How to Dispute a Bad Lead Credit: 4 Deadlines

Most bad-lead disputes are lost before you file them. Not on the merits of the lead, and not because a support agent read your evidence and disagreed, but on a deadline or a category rule you agreed to at signup and have never read since. Bark gives you 7 days. Angi's signed terms say 30 days while its own help centre says 45. Google removed the dispute button entirely in 2024. If you want the money back, the work is knowing which rulebook applies, filing inside the shortest clock, and picking a reason code the platform has already agreed to honour.

The four clocks, side by side

Every platform sells the same product and every platform has a different statute of limitations on complaining about it. These are pulled from the live policy documents, not from summaries.

The practical rule: assume the shortest number you can find in writing for that platform, and file within a week regardless. A dispute filed on day 6 is never rejected for being early. A dispute filed on day 31 against a 30 day clause is dead on arrival no matter how obviously fake the lead was.

Angi has two rulebooks and they do not match

This is the single most useful thing to know before you file with Angi, and no page currently ranking for lead credit disputes points it out.

The Lead Credit Guidelines hosted on the Angi Leads Pro domain are the contractual version. They say credits are issued in Angi's sole discretion, must be requested within 30 days of the charge, come as store credits, and expire six months after issue. Eligible situations are a duplicate request from the same consumer, a wrong ZIP code that does not match your profile, a wrong job type that is not in your profile, a competitor testing the system, and all contact information being wrong or disconnected. A wrong job type where the correct type is in your profile gets a partial credit only.

The help centre article, updated in August 2026, is the operational version support actually works from. It uses different words and different numbers. The lead must be less than 45 days old rather than 30. Duplicates are defined as being charged twice for the same homeowner within 45 days. Paused leads, meaning a charge taken while your lead flow was off, appear as an eligible reason and are absent from the contractual version entirely. Review takes five business days.

Then it adds three requirements that decide more disputes than any evidence you can submit:

1. You should have attempted to call the homeowner within 24 hours of receiving the lead.
2. Your account must be in good standing with no overdue balances.
3. You must not be on an annual subscription.

That third one is brutal. A tile contractor posting to r/Contractor in April 2026 described paying 285 dollars for an annual subscription and then being charged 100 to 130 dollars per lead on top, hitting 235 dollars in extra charges inside one week on leads that never responded. The post drew 43 upvotes and 34 comments and the pro reported that Angi refused any refund. Reading the help centre after the fact, that outcome was determined at signup: annual subscribers can report leads, but credits are not offered on them.

The tactical takeaway is to check which plan you are on before you spend an hour writing a dispute, and to file against the 30 day clock rather than the 45 day one so that neither document can be used against you.

Google removed the dispute button, then removed two reason codes

Google Local Services Ads no longer has a dispute process. In 2024 the Dispute button was replaced with a Rate this lead feedback survey, and credits are now decided by machine learning models that reassess charged leads over time. Google's automated lead credits documentation confirms the current state:

• Credits usually reach your account balance within 30 days, and the original charge stays on the invoice.
• Google no longer supports credits for "job type not serviced" or "geo not serviced" leads.
• Lead credits are unavailable for health care verticals, tax specialists, and advertisers in EMEA.
• Automatic lead credits run in the United States and Canada only.

Those two removed reason codes used to be the bread and butter of contractor disputes, and their removal explains a complaint that is otherwise baffling. In January 2026 a flooring contractor posted to the Google Ads community that he was charged over 100 dollars for a carpet installation lead. He offers hardwood installation and refinishing only, carpet is not in his settings, he rated the lead as irrelevant, and he was charged anyway. He asked where to formally submit a dispute. There is no longer anywhere to submit one, and the exact category his complaint falls into is the one Google stopped crediting.

Four things you do that turn a junk lead into a billable one

This is the part that saves the most money, because it prevents the charge instead of arguing with it afterwards. Google publishes an explicit definition of a valid lead and a list of leads that will not be credited. Read them as a list of your own actions, and the picture changes.

Returning a missed call with no voicemail. A missed call without a voicemail is not automatically a valid lead. It becomes one when you return the customer's message with a text, an email, or a call where you either speak to them or leave a voicemail. Reflexively calling back every missed number is how you buy leads you were never charged for.

Referring the customer to someone else. "Referring a customer to a different provider" sits on Google's will-not-be-credited list. Being helpful to a caller whose job you cannot take is exactly the behaviour that makes the charge stick.

Quoting and promising a callback. "You entertained a customer with a quotation and promised a call back" is also on the list. So is a customer who was researching potential projects or prices, and a customer who did not respond to your return call.

Listing a general service type you do not fully cover. The line reads: you listed a general service type on your profile, but you don't do a specific type of service. This is the flooring contractor's carpet lead. If your profile says flooring and you only do hardwood, the carpet caller is a valid, billable, uncreditable lead by policy. The fix is not a dispute, it is narrowing your job types until the profile describes only what you actually sell.

One more from the same page: a valid lead received outside your business hours will not be credited. Wide-open business hours in your profile are a standing bill.

The five minute dispute that actually gets paid

Long, angry, detailed disputes lose to short, correctly coded ones. Support is matching your submission against a fixed list, not reading a narrative. Structure it like this.

