- Health insurance leads run from pennies for aged data to $200 or more for a screened live transfer call, per two lead-industry pricing guides published in 2026.
- The biggest lever on what a lead is worth is not data quality. It is whether the person can legally enroll the week you call.
- CMS reported 22.8 million 2026 Marketplace plan selections, but only 2.8 million were new consumers.
- Nearly three in ten of last year’s Marketplace enrollees switched plans rather than renew, per a KFF follow-up survey. A slice of any aged file is still actively shopping. Most of the rest of the churn is people getting priced out.
- Off-exchange U65 and on-exchange ACA are priced as one bucket and should not be. The off-exchange lead is workable all year and often costs less.
- Before you pay, ask for the source URL, the consent language, the resale count, and the return policy in writing.
- A health insurance live transfer call costs $30 to $200 per transfer. Only one of the two guides breaks a transfer price out for health, and that band is $30 to $75 and up.
- How much does it cost to buy health insurance leads?
- What is a reasonable cost per lead for health insurance?
- Are health insurance leads worth buying?
- What is the difference between U65 and ACA health insurance leads?
- When can someone enroll in a health plan outside open enrollment?
- How do you spot a bad health insurance lead vendor?
- Do live transfer calls cost more than health insurance form leads?
- Are aged leads worth it?
- Where can I buy aged insurance leads?
Health insurance leads cost between $0.15 and $200 each in 2026.
Aged data sits at the bottom. Shared web leads run $10 to $45. Exclusive web leads go for $40 to $120. Live transfer calls reach $80 to $200 or more.
That is a spread of more than a thousand to one, on something every vendor calls by the same three words.
Most guides explain the spread with quality. Better data, fresher intent, fewer buyers on the same record. All of that is real. None of it is the biggest lever.
The biggest lever is whether the person on the other end can legally buy a plan the week you call them.
That sounds like a technicality. It is the whole market.
What Health Insurance Leads Cost in 2026
Two lead-industry pricing guides published their bands this year. Both sell into this market. Here is the Aged Lead Store health insurance lead pricing guide from March 2026, next to ActiveProspect’s breakdown of insurance lead costs from May 2026.
| Lead type | Aged Lead Store (Mar 2026) | ActiveProspect (May 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Aged data | $0.15 to $5.00 | $0.50 to $15 |
| Shared web lead | $15 to $40 | $10 to $45 |
| Exclusive web lead | $40 to $100+ | $45 to $120 |
| Live transfer call | $30 to $75+ | $80 to $200+ |
| Social or Facebook lead | $5 to $25 | not published |
Two sources, same market, and the live transfer bands barely overlap. One puts a transfer at $30 to $75 and up. The other puts it at $80 to $200 and up.
Neither is wrong. They are describing different things and calling them the same thing. That is the recurring problem with published health lead pricing. We settle that row into one range below, and name what moves a transfer to each end of it.
Aged Lead Store also breaks price out by product line. This is the table most buyers never see.
| Product line | Fresh exclusive | Fresh shared | Aged |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACA on-exchange | $30 to $80 | $10 to $30 | $0.50 to $3.00 |
| Under-65 off-exchange | $25 to $60 | $10 to $25 | $0.50 to $3.00 |
| Medicare Advantage and Supplement | $40 to $100+ | $15 to $40 | $0.50 to $5.00 |
| Group and employer | $50 to $150+ | $20 to $50 | $1.00 to $5.00 |
For scale on the spend side, the same guide puts a typical solo health agent at $300 to $1,500 per month on leads.
These are market ranges from vendors who publish them. Use them as a sanity check on the quote in front of you, not as a target. Anyone quoting far under the bottom of a band is selling something older or more widely resold than they said.
Why Enrollment Rules Set the Price, Not Lead Quality
The CMS Marketplace 2026 Open Enrollment Period national snapshot reported 22,774,847 people selected a 2026 Marketplace plan. That is the number everybody quotes when they pitch you ACA leads.
Read one line further in the same report. Of that 22.8 million, 2,803,016 were new to the Marketplace. The other 19,971,831 were returning consumers. They either picked a plan again or were automatically re-enrolled in the one they already had.
So the genuinely new on-exchange buyer pool was about 2.8 million people. That is roughly 12 percent of the headline figure.
