Cost per job in 2026: every trade lead channel ranked
Every channel that sells work to tradesmen quotes the same misleading number. A lead for £18. A click for £4.20. A membership for £95 a month. None of those are prices you can compare with anything, because none of them is what a job costs you. The figure that matters is what you spent divided by the jobs you actually won, and it is usually four to ten times the headline. That single division reorders the entire market: channels that look cheap become the most expensive, the two cheapest channels turn out to be ones nobody sells you, and the ranking stops being about price at all and starts being about win rates. Here is the whole picture, with the assumptions written down so you can put your own numbers in.
Cost per booked job, not cost per lead, is the only number worth comparing. Referrals and repeat work cost effectively nothing. An owned website plus a Google Business Profile comes next, because the spend is fixed while the jobs keep coming. Paid ads and lead platforms sit well above both, and your win rate moves them more than their prices do.
The division everyone skips
Cost per job is total spend divided by jobs won, and because most trades win between one in three and one in eight of the enquiries they chase, the real cost of a job is routinely five times the advertised cost of a lead.
Two trades paying the identical price per lead can have completely different costs per job, and the difference is entirely in how fast they answer and how well they quote. That is the uncomfortable part: the channel is rarely the problem, and negotiating a better rate moves the number far less than picking up the phone within ten minutes does.
| Channel | What you pay for | Typical win rate | Why it lands there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referral or repeat | Nothing | Very high | Pre-trusted, no competition, ready to book |
| Your own site and profile | The build, then hosting | High | They chose you, not a form |
| Local Services Ads | Each contact | Medium | Good intent, but shared attention |
| Search ads | Each click | Medium to low | You pay for browsers as well as buyers |
| Membership platforms | A monthly fee | Medium to low | Fixed cost whether busy or quiet |
| Pay-per-contact platforms | Each conversation | Low | Same enquiry sold several times over |
| Social ads | Impressions and clicks | Lowest | Interrupting people who were not looking |
The ranking, with the maths shown
Modelled on a single trade spending the same £300 a month on each channel in turn, the cost of a booked job varies by more than tenfold, and the ordering barely moves even when you change the assumptions.
The chart below is a model, not a survey. It takes one figure, £300 of monthly spend, applies the win rates in the table above, and divides. Your own numbers will differ. What will not differ is the shape: the channels you rent sit at the top, and the ones you own sit at the bottom.
A worked model on stated assumptions, not survey data. Owned site assumes a £600 build plus £20 a month, spread over the first year, at four jobs a month.
The owned-site figure deserves explaining rather than glossing, because it is the one that looks too good. A £600 build plus £20 a month is £840 in the first year. At four jobs a month from the site and profile, that is 48 jobs, and £840 divided by 48 is about £18 a job. In year two the build is paid for, the cost is £240, and the same 48 jobs cost £5 each. Halve the job count and it is still the cheapest row on the chart by a wide margin. That is the entire argument for owning rather than renting, in one sum.
A real month, itemised
Abstract rankings persuade nobody, so here is the same arithmetic applied to one month of a working trade's actual spending, which is where the gap between what a channel costs and what it delivers becomes obvious.
One month, three channels, one trade
| Membership platform fee | £95 |
| Enquiries received from it | 6 |
| Jobs booked from it | 1 |
| Cost per job, platform | £95 |
| Pay-per-contact credits spent | £180 |
| Contacts made | 7 |
| Jobs booked from it | 1 |
| Cost per job, credits | £180 |
| Website and profile, monthly cost | £20 |
| Enquiries received | 9 |
| Jobs booked | 4 |
| Cost per job, owned | £5 |
Illustrative month built from the pattern we see across trade clients, with the build cost excluded because it was paid in a previous year. Your split will differ; the method will not.
Look at the enquiry counts rather than the costs for a moment. The owned channel produced more enquiries and converted a far higher share of them, because those people searched for that trade, in that town, found the site, read it, and chose to ring. Nobody else was ringing them back. That is the difference between an enquiry you own and an enquiry you rented, and it is why win rates diverge so sharply.
Where the paid channels genuinely earn their place
None of this makes paid channels stupid, it makes them a tap: they buy work this fortnight at a known price, which is exactly what you want when the diary is empty and exactly what you do not want as a permanent arrangement.
A new business with no history, no reviews and no rankings cannot wait three months for organic enquiries. A seasonal trade heading into a quiet stretch needs work in a fortnight, not a quarter. In both cases paying £150 a job is entirely rational, because the alternative is no job. The mistake is not turning the tap on. It is leaving it on for four years while never building anything that would let you turn it off.
The membership platforms deserve the same fairness. They are fixed cost, which is a genuine advantage in a busy month, and they are worse in a quiet one. Their real problem is not the monthly fee, it is what happens over years, which is set out with the numbers in what Checkatrade costs over three years and compared across the main platforms in Checkatrade vs MyBuilder vs Rated People.
Why nobody sells you this number
Every channel advertises the unit that flatters it, and because those units are genuinely different things, no two prices in this market are directly comparable until you convert them all into cost per booked job yourself.
Search advertising charges per click, in an auction, so what you pay moves with how many competitors are bidding in your town that week; Google documents the mechanism plainly enough (Google Ads, how costs are calculated). Local Services charges per lead instead, with a process for disputing ones that were never real work (Google, Local Services Ads help). Membership platforms charge per month regardless. A click, a lead and a month are three different products wearing the same price tag.
None of that is dishonest, and every one of those units is the right one from the seller's point of view. It just means the comparison you actually need is one nobody in the market has any reason to publish, because for most channels it looks considerably worse than the number on the homepage.
There is one more reason the figure stays hidden: it is different for every trade. A firm that answers within five minutes and quotes the same day will get a cost per job less than half that of an identical firm that rings back tomorrow, on the identical channel at the identical price. The channel takes the credit or the blame for something that mostly happens in your own van.
How to work out your own numbers this month
You can produce your own version of this ranking in one month with a single question asked at the start of every call, and it will be more useful than any national figure because it uses your win rate and your prices.
Ask everyone who rings how they found you, and write it down the moment you hang up. Not later. At the end of the month, add up what each channel cost, count the jobs booked from each, divide. That is the whole method, and almost nobody does it, which is why so many trades keep paying for the channel that feels busiest rather than the one that pays.
Two warnings from doing this with trades. The first is that memory flatters whatever you are already paying for, so the written note matters more than it sounds. The second is that word of mouth gets systematically under-counted, because "a mate told me about you" often also involved someone checking your website before ringing. When the same money is compared against van livery and advertising instead, the picture is in website versus van signwriting versus ads.
If you want the bottom row of that chart, that is what I build. A free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything, then a one-off £600 to build (£300 to start, £300 when you approve it) and £20 a month for hosting, security, renewals and unlimited small edits, cancellable any time. No charge per enquiry, ever, however busy it gets. See what a tradesman website costs, or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.