Roofing has the highest cost per lead in home services. Not the highest cost per click, not the most competitive auction, the highest cost per lead. Those are different problems with different fixes, and almost every article on this topic conflates them.
Here is the spread you are actually choosing between:
| Source | Roofing cost per lead | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| LocaliQ, 3,211 campaigns | $228.15 | Medians, all campaign types, Apr 2024 to Mar 2025 |
| SearchLight, 15 contractors | $124 | Spend-weighted, non-branded only, Q1 2026 |
| SearchLight, blended | $105 | All Google Ads campaign types, Q1 2026 |
| Angi / HomeAdvisor, reported | $15 to $85 | Shared, plus annual membership |
Same trade, same question, an 84% gap between the two figures most often quoted as "the" roofing number.
The short answer
Budget $120 to $250 per lead for non-branded paid search, then stop optimising that number. It is a real constraint on your ad account and a poor description of your business. The figure that decides whether roofing marketing works is cost per paying customer, and in roofing that number sits roughly twelve times higher than cost per lead because of two conversion steps that happen after the lead arrives.
If you want the version of this argument for a trade with faster, smaller tickets, we ran the same analysis on how much HVAC leads cost. The conclusions diverge more than you would expect, and the reason why is the point of this article.
The number everyone quotes, and the one nobody checks
Search for roofing lead costs and you will meet $228.15 within about thirty seconds. It appears on dozens of pages, usually attributed to LocaliQ. It is real. It comes from LocaliQ's 2025 home services search ads benchmark, based on 3,211 US campaigns running from April 2024 to March 2025, with a minimum of 103 active campaigns per category. Roofing and Gutters topped all 16 trades.
What almost nobody quoting it mentions is the methodology line at the bottom: the figures are medians, not means, and they blend every campaign type together, branded and non-branded alike.
That matters, because SearchLight's Q1 2026 roofing benchmark reports $124 for the same trade. It is not contradicting LocaliQ. It is measuring non-branded campaigns only, spend-weighted, across 15 contractors, nine to twenty-one months later. Branded search in that dataset ran $44 per lead and Performance Max $64, which drags the blended figure to $105.
Watch out
Both numbers are defensible and neither is yours. The honest read: $228 is a median roofer running a mixed account in 2024 to 2025. $124 is a spend-weighted non-branded average across fifteen accounts in early 2026. If you are comparing your cost per lead to a published benchmark without checking which campaign types are inside it, you are comparing two different quantities.
One more caveat that the sites citing SearchLight tend to skip. In that same dataset, HVAC is built on 816 accounts and $14.9M in spend, plumbing on 524 accounts and $14.6M. Roofing is built on 15 accounts and $310K. It is the thinnest trade in their own table, which is why they label the page a living benchmark.
Roofing does not have a click price problem
This is the part no competing article does, and it reframes the entire question.
If roofing leads cost the most, the intuitive explanation is that roofing clicks cost the most. They do not. Here is LocaliQ's full picture with all three metrics side by side:
| Trade | Cost per click | Conversion rate | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing & Gutters | $10.70 | 3.70% | $228.15 |
| Doors & Windows | $8.76 | 4.41% | $200.34 |
| Construction (general) | $5.31 | 2.61% | $165.67 |
| Paint & Painting | $13.74 | 10.80% | $138.38 |
| Plumbing | $10.49 | 7.63% | $129.02 |
| Heating & Furnaces | $9.30 | 7.48% | $129.02 |
| Air Conditioning | $9.68 | 6.56% | $127.74 |
| Electricians | $12.18 | 9.08% | $93.69 |
| Cleaning / Maid | $8.50 | 17.65% | $46.99 |
| Home services average | $7.85 | 7.33% | $90.92 |
Read the painting row against the roofing row.
Painters pay 28% more per click than roofers and get their leads 39% cheaper. Electricians pay 14% more per click than roofers and get leads 59% cheaper. The auction is not what is punishing roofing companies.
Roofing's cost per click is 36% above the home services average. Its cost per lead is 151% above the home services average. The entire multiplier between those two figures is conversion rate: 3.70%, roughly half the trade average, second lowest of all sixteen categories.
By the numbers
Put plainly: a roofer buying 100 clicks at $10.70 spends $1,070 and gets about 4 leads. A painter buying 100 clicks at $13.74 spends $1,374 and gets about 11. The painter spent 28% more and got nearly triple the leads.
That changes what you do on Monday. If clicks were the problem, the levers would be bidding, match types and geography. Because conversion is the problem, the levers are the landing page, the form, the phone, and the speed of the human on the other end. Bid tuning on a 3.70% conversion rate is rearranging deck chairs.
