Cost per lead is the wrong number. Here's the cost per booked job for the three ways a roofer buys leads, with 2026 benchmarks and real client accounts.
Every lead source will quote you a cost per lead. Almost none of them will tell you the cost per booked job, which is the only number that shows up in your bank account. Here's how the three main ways a home-service business buys leads compare on that number in 2026.
Roofing leads on LSA run $60 to $130 depending on market and season, and well-run accounts book 31% of them (the top accounts hit 40% or better). That works out to roughly $168 per booked job. Two things make LSA cheap: you only pay when a lead actually contacts you, and Google credits back leads that are spam, out of area, or not a real request. On one of our roofing accounts, 18 of 69 leads in a single month were credited back.
Non-branded search leads for roofing average about $124, with landing pages converting at 3.7% on average and 8 to 12% on the good ones. Branded search leads (people who already know your name) run about $44. With fast follow-up booking 35 to 40% of leads, that's roughly $310 to $350 per booked job from non-brand search, and much less from branded. The reason to run it anyway: search catches the urgent, specific, high-ticket queries LSA doesn't, and you control the message and the page. One $15,000 roof pays for a lot of $124 leads.
Marketplaces sell the same lead to several contractors at once, so your booking rate is competing with three other phones. The 2026 benchmark is about $542 per booked job on Angi and around $250 on Thumbtack. They can fill a gap, but they're the most expensive way to buy a customer, and the customer never learns your name.
The businesses with the lowest blended cost per booked job run LSA and Google Ads together and add AI-search visibility on top, because being named by AI drives the branded searches that cost a third as much to win. That's the system, and the reason we report on cost per booked job instead of cost per lead.
Sources: BlueGrid Media, 50 Google Local Services Ads Statistics (2026); SearchLight Digital Q1 2026 roofing Google Ads benchmark via Web Tonic.
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