Appointment-Set vs Raw Solar Leads: Why One Appointment Costs $25 and Another Costs $450

Two vendors will quote you a solar appointment this week, and the quotes will not be close to each other. VA Horizon publishes an appointment rate starting at $25, while RGR Marketing lists one at up to $450. Neither of them is lying. Neither number tells you which is cheaper either, because they are not selling the same thing.

The comparison most installers run is price per lead against price per appointment. That comparison cannot work, and it is worth being precise about why. An appointment price already contains the labor of setting it. A raw lead price does not. Until you add your own setting cost to the raw side, you are holding a finished product in one hand and a component in the other, and asking which one weighs less.

This page rebuilds the comparison from prices and wage data you can open and check yourself. Where a number is yours to supply, it says so instead of inventing an industry constant.

“Appointment” Is at Least Two Products, and the Market Prices Them Apart

The cleanest distinction in solar lead buying is set versus sit. A qualified set is outreach plus an initial booking, before the homeowner has confirmed the time. A confirmed sit is the homeowner having agreed to and kept a specific time. VA Horizon prices the first at $25 to $75 per set and the second at $50 to $150 per sit, describing the sit as roughly 1.5 to 2.5 times the per-set rate.

Other publishers price something they also call an appointment at several times that. RGR Marketing’s 2026 solar lead guide lists appointment-set solar leads at $250 to $450, and The Leads Warehouse puts door-to-door appointments at $200 to $400 or more.

Read that table as eight separate claims, not as a consensus. Each row is one publisher’s number for its own definition of the product. Where two rows look similar that is not corroboration, and where they conflict neither is automatically wrong. We took this apart at length in why published solar lead prices disagree so badly, which sets four guides side by side using one label for four different products.

What You Are Actually Buying Is Who Absorbs the No-Show

The set-to-sit spread prices exactly one risk. Buy per set and the no-show is yours. Buy per confirmed sit and the vendor carries it, and VA Horizon charges roughly 1.5 to 2.5 times as much for doing so. That multiple is the market’s own estimate of what no-shows cost, and it is more useful than any show rate you will be quoted, because it is a price someone will actually transact at.

Vendors selling the service publish their own show rates. Touchstone Communications states that its solar clients “consistently achieve 70 to 75% show rates” using a 24-hour double-confirmation call or SMS. Treat that as exactly what it is. It is a vendor’s claim about its own clients, made on a page selling appointment setting, and it is not an independent benchmark.

We went looking for an independent, published solar no-show benchmark and did not find one. That absence is worth more to you than a borrowed number would be, because it means any vendor quoting you an industry-standard show rate is quoting an assumption. Ask what their own rate is, ask how they measure it, and put the answer in the contract rather than leaving it in the pitch deck.

That is not a contrarian position. A vendor that sells appointments tells buyers the same thing, advising them to get the no-show and replacement policy in writing before paying for any appointment.

The Raw Side Is Incomplete Until You Price the Setting Labor

A raw lead is a component. Someone still has to dial it, reach a human being, qualify them and book a time. When you buy raw, that someone is on your payroll, and an honest comparison puts their cost on the raw side of the ledger.

Two public figures get you most of the way to a defensible hourly number, and both come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than from anyone selling leads.

What that hour converts into per booked sit depends on one number nobody else can supply for you.

Every cell in the right column is the loaded hourly figure multiplied by the hours beside it, and nothing else is baked in. Pull your own hours by dividing setter hours worked in a period by sits booked in the same period, then read the row that matches.

We are not going to publish a single industry cost-per-sit, and you should be wary of anyone who does. It moves with contact rate, list quality, how many hours of phone coverage you run against the hours your leads actually arrive, and dialer concurrency. No source we could open publishes a solar-specific figure for it. A vendor quoting you one is quoting an assumption with a dollar sign in front of it.

Speed Is the Largest Variable You Do Not Fix by Buying

Setting labor is the cost of the raw side. Response speed is its risk. The Lead Response Management Study reports that the likelihood of contacting a lead drops more than tenfold after the first hour, and that the odds of qualifying one fall 21-fold as response time stretches from 5 minutes to 30, with a fourfold drop between 5 and 10 minutes.

Two cautions on that study, because it is routinely misquoted. Its tenfold contact figure attaches to the first hour, not to the first five minutes, and the difference matters when you are sizing a staffing decision around it. The study also reports relative odds drawn from web-generated leads across six companies, publishing no absolute contact rates and no solar-specific data at all. Use it for the shape of the decay. Do not let anyone use it to justify a contact rate.

For what it is worth from a source with a stake in the answer, VA Horizon puts the industry average response time at 47 hours and says the first caller wins about 78% of sales on a shared lead. If either of those is even directionally right, most of a shared lead’s value is gone before anyone dials it. How distribution compounds that problem is the subject of what a shared solar lead really costs per acquired customer, and the operational side of closing the gap runs through building a solar strategy around cost-per-sat-appointment.

The Only Comparison That Works, and What It Actually Says

Price per unit is not a decision input. Price per unit divided by your close rate on that unit is. Run every source you are considering through the same formula.

RGR Marketing is the one publisher we found that prints both halves, so at least its rows are consistent with each other.

Prices and close rates in that table are RGR Marketing’s published figures. The right-hand column is division rather than a new source, taking best price over best close rate at one end and worst over worst at the other. The two raw rows carry no setting labor at all.

