permit regime, none of which appear on an Angi form and all of which move the number by four figures.
So the electrical big-ticket lead takes three strikes at once. It is the most expensive lead on the board, it is shared with three to five competitors, and the homeowner is holding a price Angi set without knowing any of the site conditions. Meanwhile the small categories, which reliably close, cannot carry $300. That squeeze is the real answer here, and it is why so many electricians describe what one shop owner did on that thread: "I did get jobs but the added confusing fees took every penny I earned and I worked for free essentially."
We build the version of this that does not have a landlord: your own site ranking for the panel upgrade and EV charger searches in your service area, an LSA account that buys exclusive leads at a third of Angi's cost per job, and a CRM that stops the ones you already paid for from going cold. Tell us your market and we will price the plan.
The dead lead multiplier nobody prices in
Every published cost per lead figure, including Angi's own $50, assumes the person on the other end exists and answers. The electrician who tracked his numbers reported that a third of the leads he paid for never responded in any way, shape or form.
That is not a lead quality complaint, it is a pricing correction. If a third are unreachable, your effective cost per contactable lead is $50 divided by 0.67, or about $75. The two thirds who pick up subsidise the third who never existed, which makes the real number worse than the one Angi gave its investors.
The credit process is meant to solve this and mostly does not. Credits go toward future leads rather than back to your card, disputes are capped per territory, and the wrong-category cases are the hardest to win. One electrician described the classic version: a homeowner wanting an outdoor GFCI receptacle replaced gets logged as a panel upgrade, you pay panel upgrade pricing, and Angi declines the credit because it could not reach the homeowner to confirm.
What Angi electrical leads actually cost in 2026
Angi prices dynamically by task, zip code and demand, and publishes no rate card. These are the ranges electricians consistently report:
| Lead type | Typical range | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Small repairs, outlets, switches | $15 to $50 | Closes well, cannot carry a $300 acquisition cost |
| Ceiling fans, lighting installs | $20 to $60 | Heavily shopped, homeowners collect three or four quotes |
| Panel upgrades, service changes | $50 to $100+ | Best real economics on the board if you win them |
| Generators, EV chargers, rewires | $60 to $125+ | Highest anchor risk, longest sales cycle, worst close rate |
| Blended electrical average | $35 to $80 | Cheaper than plumbing or roofing because tickets are smaller |
Around those sit the fixed costs: an annual membership near $300, a monthly spend minimum in most accounts, a 12 month auto renewing term, and early cancellation commonly reported at 30% to 35% of the remaining contract value with 60 days written notice. Metro markets run 20% to 25% above these ranges. In Canada the same company trades as HomeStars, where contractors report C$40 to C$80 per lead on matching terms.
If you are already in and want out, how to get out of an Angi contract covers the notice window and the credit balance question specifically.
The licence problem that only the licensed trades have
Shared leads carry a structural unfairness that hits electricians harder than almost anyone. Marketplaces do not verify licensing to the depth a state board does, so a master electrician carrying licence, liability coverage and a permit history is bidding for the same homeowner as a handyman carrying none of it. His overhead is lower, so his number is lower.
Angi's own pages make this worse without meaning to. The cost guide lists a building permit at $75 to $150 and a safety inspection at $100 to $125 as the homeowner's cost rather than as part of a licensed contractor's price, so they arrive framing the permit as an optional surcharge you are adding. That is exactly the opening the unlicensed bidder needs. As one electrician put it after quitting, he "constantly dealt with window shoppers or people who wanted the absolute lowest price regardless of professionalism, licensing, etc."
The channel comparison at electrical prices
Here electrical looks genuinely different, and it is good news. SearchLight Digital's February 2026 Home Services LSA Benchmark tracked $6.72 million in Local Services Ads spend across 888 contractors and 126,650 leads. Electrical came out the cheapest trade in the dataset.
| Metric | Angi (electrical) | Google LSA (electrical) |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $35 to $80, about $50 average per Angi | $39 |
| Exclusive to you | No, three to five pros | Yes |
| Book rate | Roughly one in six wins | 43.4% |
| Average ticket | Angi's published trade average is $351 | $1,434 |
| Cost per booked job | About $300 per Angi's CEO | About $90 per booked appointment |
| Licence verified before listing | Not to state board depth | Yes, Google Guaranteed |
The cost per lead gap is real but it is not the interesting one. The interesting one is the average ticket: $1,434 on LSA against the $351 Angi publishes as the average electrician hire. LSA is not a cheaper version of the same leads, it intercepts a different job mix, because a homeowner searching "panel upgrade electrician near me" at nine at night has already decided what they need while an Angi form filler is often still browsing a cost article. Electrical LSA campaigns in that dataset returned 8.52x closed ROAS, second only to HVAC.