That figure also undersells how much of the market moves in a year, though the movement cuts both ways. Nearly three in ten of the prior year’s Marketplace enrollees switched to a different plan rather than renewing, and one in ten became uninsured, according to a KFF follow-up survey of ACA Marketplace enrollees fielded February 12 to March 2, 2026. The switchers are the half that matters to you, because they transacted. The uninsured half mostly did not choose to go. Eight in ten of everyone who changed or dropped coverage told KFF the reason was that it had become too expensive. So a returning consumer is not a settled customer, and an old record is not automatically a warm one either.
Now add the calendar. Under the HealthCare.gov rules on enrolling outside open enrollment, open enrollment runs November 1 to January 15. Outside that window you can only enroll in or change a Marketplace plan with a Special Enrollment Period.
Put those two facts together and the pricing spread stops looking like a quality scale.
For about 11 weeks a year, an on-exchange health lead is a person who can act. For the other 41, that same record is a person who legally cannot buy what you are selling. Not unless something specific happened in their life in the last 60 days.
Same data quality. Same form. Same vendor. Completely different asset.
This is why agents who buy on price alone get hurt in the spring. They see ACA lead costs soften in March and read it as a bargain. What they bought is a shopper with no legal path to a plan until November.
Off-Exchange U65 and On-Exchange ACA Are Not One Price
Under-65 off-exchange private health and on-exchange ACA coverage are two different products. Two different buyers. Vendors mostly price them as one bucket called health insurance leads, and buyers with a mixed book pay for that.
Look again at the product-line table. A fresh exclusive ACA lead runs $30 to $80. A fresh exclusive under-65 lead runs $25 to $60. The off-exchange lead is cheaper at the top of the band.
That is backwards from how most agents value them. The enrollment calendar is why.
Off-exchange U65 products are not bound to the November-to-January window. An off-exchange record stays workable in July. An on-exchange record does not. A lead you can act on all year, priced below one you can act on for 11 weeks, is the clearest mispricing in this market.
If your book is mostly off-exchange, that gap is your margin.
Still deciding which side of the line a lead sits on? Our breakdown of how to tell a U65 lead from an ACA lead before you buy it walks the classification test. The off-exchange U65 buyer’s guide goes deeper on how that book gets built.
What a Live Transfer Call Is Worth Over a Form Lead
What a health insurance live transfer call costs
A health insurance live transfer call costs $30 to $200 per transfer in 2026. That one span is the whole published market. It is wide because it holds two bands from two guides that both sell into this market.
Only one of the two breaks a transfer price out for health. The Aged Lead Store health insurance lead pricing table lists health live transfers at $30 to $75 and up. That is the band to plan a health buy against.
The $80 to $200 and up figure comes from the ActiveProspect insurance lead cost guide, and it is a transfer price across insurance lines rather than a health table. That same guide shows the band moving by line. It names real-time exclusive or live transfer life leads at $80 to $200 and up, and auto live transfers at about $50 to $150.
So the top of the span is real. It is what a transfer costs in the priciest lines. Health sits lower in it.
A live transfer is a person already on the phone, already screened, handed to your licensed agent while the intent is live. A form lead is a phone number and a hope.
What moves a transfer to each end of that range
Four things decide where a call lands in that span. None of them is data quality.
Product line is first, and it is the biggest one. A transfer is priced off what a closed policy is worth, not off what the call cost to produce. That is why the same guide can put auto at about $50 to $150 and life at $80 to $200 and up.
Screening depth is second. A transfer that is only a warm dial costs about what a good exclusive lead costs. A transfer screened against plan type, enrollment eligibility, and licensing state costs multiples of that. Most of the failure modes have already been paid for.
Exclusivity is third. ActiveProspect puts exclusive web leads at roughly two to three times the price of shared ones. The same logic prices a call that reaches one agent above a call shuttled down a list.
The billable-call definition is fourth, and it is the one buyers skip. Connect, a duration threshold, and a qualification standard are three different products. Two vendors can quote the same price and hand you very different calls. Get the definition in writing before you compare a quote to any band on this page. Our guide to buying insurance calls on a pay-per-call basis covers how those terms get written.
What you are buying anywhere in that range is contact. The same Aged Lead Store table puts live transfers at an 80 to 95 percent contact rate and a 15 to 25 percent close rate. Its fresh exclusive leads sit at 50 to 65 percent contact and 8 to 15 percent close. You are paying to delete the dialing, not to improve the prospect.
Both units are worth buying. They are worth buying for different floors.
Elevarus prices work on a cost-per-call and cost-per-lead basis. The practical rule is simple. Pay the call premium when your closers are the constraint. Pay the form-lead price when your dialer capacity is the constraint.
