An electrical lead costs about $39 on Google Local Services Ads, $90 to $220 on Google search ads, and $15 to $85 on shared platforms like Angi and Thumbtack. Electricians pay the lowest cost per lead of any trade tracked in SearchLight's February 2026 Home Services LSA benchmark, which covered 888 contractors, 126,650 leads and $6.72 million in spend.
That sounds like good news. It is mostly a warning, and this article is about why.
What electrical leads cost by channel
Here is the honest spread. LSA is the only line backed by a large tracked dataset rather than agency-reported ranges, which is why it is the anchor for everything below.
| Channel | Cost per lead | Exclusive? | Typical close rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Local Services Ads | $39 (benchmark) to $95 in dense metros | Mostly, rotated among qualified pros | 20% to 35% |
| Google search ads | $90 to $220 after click costs | Yes, but you pay per click either way | 15% to 25% |
| Exclusive Meta leads | $45 to $110 | Yes | 20% to 40% |
| Thumbtack | $10 to $65 per contact | No | 8% to 15% |
| Angi / HomeAdvisor | $15 to $85 | No, shared with 3 to 5 electricians | 5% to 12% |
| SEO and Map Pack | About $42 once established | Yes | 20% to 35% |
| Referral | $0 to $15 | Yes | 50%+ |
| OEM and EV installer networks | No per-lead fee at all | Assigned, see below | Varies |
Channel ranges for search, Meta, Thumbtack and Angi are from Minyona's 2026 electrical lead generation guide and Watson Co's electrical contractor lead breakdown; the $42 organic figure is Watson Co's. Cost per click for electrician keywords lands between $7 and $18 in most markets and $15 to $55 in competitive metros, which is the input that produces those search-ad lead prices.
Now the part almost nobody gets right.
The $39 is correct. The numbers printed next to it usually are not
Search "electrician cost per lead" today and you will find the $39 quoted alongside a 43.9% book rate, a $1,826 average ticket, and a $233 cost per paying customer. Those three numbers are real, and they are not electrical. They are the blended all-trades row of the same benchmark, which mixes 888 contractors across HVAC, plumbing, drain, water heater and general accounts.
The electrical row reads differently:
| Metric | Electrical row | Blended all-trades row |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $39 | $53 |
| Accounts / spend | 112 / $335K | 888 / $6.72M |
| Book rate | 43.4% | 43.9% |
| Average ticket | $1,434 | $1,826 |
| Closed ROAS | 8.52x | 7.84x |
The book rates are close enough to borrow. The ticket is not. Electrical carries the smallest average ticket in the entire dataset, 32% below HVAC's $2,110 and 16% below plumbing's $1,714.
Divide the ticket by the closed return on ad spend and you get what each trade actually pays per paying customer. That calculation is not in the source; it falls straight out of it.
| Trade | Avg ticket | Closed ROAS | Cost per paying customer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical | $1,434 | 8.52x | $168 |
| HVAC | $2,110 | 9.55x | $221 |
| General / all trades | $1,831 | 7.84x | $234 |
| Plumbing | $1,714 | 6.85x | $250 |
| Drain / sewer | $1,521 | 5.50x | $277 |
So electricians do win. $168 per paying customer is the cheapest customer acquisition in the trades, and at a $39 cost per lead it takes roughly 4.3 leads to get there, an implied 23% lead-to-customer rate.
Watch out
Here is the number that should stop you. $168 of acquisition cost against a $1,434 average ticket is 11.7% of revenue. The healthy marketing benchmark for an electrical contracting business is 5% to 8% of revenue, per Profitability Partners' 2026 electrical margin benchmarks. The cheapest paid lead channel in the trades, run at benchmark performance, already exceeds the benchmark budget. Everything more expensive than LSA is further underwater unless your job mix is bigger than average.
That context matters more in electrical than elsewhere, because the trade runs thin. Simpro's 2026 electrical industry statistics put the industry at a projected $347.5 billion in US revenue with average net margins around 7.5%, and IRS Statistics of Income data puts electrical contractors at 6.1% net. Top performers clear 20%. On a 6% to 7.5% net margin, a marketing line running at 11.7% of revenue is not a rounding error, it is most of your profit.
Your cost per lead is the average of two different businesses
This is the structural reason a single electrical cost per lead is close to useless, and it is specific to this trade.
An electrician sells two things that behave nothing alike:
The emergency. Half the house is dark. A breaker trips every time the AC starts. An outlet is warm or something smells hot behind drywall. The homeowner is not comparing quotes, they are dialling until someone picks up. Ticket: $180 to $600. Decision time: minutes.
