On 2026 benchmarks, personal injury law leads run $250 to $750, with a median around $450 and a typical lead-to-customer close rate near 12%. 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 personal injury law defaults loaded.
Your ceiling of $270 per lead sits inside the $250 to $750 band for personal injury law, 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 a 34% close rate your ceiling clears $750, 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 $1,401 / $2,824 / $6,587 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 | $6,750 |
| Value per leadusing the 12% industry benchmark close rate | $810 |
| Breakeven lead cost | $810 |
| Your ceiling | $270 |
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 ($250 to $750).
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.
Personal injury has the most expensive leads in this dataset by a factor of three, and the economics still work, for firms built to convert them. Signed cases settle from $10,000 fender-bender territory to seven figures, contingency fees run a third or more, and that spread is why intake quality decides everything: two firms buying identical leads can see tenfold differences in revenue per lead depending on case selection and signing speed.
The number that matters is cost per signed case, not cost per lead. Benchmark signing rates run 8 to 18 percent of raw leads, dragged down by unqualified callers, out-of-jurisdiction inquiries, and cases below the firm's threshold. At a $450 median lead price and a 12 percent signing rate, a signed case costs about $3,750, which a $30,000 average fee absorbs without strain and a $9,000 average fee does not.
Speed dominates this vertical more than any other. Injury claimants contact multiple firms in one sitting, and industry studies have repeatedly found the first firm to respond signs the majority of contested cases. A firm with 24-hour intake staffed by trained signers can pay top-of-band lead prices profitably; a firm routing after-hours calls to voicemail is donating its lead budget to competitors regardless of what the leads cost.
A worked example: a firm averaging $15,000 in fees per signed case at 45% effective margin keeps $6,750 per case. Signing 12% of leads puts $810 of value on each lead, and the divide-by-three ceiling lands at $270, just under the market's cheap end. The same firm averaging $30,000 per case clears $540 ceilings comfortably. In PI, average case value is the verdict.
The case-value caveat: averages deceive in PI because settlements follow a power law. One policy-limits case can carry a quarter of marketing spend, and a run of soft-tissue cases can make a good lead source look broken. Judge sources on six months of signed-case economics, never a single month.
Because a signed case is worth tens of thousands in fees and every firm in the market knows it. Leads at $250 to $750 are normal; the question is signing rate. At 12% signing, a $450 lead means about $3,750 per signed case, which the fee on almost any legitimate injury case covers.
Benchmark bands run 8 to 18 percent of raw leads. The spread is intake: firms with 24-hour staffed response and same-call retainer processes sit at the top, and firms that call back the next morning sit at the bottom, buying the same leads.