A team with three licensed agents and a full pipeline should be buying calls. A team with twelve agents and idle time should be buying volume and working it.
How to Buy in the 41 Weeks Outside Open Enrollment
Open enrollment for 2026 coverage began November 1, 2025 and ran to January 15. That is 76 days. The rest of the calendar is roughly 41 weeks.
No vendor pricing guide explains that stretch. It is the most asked and least answered question among working health agents.
Here is what actually changes.
Outside open enrollment, an on-exchange prospect needs a Special Enrollment Period. HealthCare.gov ties those to specific qualifying life events.
Changes in household, such as marriage, birth, adoption, or divorce with loss of coverage. Changes in residence, such as a move to a new ZIP code or county. And loss of qualifying health coverage.
The window is 60 days. For loss of coverage it runs either direction. You qualify if you lost coverage in the past 60 days, or expect to lose it in the next 60.
That gives you three real ways to source year-round.
Buy on the life event, not the plan interest. A lead generated off a job change, a move, or a new baby has a legal path to coverage today. A lead generated off a generic quote form in June usually does not.
Run the off-exchange book as your base. Under-65 private health is not gated by the marketplace calendar. That is why a mixed book survives the summer and a pure ACA book does not.
Treat aged data as a re-entry list, not a lead list. At $0.15 to $5.00 the math tolerates a low hit rate. A record from last November is a person whose situation may have turned into a qualifying event since. That is a very different reason to buy aged data than the usual one.
One more thing moved this year, and it sets the ceiling on all of it. A plan selection is not a paid policy. Sign-up counts, like the 22.8 million selections cited above, measure who chose a plan; effectuated enrollment counts who actually paid a premium. KFF’s analysis of 2026 Marketplace enrollment projects the second number falling by millions this year.
| Measure | 2025 | 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average monthly effectuated enrollment (people who pay premiums) | 22.3 million | About 17.5 million, projected | KFF, What We Know So Far About 2026 ACA Marketplace Enrollment |
| Returning enrollees who had not paid a first premium | Not reported | 4 percent | KFF Follow-Up Survey of ACA Marketplace Enrollees |
| Returning enrollees not confident they can afford premiums all year | Not reported | One in six | KFF Follow-Up Survey of ACA Marketplace Enrollees |
Read the bottom two rows in both directions. People who never paid a first premium, and people who doubt they can keep paying, are heading for a loss of coverage, and loss of coverage is the one qualifying event that runs 60 days in either direction. That does put them back inside a buying window. It also tells you why they left, which was price. So work that list with a cheaper product in hand, not the same plan they just walked away from. Open Enrollment for 2027 coverage starts November 1, per HealthCare.gov, which is the other date this list is pointed at.
What Aged Health Data Costs Once You Price the Dialing
An aged record is a health insurance inquiry somebody filled out weeks or months ago, that the first buyer never converted, resold to you at a discount.
The same arithmetic runs in every vertical we buy in, and the answer differs each time. We priced the same trade for aged HVAC records against real-time and for aged Gold IRA records. Health is the one where the calendar, not the age of the record, does most of the work.
The discount is real and it is steep. Aged Lead Store publishes a full ladder on its health lead page: $2.00 per record at 14 to 45 days old for orders of 1 to 249, $1.50 each at 250 to 999, $1.25 for records 46 to 85 days old, $0.30 for records 86 to 365 days old, and $0.20 for records 366 to 2,000 days old.
The headline number agents repeat is $0.10. That one carries two conditions. The record can be up to 2,000 days old, which is five and a half years. And you have to buy 25,000 of them at once.
Age is the variable the seller prints. Resale history is the one nobody puts on the file. Second Chance Leads, another seller holding page one for this query, markets its aged inventory as “Exclusive to you” while describing real-time leads as sold to “5 other agents instantly.” It publishes no per-record prices at all. You request a quote. So you have two page-one sellers, two different accounts of the same product, and no resale count on either. Ask for that count in writing before you pay.
The arithmetic the price ladder leaves out
Every aged-lead cost table stops at the data. Carry it one step further and the picture changes.
Aged Lead Store publishes the conversion inputs itself. Its cheap insurance leads guide puts aged internet leads at a 28% contact rate and a 3.5% close rate of contacts, and it recommends a 21-day cadence of six call attempts per record. Take those at face value. They belong to the seller, so they are the best case, not a cautious one.