The planned upgrade. The 1985 panel cannot carry a hot tub, an EV charger and central air. The insurer wants the aluminum wiring gone. The family just bought an EV. Ticket: $750 to $25,000. Decision time: days to weeks, with two or three quotes in play.
Roofers largely sell one of these. HVAC sells a repair and a replacement, but both are the same equipment and the same season. Electrical genuinely runs two funnels with a 40x spread in job value, and a blended cost per lead is the arithmetic mean of them. That is why the answer to "how much do electrical leads cost" changes completely depending on which business the lead lands in.
Typical job values, consistent across both Minyona and The Valley Marketing Group's 2026 electrician ads guide:
- Service call or diagnostic: $180 to $600
- EV charger installation: $500 to $2,200
- Panel upgrade to 200A: $1,800 to $5,000
- Whole-home generator: $6,000 to $15,000
- Whole-home rewire: $8,000 to $25,000
Break-even cost per lead by job type
This is the table to actually budget from. It takes the 8% marketing ceiling, applies it to the job value, then works backwards through the 23% lead-to-customer rate implied by the electrical LSA benchmark.
| Job type | Typical value | Marketing budget at 8% | Break-even cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service call / diagnostic | $250 | $20 | $4.60 |
| Outlet, switch, fixture | $400 | $32 | $7.40 |
| EV charger install | $1,500 | $120 | $27.60 |
| Panel upgrade | $3,000 | $240 | $55 |
| Generator install | $9,000 | $720 | $166 |
| Whole-home rewire | $14,000 | $1,120 | $258 |
Read the top two rows again. There is no paid channel on earth that delivers a booked electrical service call for $20. Not LSA at $39 a lead, not Angi at $15, not organic at $42. If your mix is mostly small service work, buying leads is a structurally losing trade on first-job economics, and no amount of bid tuning fixes it.
Read the bottom two rows and the picture inverts. A generator or rewire shop can pay $166 to $258 a lead and still sit inside an 8% marketing budget. Those are prices that buy you exclusivity, premium placements and the top of a competitive metro auction.
Two honest caveats. First, this is first-job math. A service customer who calls you back twice more and refers a neighbour is worth several times the first ticket, which is exactly why service-heavy shops live on referral and reputation rather than paid leads. Second, the 23% lead-to-customer rate is the benchmark average; your own is the only one that matters, and it is very likely different.
Most electricians are buying leads priced for panel upgrades while running a service-call mix. We map your actual job values against what each channel really costs to book, then build the plan around the jobs that can carry the spend.
Why shared leads punish electricians harder than other trades
Shared platforms are a bad deal in most trades. In electrical emergencies they are structurally worse, because safety pressure accelerates the race.
When a platform sells one no-power call to five electricians, five phones ring at once. The homeowner books whoever calls back first, because the fridge is warming up. If your crew is on a roof or in a crawlspace, the fee did not buy a lead, it bought entry into a race you lost.
Run it. Ten shared leads at $55 is $550. At a 10% shared close rate that is one job. If the job is a $220 diagnostic and repair, you spent $550 to invoice $220, before labour, truck and parts.
This is not a fringe complaint. In January 2023 the FTC issued an order requiring HomeAdvisor, an Angi company, to pay up to $7.2 million and stop deceptively marketing its leads. The FTC's complaint alleged that since at least mid-2014 the company had made false or unsubstantiated claims about lead quality and source, specifically that service providers were told they would only receive leads matching their services and preferred geography when many did not, and that HomeAdvisor claimed job conversion rates it could not substantiate. The Commission approved the final consent order in April 2023, and the redress payments to affected pros were capped at $30 each.
That is the regulator's finding, on the record, about the exact objection electricians raise on forums.
What electricians actually say they pay
The forum record is consistent and worth more than most agency ranges, because these are operators reporting their own money.
A Denver master electrician going out on his own asked r/electricians whether Angi's $350 per month flat rate was worth it. Not one reply said yes. One contractor who had run it: "They send unqualified or improper leads and charge you for them, you can ask for money back and you 'might' get it. They send the same lead to 10 contractors and charge all of them for it. Lasted about a month, never again." Another: "Stay the hell away from Angie's list and home advisor, both exist to screw contractors, i lost a lot of money with them before i learned my lesson. Thumbtack is ok, but still kind of pricey."