Whether any of those numbers is tolerable depends on gross profit per install, which is another input this page cannot supply for you. If you do not have your own average to hand, the Department of Energy benchmarks a representative residential rooftop system at 8 kW, which is the size to reason from when you apply your own gross margin per watt.

The honest read is that the bands overlap almost end to end. On the only source publishing both halves, no product wins outright. What separates them is width, not height. The appointment-set band spans a factor of about four, the exclusive band a factor of about eight. That is the real case for buying appointments, and it is not the case vendors usually make. Appointments are not reliably cheaper. They are reliably less variable, which is a different and more modest claim.

Then add back the setting labor those raw rows are missing. Somewhere inside the range in that staffing table, depending entirely on the hours figure only you hold, the raw side’s good end either survives contact with your payroll or it does not. That is the number this decision turns on, and no vendor can quote it to you.

Which One Fits Your Operation

There is no winner here that survives being applied to every shop, so the useful answer is a conditional one.

• Buy confirmed sits if you have closers but no setting function, or if you cannot staff phone coverage across the hours your leads actually arrive. You are paying someone else to carry the no-show, and the set-to-sit multiple tells you roughly what that costs.
• Buy raw if you already run a dialer with real coverage and you can measure setter hours per booked sit. If you cannot measure that, you cannot know whether raw is cheaper, and you are guessing with your own money.
• Buy per set rather than per sit only if you run a confirmation process of your own. Otherwise you have bought the cheaper product and kept the expensive risk.
• Whatever you buy, price it per install. A cheaper unit that closes at a third of the rate is the more expensive customer.

One thing sits underneath all of it. Every close rate quoted above assumes the contact was a real homeowner, and a lead that was never a person closes at zero no matter what you paid for it. If you have not audited what share of your inventory is junk, start with how solar lead fraud and verification change the denominator. Wider context on how the vertical prices lead generation sits on our solar lead generation hub, and the margin backdrop is in solar cost per lead after the ITC step-down.

FAQ

Why do two vendors quote wildly different prices for a solar appointment?

Because they are selling different products under one word. VA Horizon prices a qualified set, meaning outreach plus an initial booking before the homeowner confirms a time, at $25 to $75, and a confirmed sit, where the homeowner agreed to and kept a specific time, at $50 to $150. RGR Marketing lists an appointment-set solar lead at $250 to $450, and The Leads Warehouse puts door-to-door appointments at $200 to $400 or more. Make any vendor define what actually bills before you compare two quotes.

What does the price gap between a set and a confirmed sit pay for?

It pays for the no-show. On a per-set price you carry the risk that the homeowner never keeps the time, and on a per-confirmed-sit price the vendor carries it instead. VA Horizon prices a confirmed sit at roughly 1.5 to 2.5 times its own per-set rate, and that multiple is more useful to you than a quoted show-rate percentage, because it is a price a seller will actually transact at rather than a number in a deck.

What should I budget for an in-house solar appointment setter?

Build the number rather than borrow it. BLS OEWS data puts the mean hourly wage for telemarketers, occupation code 41-9041, at $17.97 in its May 2025 estimates. The BLS Employer Costs release puts benefits at 31.6% of total hourly compensation for civilian workers in the first quarter of 2026. Grossing that wage up by the benefits share gives a fully loaded hour near $26, a figure built entirely from BLS wage and benefits data rather than from any vendor. Multiply it by setter hours per booked sit from your own dialer report.

How fast do I have to call a raw solar lead?

Faster than most buyers manage, though the most-quoted study on this is routinely misread. The Lead Response Management Study reports that the likelihood of contacting a lead falls more than tenfold after the first hour, and that qualification odds drop 21-fold between a 5-minute and a 30-minute response. The tenfold figure belongs to the first hour, not to the first five minutes, and the study publishes no absolute contact rates and no solar data, so it describes the shape of the decay and nothing more.

Do appointment-set leads close better than raw leads?

On the only source we found publishing both, yes, though the comparison is closer than it first looks. RGR Marketing lists appointment-set solar leads closing at 5% to 10%, exclusive leads at 1% to 3%, and shared leads at half a percent to 1%. Those are close rates per unit purchased, which is how a buyer experiences them. Divide price by close rate and the resulting cost-per-install bands overlap heavily, so the close-rate advantage does not settle the decision by itself.

Is appointment-set cheaper per install than buying raw leads?

Not reliably, and that is the wrong reason to buy it. Running RGR Marketing’s published prices against its published close rates gives $2,500 to $9,000 per install for appointment-set, $1,333 to $10,000 for exclusive leads, and $2,000 to $12,000 for shared leads, before any setting labor is added to the two raw rows. Those bands overlap almost end to end. The appointment-set band is the narrowest of the three, so the defensible reason to buy appointments is lower variance rather than lower cost.

What single number decides this for my shop?

Setter hours per booked sit. Every other input can be taken from a published source or negotiated into a contract, but that one is yours alone, and it moves the raw side of the comparison more than anything a vendor controls. Divide setter hours worked in a period by sits booked in the same period. If your systems cannot produce that figure today, fixing the measurement comes before switching lead sources.

If you would rather buy the call than build the setting function, talk to our team about exclusive solar calls and leads. We will walk your current cost per unit and your close rate through the formula above, then tell you plainly where a call beats an appointment at your volume and where it does not.