How Much Do Garage Door Leads Cost? $18 to $280

Garage door leads cost $49 on Google Local Services Ads and $173 on non-branded Google Ads. Those are the spend-weighted averages from SearchLight's Q1 2026 benchmark, covering $784,795 of tracked spend across 11 to 12 US garage door contractors between January and April 2026. The account-level range is far wider: $18 to $81 on LSA, and $18 to $280 on non-branded search.

But the average is not the interesting number here. This is:

That combination should not survive in a rational auction. It survives because a large share of the people bidding against you are not pricing a $300 spring job. This article explains who they are, what that does to your number, and how to work out the only cost per lead that matters, which is the one your own book of work can afford.

What garage door leads actually cost, by channel

Here is the full price sheet as of the most recent published data. Every figure below traces to a named source at the bottom of this article.

The spread inside one trade is the story. A residential repair lead and a commercial overhead door lead differ by more than ten times in price, and every headline benchmark averages them together.

The contradiction: cheapest jobs, second-dearest leads

Set SearchLight's two garage door benchmarks side by side and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable.

Garage door's LSA average ticket is $1,145, the lowest of the six categories in its LSA comparison, below electrical at $1,434, plumbing at $1,714 and HVAC at $2,110. The reason is structural: the trade's demand is dominated by springs, openers, cables and sensors rather than full-door replacement.

Garage door's non-branded search cost per lead is $173, above HVAC at $149, electrical at $128 and roofing at $124.

So garage door pays more per lead than HVAC while selling jobs worth roughly half as much. If lead prices were set by what a lead is worth to a typical buyer of it, that gap would close. It has not closed, and the reason is that a typical buyer is no longer who is setting the price.

Who is actually bidding against you

Three groups sit in the garage door auction alongside independent shops, and none of them price a lead the way an owner-operator does.

Private equity roll-ups, buying lifetime value rather than first-job payback. In March 2026 Reuters reported Oak Hill Capital agreeing to acquire Guild Garage Group, an alliance of garage door repair and replacement businesses, in a deal worth more than $800 million. PitchBook covered the same transaction under the headline that private equity hopes garage door roll-ups will be the new HVAC, calling it the largest PE-backed acquisition yet of a US garage door supplier. A media buyer running garage door accounts in the Atlanta market put the effect plainly in r/PPC: "you're up against private equity that is happy to focus more on LTV rather than making their money back on the first job or one-offs."

National franchise networks with territory-scale volume. Precision Garage Door Service, a Neighborly brand, markets average annual gross sales above $3.6 million per territory. A buyer amortising acquisition across that volume, a service agreement and a replacement pipeline can pay a price per lead that a two-truck shop cannot.

Fake Google Business Profile operations monetising the same lead at five to ten times your ticket. This is the part the benchmark articles never touch. Angi puts national average garage door spring replacement at $250, typically $150 to $350. Yelp's cost data puts spring repair at a $200 national average with a $119 to $279 typical range. Now read what garage door operators are reporting about the companies buying the ad slot above them.

One operator in r/GarageDoorService, describing a cluster found in a single week: "About a week or so ago I found 7 companies, on google, spam companies. The phone numbers are different but everyone goes to the same switchboard. The game is that 2 guys in an unmarked truck hang out until the main switchboard calls and gives them a call then they go out and charge 2400.00 for 2 springs on a non-insulated 16x7 door."

Another, on an operation crossing state lines: "when you call you get transferred to a MA number and they send some joker out in a unmarked pickup truck selling amazon quality springs out the tailgate upcharging $1200 for an at most $400 job... I think they take the money they shake people down with to buy spots on google search results and that's how they're the first result."

A third, on the verification asymmetry: "I wanna know how they get their verified profiles up, yet here i am a legit business, and it takes months of back and forth with google to verify mine. Like these places don't even have a building, just an open field at the location."

That is the mechanism. A bidder converting the same broken-spring call into $2,400 instead of $250 has roughly ten times your headroom on cost per lead. They do not need to outwork you. They only need to outbid you, and their unit economics let them do it every hour of every day.

The benchmark everyone quotes is mostly one advertiser

Before you hold your account against $49 or $173, read the methodology notes that most articles citing these numbers leave out.

SearchLight discloses that in its LSA dataset, one account represents approximately 54% of total spend and the top three represent approximately 74%. In its Google Ads dataset, one account represents approximately 52% of total spend. Both benchmarks are spend-weighted. That means the headline average is substantially a description of one large contractor's buying, not of the typical shop.