For the full per channel breakdown, what electrical leads cost by channel has the numbers side by side, and how to get more electrical leads covers the sequence for building the channels you keep.
Both sides of Angi are shrinking at once
The Angi selling to you in 2026 is neither the Angi of the horror stories nor the Angi of the growth years. From the same call: US service requests down 6% year over year, total leads down 13%, revenue per lead up 1%, and pro capacity recovering from down 13% in Q1 to roughly flat in July.
Homeowner demand is falling faster than pro supply is recovering, and the per lead price is drifting up rather than down. Angi still reports over 100,000 active US pros while acquiring more than 70,000 new ones a year, which tells you how fast the churn runs underneath that number. The practical implication: the rep calling you four times a week is under real pressure, so push on the monthly minimum and the term length before you sign.
If your problem is that the leads you already pay for go cold before you call them back, that is cheaper to fix than replacing the channel. Missed call text back and a real follow up sequence recover more booked jobs per dollar than any marketplace, and we build both.
The category switchboard
If you are running Angi, this is the decision. Not whether to use it, but which task types to leave switched on. Everything here is measured against the roughly $300 per booked job Angi's own CEO described.
| Category | Setting | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Panel upgrades, service changes | Leave on | $1,200 to $2,000 published anchor, and the anchor is roughly honest. Best economics on the platform. |
| Breaker and subpanel work | Leave on | $520 to $2,120 ticket, site conditions mostly visible, quotes hold. |
| EV chargers | Switch off | $967 anchor against a real number that is often double it. Highest lead price, worst close. |
| Whole house generators | Switch off | Long cycle, multiple site visits, permit and gas coordination the form never captures. |
| Rewires and remodels | Switch off | $1,500 to $10,000 published range is so wide the anchor is meaningless, and the sales cycle outlives the lead credit window. |
| Outlets, switches, fixtures | Switch off | $133 to $300 tickets cannot carry a $300 acquisition cost at any close rate. |
| Ceiling fans, lighting | Switch off | $140 to $350 tickets, and the most shopped category on the board. |
| Troubleshooting and diagnostics | Switch off | A $150 first hour against a $50 lead at one in six is a guaranteed loss. |
Two on, six off. If that leaves too little volume for the monthly minimum, the platform is telling you something about the fit.
If you are going to test it, test it like this
- Cap it at 30 days and a dollar figure you can afford to lose entirely, and calendar the renewal date the day you sign.
- Run the two panel categories only. Everything else off from day one, not after you have proved it.
- Track cost per booked job by category, never cost per lead. Cost per lead is the number Angi wants you watching.
- Log dead leads on their own line. That number decides whether the sticker price is real.
- Dispute the same day, with specifics. Wrong category, out of area, unreachable after three documented attempts. Late disputes lose.
- Answer inside five minutes or do not bother. On a shared lead the second caller is usually buying a conversation the first caller already closed, so how fast you respond to a lead matters more than which platform you buy from.
- Redirect every won job to your Google profile. The review is the only asset the money buys that you keep.
- Decide at day 30 on the number, not the feeling. Two panel jobs at $1,600 against $900 of spend is a keep. Anything else is a cancel.
When Angi is genuinely worth it for an electrician
Three cases, and pretending there are none is why most articles on this are useless.
You are new with no reviews. LSA rewards review velocity and a verified profile, so a first year shop can be locked out of the cheaper channel for months. Buying panel leads at thin margin to generate reviews you redirect to your Google Business Profile is a defensible bridge, provided it has an end date.
You have idle capacity this week. A licensed electrician sitting still costs more than a $60 lead, and this is the one case where even the small categories can pencil.
You are entering a new geography. Buying into zip codes where nobody knows you, while the map pack work matures, is a reasonable use of a channel you do not intend to keep.
None of those support Angi as a primary pipeline. The failure mode is the shop that wakes up with 60% of revenue from bought leads and discovers it has a landlord who sets the rent.
The verdict
Angi is not a scam and it is not a solution. It is a marketplace whose own CEO put the cost of a booked job at roughly $300, sold into a trade whose average ticket Angi itself publishes at $351.
Two categories survive that: panel upgrades and breaker work. Switch the other six off permanently, and ignore the standard advice to chase EV chargers and generators, because those are the categories where Angi's own price guide is quietly bidding against you.
Spend the difference where an electrician's economics work. Local Services Ads at $39 a lead and a $1,434 average ticket, a Google Business Profile with real review velocity, and a system that answers the phone, because the jobs you already paid for leak faster than any channel fills them.