Why does roofing convert so poorly? Three structural reasons, all specific to this trade:
The job is enormous and the decision is not urgent. A $28,000 tear-off is not a same-day purchase. A homeowner comparing replacement quotes is early, cautious and gathering options. Compare that to a burst pipe, where the search and the purchase are minutes apart. Plumbing converts at 7.63% for exactly this reason.
The searcher is often not the buyer yet. Roofing traffic is heavy with insurance research, price checking and homeowners who have not yet decided whether they are repairing or replacing. General Construction and Contractors converts even worse in the same dataset, at 2.61%, because its intent is broader still.
Roofing keywords attract non-buyers at scale. Cost researchers, DIYers and agencies prospecting roofers all click roofing ads. That traffic is paid for at $10.70 and converts at zero.
What roofing leads cost by channel
Cost per lead with no close rate beside it is not information. Ranges below are the current reported picture across the sources cited on this page, with the close rates marked as estimates where they are estimates.
| Channel | Cost per lead | Exclusive? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referrals | ~$0 | Yes | Ranked first for quality by roofers on r/Roofing |
| Organic search / Maps | Low after ramp | Yes | Slow to build, cannot be switched on |
| Google Ads, branded | $44 | Yes | 6.22x closed ROAS, but volume is capped by name recognition |
| Google Ads, Performance Max | $64 | Yes | Small sample, may absorb branded traffic |
| Google Ads, non-branded | $124 | Yes | 89% of roofing search spend in the dataset |
| Google Ads, LocaliQ median | $228.15 | Yes | Mixed campaign types, 2024 to 2025 |
| Angi / HomeAdvisor | $15 to $85 | No | Plus annual membership, sold to several contractors |
| Local Services Ads | Unknown | Yes | No credible roofing dataset exists |
Two rows deserve attention.
Branded search at $44 is the cheapest paid lead a roofer can buy, and it is the one most contractors argue about switching off because "they were going to find us anyway". In this dataset it returned 6.22x closed ROAS against 2.07x for non-branded. It is also structurally capped: you cannot scale demand for your own company name faster than you build your reputation.
The LSA row is blank on purpose. Numbers between $71 and $162 per roofing LSA lead circulate widely, and none of them trace to a primary dataset we could verify. SearchLight's LSA benchmark is the largest published, covering 888 contractors, 126,650 leads and $6.72M in February 2026 spend, and its trade breakdown lists electrical, HVAC, plumbing, drain and sewer, and water heater. There is no roofing line. So when an article quotes you a roofing LSA book rate of 43.9%, that number came from HVAC and plumbing accounts. It may well be right. It has not been measured. We covered the mechanics in Local Services Ads for contractors, but price it from your own account, not a borrowed benchmark.
From lead to booked to paid: the ladder that actually prices a roofing job
This is the arithmetic that should replace cost per lead in your head, and it is available because SearchLight published the raw counts alongside the ratios.
Their Q1 2026 roofing dataset: $347,421 in Google Ads spend, 3,304 leads tracked, 934 booked customers, 263 paying customers, $854,416 in closed revenue.
Divide it out:
| Rung | Count | Cost each |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | 3,304 | $105 |
| Booked customer | 934 | $372 |
| Paying customer | 263 | $1,321 |
Cost per paying customer was 12.6 times cost per lead. Two thirds of leads never became a booked customer, and then 72% of booked customers did not become paying customers inside the quarter.
That second drop is the one that separates roofing from every other trade. In HVAC or plumbing, booked usually means the van goes out and an invoice follows the same day. In roofing, "booked" means an inspection happened and an estimate was delivered. Between that and money changing hands sit the insurance adjuster, the mortgage, the spouse, the other three bids, and the homeowner's decision to wait until spring.
Note
Read that $1,321 fairly. SearchLight is explicit that a share of their 17.82x pipeline ROAS converts to closed revenue later, so within a single quarter the figure overstates the eventual cost per customer. It is a snapshot of a slow sales cycle, not a verdict. The lesson is the shape of the ladder, not the precision of the last rung.
The practical consequence: a roofer who measures marketing monthly will always conclude that marketing is failing. Your leads arrive in March and your money arrives in June. If cost per lead is the only number on your dashboard, you cannot see the difference between a channel that is genuinely losing money and one that is simply mid-cycle. That is a tracking problem before it is a marketing problem, and we walked through fixing it in how to track where your leads come from.
We size roofing engagements against your market, your storm exposure and your replacement-to-repair mix rather than quoting a cost per lead, because a CPL that ignores your booked rate and your close-to-collect rate describes almost nothing about your business. Bring those two numbers and we can give you real figures.
Why shared leads close so badly, from the homeowner's side
Every article on this topic tells you shared leads convert poorly because you are competing with three to five contractors. True, and incomplete. The more useful version comes from the homeowner.