A newly licensed Bay Area C-10 electrician testing Thumbtack, Yelp, Angi and TaskRabbit got the same verdict from an operator who had run all of them: "Google local services was by far the best option as far as paid leads go." A Florida master with insurance and a licence put the failure mode plainly: "I get leads but never get a response. Feels like I'm paying for nothing."
That last one is the real cost driver and it is not a pricing problem. A lead you paid for and did not reach is not a cheap lead, it is a wasted one, and it silently doubles your effective cost per booked job. We covered the numbers on that in how fast you should respond to a lead.
Tip
LSA charges you for a connected call, which means the channel has a ceiling that per-lead platforms do not: your phone-answering capacity. Calls that ring out to voicemail are still billed. Before you raise an LSA budget, work out who answers between 4pm and 7pm and on Saturday, because that is where the emergency calls land. A dispatch process that catches them is worth more than a bid change, which is why we treat scheduling and dispatch for electrical shops as a lead-cost problem rather than an operations one.
The electrical channel with no cost per lead at all
Every cost-per-lead table for electricians omits the channel that has become a serious share of residential electrical volume, because it does not have a per-lead price to put in a column.
Manufacturer and EV installer networks assign work rather than selling leads. Qmerit, the largest of them, reports a network of over 23,000 electricians and more than 1.5 million completed home electrification projects, and is listed as a trusted installer partner by automakers including Ford and GM, so many EV buyers arrive through a vehicle purchase incentive rather than a search. The homeowner requests a quote, the platform routes it to certified installers in the area, and the installer quotes the job.
The cost to you is not a lead fee. It is a price ceiling and a margin position. You are quoting into a managed marketplace against other certified installers, on a scope the platform defined, with permitting and inspection fees carved out of the advertised price. Whether that is cheaper than a $39 LSA lead depends entirely on what the constrained price does to your margin on a $750 to $2,200 charger install.
It belongs in your cost-per-lead thinking anyway, because EV charger work is the one planned-upgrade category where the homeowner has already spent the money on the car and is not shopping the electrical on price the way they shop a panel. Leaving it out of the channel mix and then complaining that search leads are expensive is an analysis error, not a market condition.
How to work out your own number in six steps
Benchmarks are a starting hypothesis. This is the measurement that replaces them.
- Tag every lead by source and by job type. Source alone is not enough. "LSA" tells you nothing if it blends $220 diagnostics with $3,400 panel swaps.
- Carry each lead to an invoice, not to a booking. A booked job that cancels cost you the lead fee and a truck roll.
- Compute cost per booked job per channel, per job type. Channel spend divided by jobs invoiced from that channel. Do the two funnels separately.
- Express it as a percentage of the ticket. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that makes the answer decidable. Above 8% and the channel is eating your margin.
- Check your answer rate before you cut anything. Pull the calls you were billed for and never connected. If that number is above 10%, your cost problem is a phone problem.
- Re-run it monthly. Auction prices move with season and competition.
The practical obstacle is that most electricians try to pull these numbers out of their accounting system, which cannot produce them. QuickBooks starts counting at the invoice, so every lead that did not convert, the exact population that determines your cost per booked job, was never recorded anywhere. That gap is the whole subject of is QuickBooks a CRM, and it is why a CRM built around how electrical shops actually work is a prerequisite for this measurement rather than a nice-to-have. If you have never had source attribution running at all, start with how to track where your leads come from.
What to do if your number is too high
Three moves, in order of how fast they work.
Fix response speed first. It costs nothing and it changes the denominator on every channel at once. Shared leads are won or lost in minutes; LSA calls are won or lost by whether a human answers.
Reprice the mix, not the bid. If your break-even cost per lead on your dominant job type is under $10, the answer is not a cheaper lead source, it is more of the work that can carry a lead cost. Panel upgrades, generators, EV chargers and rewires are the categories where paid acquisition is affordable. Service calls have to come from reputation, referral and organic presence, which is why Map Pack visibility and reviews do more for a service-heavy electrical shop than any ad budget.
Stop comparing your cost per lead to another electrician's. Two shops at an identical $39 can be in opposite financial positions depending on ticket, book rate and answer rate. We ran the same comparison for the trade with the highest lead prices in how much HVAC leads cost, and the conclusion is the same in both: cost per lead is a budgeting input, and cost per booked job as a percentage of the ticket is the decision.
The honest summary for electricians is uncomfortable. You buy the cheapest leads in the trades, you acquire customers cheaper than any other trade, and you still have the tightest margin for it, because the jobs are smaller. The trade with the cheapest leads is the trade with the least room to waste them.