On 2026 benchmarks, general home services leads run $25 to $80, with a median around $45 and a typical lead-to-customer close rate near 35%. What your business can afford is a separate number: gross profit per customer, times your close rate, divided by a profit factor. The calculator below runs that math with general home services defaults loaded.
Your ceiling of $26 per lead sits inside the $25 to $80 band for general home services, so profitability depends on buying at the cheap end or converting better than average. Two levers move you clear of the band: close rate and job value. At about $1,400 average job value your ceiling clears the expensive end of the market.
Two readings from the same dataset: the band above is the blended cost-per-lead row; paid search alone implies $36 / $63 / $119 per lead (Google cost per click divided by landing-page conversion at each quantile). Search-only leads usually cost more than the blend.
| Gross profit per customer | $225 |
| Value per leadusing the 35% industry benchmark close rate | $79 |
| Breakeven lead cost | $79 |
| Your ceiling | $26 |
Balanced: a lead may cost up to a third of the money it brings in. A sensible default for most businesses.
Plots your real number on the scale next to the benchmark band ($25 to $80).
These bands are industry medians. If you want to know what leads cost in your market right now, we will pull the numbers for your area at no cost.
This page covers the volume trades: cleaning, lawn care, pressure washing, junk removal, handyman work, pest control. Tickets are smaller ($150 to $600 for most first jobs), which means the first-transaction math looks thin next to HVAC or roofing. The trades in this bucket that win at paid lead generation all win the same way: repeat schedules.
A one-time $250 clean at 50% margin carries $125 of profit; a biweekly customer at the same rate is worth $3,000 a year. Pest control figured this out a generation ago, so national pest brands can pay $80 for a lead that a one-off exterminator cannot justify at $30. The recurring-revenue toggle in this calculator is the whole story for this category; run your numbers both ways and the difference is your answer about whether to sell subscriptions harder.
Lead quality varies more here than in the licensed trades because the barrier to entry is low and marketplaces aggregate everything. Shared leads sold to four competitors close at a fraction of exclusive-lead rates, so a $25 shared lead closing at 10% costs more per customer ($250) than a $60 exclusive lead closing at 35% ($171). Cost per customer is the comparison; the calculator's math surfaces it directly.
A worked example: a cleaning company averaging $450 first jobs at 50% margin keeps $225. At a 35% close, a lead carries about $79, and the divide-by-three ceiling is roughly $26 on first-job math. Count regular repeat (the dataset's 3.0x multiplier for this category) and the ceiling rises to about $79, which is the difference between avoiding paid leads entirely and buying them profitably.
The marketplace caveat: aggregator leads are shared with competitors by design, and the race goes to the first responder within minutes. If your operation cannot respond inside five minutes during business hours, exclusive lead sources at higher sticker prices will produce cheaper customers.
Subscriptions. A quarterly pest contract turns one lead into years of scheduled revenue, so the lifetime value per lead supports $60 to $80 prices that one-off service math never could. Any home service that converts customers to a schedule inherits the same advantage.
Only if you respond first, consistently. A $25 lead shared four ways closing at 10% costs $250 per customer; a $60 exclusive lead closing at 35% costs $171. Compare cost per customer, and count your realistic response speed as part of the math.