A homeowner posting in r/Roofing described going to Angi for a couple of extra roofing quotes. They entered basic details, were shown four contractor names, and deliberately did not click the button to be contacted, planning to look the companies up themselves. In their words: "Within literally minutes, I got a phone call from a roofing company... I've been getting calls from just about every roofer in the state for the last 48 hrs!" Their question to the sub was how to get themselves off the list.
That is the lead you bought. Not a homeowner who asked you to call, a homeowner actively trying to stop the phone ringing. It lines up with what roofers report from the other end: "Sick of paying $100 for a shared lead just to find out 4 other guys already called them."
The most useful comment on the subject is not an angry one, though. It is u/Jealous-Elephant-121, who left: "My company just quit Angie's list. The ROI wasn't there. That being said it was about a 3rd of our lead source. And they haven't found a way to replace that."
Tip
That is the real trade. Shared marketplaces are expensive per job and genuinely produce volume. Cancelling them without a replacement channel already running does not save money, it removes a third of your pipeline. Build the owned channel first, then cancel. We covered the structural version of this argument in exclusive versus shared leads.
What roofers pay each other for a lead
A useful sanity check on all of this: what do roofing companies voluntarily pay a person who hands them a lead, with no platform in the middle?
On an r/Roofing thread about lead compensation, one owner: "I pay $250 if they just hand me a lead I have to sell. If they want to sell the lead themselves, I have no problem giving them 10%." Another set the market rate directly: "Lead services companies charge $200 to $300 for leads (name number address) regardless of whether or not they turn into jobs."
That is roofers, spending their own money, independently landing in the same $200 to $300 band as LocaliQ's $228.15 median. Two unrelated measurement methods converging is the strongest signal here that the number is roughly right.
Note what they are pricing, though: a name, a number and an address, with no promise it becomes a job. Everyone in that thread understood they were buying a lottery ticket, not a customer. Contractors get into trouble when they pay lottery-ticket prices and then budget as though they had bought customers.
What actually moves your roofing cost per lead
Roughly half of your number is the market and roughly half is decisions inside your account. Given roofing's conversion problem, the account half is weighted differently than in other trades.
Fix the conversion rate before the bid. At 3.70%, a move to 5.5% cuts your cost per lead by a third with zero change in spend. Nothing you do to bidding will match that. A dedicated landing page per service line, replacement separated from repair, an above-the-fold phone number and a form with three fields instead of nine is the entire play.
Answer the phone. Roofing leads call three companies. The one that picks up wins disproportionately, and roofers know it: as one put it in a thread on lead quality, response speed matters more than which channel the lead came from, and it is hardest exactly when you are on a roof. We put numbers to this in how fast you should respond to a lead.
Split repair from replacement. These are different businesses with different economics and they should never share a campaign. A repair lead against a $1,000 ticket and a replacement lead against a $15,000 ticket can justify wildly different prices. Averaged together, the replacement side quietly subsidises the repair side and you cannot see it.
Read the search terms report. Roofing attracts an unusual share of non-buyer traffic: cost researchers, insurance question askers, DIYers, and agencies prospecting you. Every one of those clicks costs $10.70. An hour with the search terms report and a negative keyword list is the highest-return hour in most roofing accounts.
Do not switch on at the peak. Roofing costs behave counter-intuitively: non-branded cost per lead fell 23% from January to March 2026 while volume rose 52%. Demand rising did not raise prices, it improved them. Contractors who go dark in winter and switch on in spring pay January prices for March competition.
Know your market's storm profile. The 25th to 75th percentile spread is $80 to $256, and the full range runs $69 to $674. Storm-and-insurance markets and quiet retail-replacement markets do not share a benchmark.
The four numbers that replace cost per lead
Stop reporting one number. Report these, per channel, per quarter:
- Cost per lead. What you paid for the phone to ring.
- Booked rate. Leads that turned into a delivered estimate. In the roofing data above, 28%.
- Close-to-collect rate. Booked customers that became paying customers. In the roofing data above, 28% again, and this is the rung most roofers have never measured.
- Cost per paying customer. Spend divided by rung 3. This is the only number that belongs in a budget conversation.
Then compare each channel against your gross profit per job, not against another contractor's cost per lead. A $256 lead is cheap against a $15,000 replacement at 30% margin. A $124 lead is expensive against a $900 repair. Both of those sentences are true at the same time in the same company, which is precisely why one blended cost per lead tells a roofer nothing.
What to do this week
- Pull your last 90 days and calculate all four numbers above, per channel.
- Find your conversion rate. If it is under 5%, your problem is the page and the phone, not the auction.
- Separate repair and replacement into different campaigns.
- Check whether your benchmark comparison is branded, non-branded or blended before you conclude you are overpaying.
- If you are on a shared marketplace and want out, start the replacement channel now and cancel in ninety days, not today.
Roofing genuinely is the most expensive trade in home services to buy leads for. It is not the most expensive trade to buy clicks for, and the distance between those two facts is where the money is.