The distributions are the honest read:

Note how much tighter LSA is. Google sets the LSA lead price, so accounts converge. Contractors set their own keyword bids on search, so accounts diverge, which is why the search spread runs more than fifteen times from best to worst while LSA runs about four and a half.

If you take one operational rule from this article, take this one: compare yourself to the median and the quartiles, not the average.

What a garage door lead used to cost

The trend line is missing from every benchmark page, because none of them existed five years ago. Practitioners remember it.

An operator in r/GarageDoorService, on starting up: "Ran ads at the beginning when LSA was $8-$20 for a lead. And I would have enough work for 3 trucks on a 3k monthly ppc budget. That was 5-6 years ago when I started. Now I just get work from my GMB and return customers."

Against a $42 median today, that is a two to five times increase in the price of the identical channel, over a period in which the average garage door ticket did not multiply by anything close to that. The same operator's response is the one most established shops eventually reach: stop renting the lead and own the profile.

Three job types, three completely different prices

Garage door is one of the few trades where a single benchmark averages together three businesses with different buyers, different close cycles and different margins.

Residential repair. The spring broke, the car is trapped, the buyer journey is minutes long. Click-to-call dominates, landing page conversion runs 10% to 18%, and cost per booked job lands around $120 to $220. This is the highest-volume and lowest-ticket line.

Residential install. A new door behaves like a remodel purchase. Three quotes, a spousal conversation, two to six weeks. Landing page conversion drops to 4% to 8% because nobody commits on first click, and cost per booked job runs $400 to $900. The variable is your in-home close rate, not your cost per lead.

Commercial overhead door. Facility managers and general contractors buying rolling steel, high-speed and fire-rated doors, on a 45 to 90 day close cycle tied to capital budgets. Cost per lead runs $300 to $600 with cost per booked job at $1,800 to $4,500, and Local Services Ads does not cover the category at all, so the LSA versus search debate is moot for this line.

The expensive mistake is running them together. Residential repair queries vastly outnumber commercial ones in most metros, so a shared campaign teaches Smart Bidding to chase residential volume and quietly starves the highest-margin line you have.

Your break-even, not the benchmark

The only cost per lead that matters is the one your book of work can carry. The formula is simple:

Maximum profitable cost per lead = gross profit per job × your lead-to-paying-customer rate.

SearchLight's LSA dataset puts the garage door paying rate at 25%, that is, a quarter of leads become invoiced customers. Applying that rate at a 40% to 50% gross margin gives the following break-even table. These are my calculations from the published inputs, not figures SearchLight publishes.

Read the top row again. A pure repair shop breaks even at about $44 per lead on the first job. The LSA average is $49. The median is $42. The non-branded search average is $173, roughly four times what that business can pay.

This is the answer to the question operators actually ask, which is not "what do leads cost" but "why does everyone say this channel works and it does not work for me." If your book is springs and openers, the published averages are not a benchmark you are underperforming. They are a price you cannot pay, and no amount of bid tuning changes that. Your routes out are a higher paying rate, a replacement and service-agreement mix that lifts the ticket, or channels you own rather than rent.

The channel picks your job mix, not just your price

Here is a detail buried in SearchLight's own comparison that nobody draws a conclusion from. Across largely the same contractors in the same four months, LSA leads closed at a $1,145 average ticket and Google Ads leads at $1,393. That is a 22% difference in job size produced by channel selection alone.

The cheaper channel is not just cheaper. It brings smaller work. LSA skews toward small-ticket service and repair; search captures a higher share of larger installations. So the honest comparison is not $49 against $173, it is $198 per paying customer at $1,145 against a search cost per paying customer above $400 at $1,393.

If you are trying to grow the replacement side of the business, the cheap channel will not get you there no matter how much you scale it.

LSA and search moved in opposite directions last quarter

Most seasonality advice tells you to raise budgets into spring. The data says which budget.

Non-branded search fell 27% from January to April as spring repair-and-replace demand rose and closed ROAS climbed from 2.92x to 4.23x. LSA went the other way, jumping 28% in April as spend scaled against fixed inventory.

Two rules follow. First, the expensive month on search is the cheap month to be present, because holding spend through January and February buys you into the cheaper months instead of switching on at the peak. Second, LSA punishes rapid scaling: one contractor in the dataset raised LSA spend roughly 75% month over month and pushed the whole cohort's price up. There is a finite number of LSA leads in your market and buying harder mostly buys them more expensively.