Pick the reason code first, then write to it. Look at the platform's own eligible list and choose the single category your lead falls into. If the number is disconnected, that is the whole dispute. Do not also mention that the homeowner sounded like a price shopper, because you have just handed over an excluded reason and given the reviewer a way to deny the whole thing.

One lead, one request. Bundled disputes get triaged as a complaint about the service rather than five discrete claims.

Attach the artefact, not the story. A screenshot of the "number not in service" message. The bounce-back email. The two lead IDs showing the same homeowner charged twice. The timestamp on your outbound call proving you dialled inside 24 hours. Bark's clause 9.2 specifically names an invalid phone number where calls are not being connected and a bouncing email address, so a screenshot of exactly that is the evidence the clause was written for.

Prove the call attempt before you claim anything else. Angi's 24 hour call requirement is a gate. If you cannot show a dial attempt inside a day, nothing else in your request matters.

On Google, rate rather than explain. A contractor on r/PPC described the approach that works for them: enter no notes and no name on the bad lead, rate it very dissatisfied, and pick a reason. The models score the rating, not your prose. Another commenter in the same thread put it plainly: technically there is no reporting leads anymore, only rating, which is up to the system's discretion.

Do it the same day. This matters twice, which the next section explains.

What disputing costs you

Here is the second-order effect that no lead platform will tell you and no competing article covers.

In August 2026 an operator posted to r/PPC that their Local Services Ads volume dropped after they reported a batch of leads all at once at the end of the previous month. The most useful reply in the thread separated two effects that stack. Google's ad rankings documentation lists responsiveness to customer inquiries and requests as a ranking factor and notes that missed calls may negatively affect responsiveness. Saving up a month of bad leads to dispute in one sitting means those leads sat unanswered for weeks first, which drags the responsiveness signal down independently of whether any dispute is approved. You take one hit from the batch and another from the slow response times that made the batch necessary.

Another commenter suggested the credits themselves may affect the answered percentage the system uses to decide how much to show your ad. That part is a practitioner theory rather than documented policy, so treat it as a reason for caution rather than a fact. The documented part is enough: responsiveness is a published ranking input, and batching disputes correlates with the slow responsiveness that damages it.

Handle every lead the day it arrives. Rate it, request the credit, move on. Spread the requests out. The money you claw back is not worth throttling the channel that pays for the truck.

When the platform says no

You have three escalation paths and they are worth exactly what they cost, which is not much.

Ask for the clause. Reply once, quote the specific eligible-reason bullet from the platform's own document, and ask which listed exclusion your lead fell under. Vague denials are the norm, and a request that forces a named clause sometimes reverses one. It also builds the record you need for the next two steps.

File with the regulators. This is not theatre. The FTC sued HomeAdvisor, an Angi affiliate, in March 2022 for making false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold to home service providers. The final order approved in April 2023 required payments of up to 7.2 million dollars, and the FTC subsequently returned more than 3 million dollars to 110,372 businesses that had paid for memberships. That case was built on exactly the kind of complaint you are about to file. Reporting to the FTC, the BBB and your state or provincial attorney general is free and takes fifteen minutes.

Treat the chargeback as an exit, not a tactic. A chargeback on a lead that was genuinely delivered is a weak claim, and the likely results are account suspension and a balance sent to collections. Contractors on r/Contractor describe disputed Angi balances being handed to a collection company after they stopped using the service. If you have decided to leave anyway, work through the cancellation arithmetic first, get the cancellation confirmed in writing, and only then dispute charges you can document as unauthorised.

The pre-flight checklist

Run this before you file anything.

1. Which plan am I on? Annual subscription on Angi means no credits exist for you. Stop here and change the plan instead.
2. What day is it? Count from the charge date, not from when you noticed. Bark 7, Angi 30, and file today regardless.
3. Did I dial within 24 hours? If not, the Angi request fails on a gate before anyone reads it.
4. Which single listed reason applies? Disconnected number, wrong contact person, duplicate, out of profile ZIP, out of profile job type, spam or competitor, paused flow. If none applies, the lead is billable and your time is better spent elsewhere.
5. Do I have the artefact? Screenshot, bounce-back, or two lead IDs. No artefact, no claim.
6. Am I filing alone or in a batch? Alone. Always.
7. Would fixing my profile prevent this whole class of lead? Narrow the job types, tighten the ZIPs, set real business hours. That is worth more than every credit you will ever win.

The part the dispute process cannot fix

Every hour in this article buys back one lead fee. A disconnected number on Angi is 90 dollars. A carpet call on Local Services Ads is 100. Even a perfect dispute record recovers a rounding error against what a bad lead channel costs over a year, and the credit you win is store credit that expires in three to six months and can only be spent buying more of the same leads. The dispute system is designed to keep you on the platform, not to make you whole.

The structural answer is to stop renting the phone number. Owned channels do not have a credit policy because there is nothing to credit: your own site, your own local pages, your own review profile, and a follow up system that reaches a homeowner before the four other contractors who bought the same shared lead. That is also the only lead flow where a ghost costs you nothing, because you never paid for the introduction in the first place. If you are still weighing whether the platform spend is worth it at all, the Angi lead economics are a better place to start than the dispute queue.

Dispute what you can, inside the clock, one lead at a time, with the right reason code. Then spend the rest of that hour on the channel where nobody gets to deny your refund.