Run 250 records at the published $1.50 tier.
| Input | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Records bought | 250 at $1.50 | Aged Lead Store published ladder, 250 to 999 tier |
| Data spend | $375 | arithmetic |
| Call attempts per record | 6 | Aged Lead Store 21-day cadence |
| Total dial attempts | 1,500 | arithmetic |
| Contact rate | 28% | Aged Lead Store aged internet lead table |
| People actually reached | 70 | arithmetic |
| Dials per person reached | 21 | arithmetic |
| Close rate of contacts | 3.5% | Aged Lead Store aged internet lead table |
| Policies written | 2 to 3 | arithmetic |
| Data cost per policy | $153 | arithmetic |
| Licensed-agent hours | 25 to 50 | 1,500 dials at 60 to 120 seconds, our assumption |
| Agent time per person reached | 21 to 43 minutes | arithmetic |
| Agent hours per policy written | 10 to 20 | arithmetic |
One input there is not sourced, and we are naming it rather than burying it in a footnote. Nobody publishes how long a licensed agent spends on a single dial attempt. Dial, ring, voicemail, disposition. We ran it at 60, 90 and 120 seconds so you can set your own. Every other line is the seller’s published figure or arithmetic on it.
The last row is the one that decides the purchase. At the seller’s own contact and close rates, 250 aged records produce two or three policies and burn 10 to 20 hours of licensed-agent dialing for each one. The $153 cost per acquisition counts the data. It counts none of those hours.
Price the person you reached, not the record you bought
A record is not a prospect. The unit that settles this is the person you actually got on the phone. At 90 seconds a dial, 250 records buy 70 conversations and 37.5 hours of dialing.
| Loaded cost per licensed-agent hour | Data cost per person reached | Agent time per person reached | Total per person reached |
|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | $5.36 | $10.71 | $16.07 |
| $25 | $5.36 | $13.39 | $18.75 |
| $30 | $5.36 | $16.07 | $21.43 |
| $40 | $5.36 | $21.43 | $26.79 |
Now the comparison is a fair one. Published bands put a screened health live transfer at $30 to $75 and up per Aged Lead Store, and $80 to $200 and up per ActiveProspect. Aged data delivers a conversation under $30 as long as your fully loaded cost per licensed-agent hour stays below roughly $46. Past that, the cheapest published transfer is the cheaper conversation.
Those two conversations are not the same conversation, and we will not pretend otherwise. A transfer is somebody asking about coverage this week. An aged connect is somebody who asked six weeks ago and has been dialed since. Our note on the buy-side math behind transfer pricing sets out what you are paying for, and the question of who dialed the person before you did bites harder on aged data than on anything else you can buy.
Aged data wins in one condition. Your licensed-agent hours are already paid for and not fully used. A salaried desk with idle afternoons turns sunk labor into policies at $153 of data each, and that is a genuinely good trade. The same 250 records bought by a shop paying for every hour of dialing costs about $536 per policy at $25 an hour, and it climbs from there.
Check Where the Lead Came From Before You Pay
In August 2025 the FTC announced that Assurance IQ and MediaAlpha would pay a total of $145 million to settle charges that they misled consumers seeking health insurance. One line from the Bureau of Consumer Protection director is worth reading twice if you buy leads for a living: “Coherently and systematically addressing unlawful lead generation is a priority for the FTC.”
The details matter more than the headline number. The FTC alleged consumers were led into short-term medical and limited benefit indemnity plans that did not provide the promised coverage. It also alleged they were bombarded with telemarketing and robocalls.
The proposed order required MediaAlpha to turn over web domains including GovernmentHealthInsurance.com and ObamacarePlans.com. It also required express informed consent to collect, sell, or disclose personal information.
Read that as a buyer. Someone was paying for the leads those domains produced. Those leads looked fine in a CRM.
A record from a site the consumer believed was a government portal is not a person who asked to hear from your agency. Price is not what tells you the difference.
So ask for the things that are checkable before you pay:
- The source URL the consumer actually filled out
- The consent language shown at submission
- How many other buyers get the same record
- The return and credit policy, in writing
- Whether the phone number was verified as belonging to that person at submission
If your vendor cannot produce the source URL, you are not buying a lead. You are buying a row. We walk the mechanics in our piece on what to verify at ping time before you bid. The health lead fraud breakdown covers the failure patterns specific to this vertical.
What You Should Actually Pay, by Book
Working from the bands above, here is how to set a ceiling instead of chasing a floor.
If you sell off-exchange under-65 year-round. Buy fresh exclusive in the $25 to $60 band. Treat anything under $25 as a resold record until proven otherwise.