What operators are actually paying, by market

Benchmarks smooth over geography. Practitioners do not.

In a January 2026 r/PPC thread from a one-person garage door shop in Atlanta asking whether $50 a day was enough, the answers were consistent and blunt. Atlanta cost per click was put at $25 to $35, Houston at around $30 to start. One agency running a client just north of Atlanta reported a 90 day cost per click near $80 and cost per lead near $260, with the client closing about 60% of leads, and advised that anything under $300 a day would get crushed in that metro. Another operator reported LSA in competitive metros running $70 to $120 per lead against $125 to $175 on search.

The most useful reply in the thread reframed the question entirely: work backwards from how many jobs you can physically complete in a week and what your ticket mix is, because "if your mix is mostly spring and opener repairs at two or three hundred bucks, thats extremely tight. if theres a decent share of full door replacements at a couple thousand, its comfortable."

Same trade, same month, and the workable answer swings from $50 a day to $1,500 a day depending on metro and mix.

The number that beats cost per lead

Book rate. A $50 lead booked 45% of the time costs $111 per booked appointment. The same $50 lead booked 25% of the time costs $200. The cheaper lead is twice as expensive per job at the lower book rate, and no negotiation with a channel will ever hand you that much improvement.

Garage door punishes slow answering harder than any other trade because the demand is an emergency. The homeowner is standing in the driveway with a trapped car, calling three companies in a row and hiring whoever picks up. A missed call on a roof replacement can be recovered next Tuesday. A missed call on a broken spring is gone in four minutes. We covered the underlying response-time data in how fast you should respond to a lead, and the garage door version of the channel question in how to get more garage door leads.

SearchLight's garage door LSA dataset puts the average book rate at 38%, with the top of the distribution above 45%. Moving from 38% to 45% is worth more to your cost per booked job than moving your lead price from $49 to $42.

Work out your own number in six steps

1. Pull your last 90 days of invoiced jobs and calculate your true average ticket, split into repair and replacement. Not your quoted average. Your invoiced one.
2. Calculate your gross margin per job after parts, tech labour, vehicle and warranty callbacks.
3. Count leads to paying customers, not leads to booked appointments. The gap between the two is where most garage door businesses lose the plot on their real acquisition cost.
4. Multiply gross profit by that paying rate. That is your break-even cost per lead on a first-job basis.
5. Compare it against the medians, $42 on LSA and $168 on non-branded search, not the spend-weighted averages.
6. Decide what to fix. If your break-even is above the median, buy more leads. If it is below, the problem is your ticket mix, your paying rate or your answering, and buying leads harder will only lose money faster.

What to do this week

Segment repair, install and commercial into separate campaigns if they are not already, because the blended number is hiding your best line. Load commercial negatives on your repair campaign and residential brand and model negatives on your commercial one. Check your own metro's map pack and paid results for profiles with no real address, and file the ones you find. Then work the break-even table above against your own invoiced tickets.

If the number that comes out is below the market price of a lead, that is not a failure of your advertising. It is a signal that you need work you are not renting, whether that is a Google Business Profile that ranks, a service agreement base, or the sticker inside every door you touch. An operator with 40 years in the trade summed up his entire lead strategy in seven words: "We put a sticker in the garage." He is not wrong about the arithmetic.

Sources

• SearchLight, Garage Door Google Local Service Ads Cost Per Lead (2026): $123,399 LSA spend, 12 contractors, 2,494 leads, January to April 2026.
• SearchLight, Garage Door Google Ads Cost Per Lead (2026 Benchmarks): $661,396 Google Ads spend, 11 contractors, 4,555 leads, January to April 2026.
• Elevarus, Garage Door Google Ads CPL Benchmarks by Job Type: repair, install and commercial overhead door segmentation.
• Reuters, Oak Hill Capital to acquire Guild Garage Group in $800 million-plus deal, 6 March 2026.
• PitchBook, PE hopes garage door roll-ups will be the new HVAC, 17 April 2026.
• Neighborly, Precision Garage Door Service franchise: average annual unit volume.
• Angi, How Much Does Garage Door Spring Replacement Cost: $250 average, $150 to $350 typical.
• Yelp, Garage door spring repair costs: $200 national average, $119 to $279 typical.
• r/GarageDoorService, Uptick in garage door scams and Quick question for people in the garage door service industry.
• r/PPC, Is $50/day enough for Google Ads for a one-man garage door business?.