Your advantage is that you can work the lead in July, so pay for freshness and exclusivity. Our note on matching under-65 lead types to how your team actually sells covers that fit.
If you sell on-exchange ACA. Concentrate spend in the November to January window and pay up. Exclusive at the top of the $30 to $80 band during open enrollment beats shared at $10 in April. In April, most of what you buy legally cannot convert.
If you run a phone room. Buy calls, and negotiate the billable definition before the price. The difference between a $75 transfer and a $200 transfer is screening. Screening is the only thing that makes a call cheaper than three form leads.
If you are testing a new vendor. Buy aged data first. At under $5 a record you can measure contact accuracy and the consent trail for a few hundred dollars, before committing real budget to their fresh inventory.
The one bet to avoid is the one the pricing guides quietly encourage. Buying a single blended health insurance lead product, at a single blended price, all twelve months of the year. That is four different assets averaged into one number, and the average is wrong in every month.
Want to see how we source and verify off-exchange health leads and calls? The under-65 private health lead generation page lays out the model. Written by Shane McIntyre, who runs this traffic.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to buy health insurance leads?
Health insurance leads cost roughly $0.15 to $200 each in 2026, depending on type. Aged data sells for $0.15 to $15. Shared web leads sit at $10 to $45. Exclusive web leads go for $40 to $120. Live transfer calls reach $80 to $200 or more. Those bands come from 2026 pricing guides published by Aged Lead Store and ActiveProspect. Aged Lead Store puts typical solo agent lead spend at $300 to $1,500 per month.
What is a reasonable cost per lead for health insurance?
It depends on which health market the lead came from. A fresh exclusive off-exchange under-65 lead sits at $25 to $60. Its on-exchange ACA equivalent sells for $30 to $80. Medicare goes higher at $40 to $100 and up. Group or employer is higher still at $50 to $150 and up. Set your ceiling from the product line you actually sell, not from a blended health insurance average.
Are health insurance leads worth buying?
They are worth buying when the person can legally enroll. CMS reported 22.8 million 2026 Marketplace plan selections, but only 2.8 million were new consumers. HealthCare.gov limits enrollment outside the November 1 to January 15 window to people with a qualifying Special Enrollment Period. Buying on-exchange leads outside that window, without screening for a qualifying life event, is where most wasted health lead spend goes.
What is the difference between U65 and ACA health insurance leads?
U65 leads are off-exchange private health prospects. ACA leads are on-exchange Marketplace prospects. They are different products with different buyers and different calendars. Off-exchange is workable year-round. On-exchange enrollment is gated to open enrollment or a Special Enrollment Period. Aged Lead Store prices fresh exclusive U65 at $25 to $60, and fresh exclusive ACA at $30 to $80.
When can someone enroll in a health plan outside open enrollment?
Only with a Special Enrollment Period. HealthCare.gov ties these to qualifying life events. Those include changes in household such as marriage, birth or adoption, changes in residence such as a move to a new ZIP code or county, and loss of qualifying health coverage. The window is generally 60 days. For loss of coverage it applies either 60 days after the loss, or up to 60 days before an expected one.
How do you spot a bad health insurance lead vendor?
Ask for the source URL the consumer submitted, the consent language shown at submission, how many buyers receive the same record, and the return policy in writing. In August 2025 the FTC announced a $145 million total settlement with Assurance IQ and MediaAlpha over misleading health insurance marketing. The proposed order required MediaAlpha to hand over domains including GovernmentHealthInsurance.com and ObamacarePlans.com. A vendor who cannot show you where a lead came from is the risk that settlement describes.
Do live transfer calls cost more than health insurance form leads?
Yes. A health insurance live transfer call costs $30 to $200 per transfer in 2026, against $40 to $120 for an exclusive form lead. Aged Lead Store lists health live transfers at $30 to $75 and up, at an 80 to 95 percent contact rate. The $80 to $200 end is ActiveProspect’s cross-line insurance price, not a health-specific band. Inside that range, product line, screening depth, exclusivity and the billable-call definition set the price. Get the billable definition in writing. A call billed at connect and a call billed after a qualified conversation are different products.
Are aged leads worth it?
It turns on what an hour of licensed-agent time costs you. Using Aged Lead Store’s own published rates, 250 aged health records at $1.50 each cost $375 and produce roughly 70 conversations and two or three policies. That is $153 of data per policy. It is also 25 to 50 hours of dialing, which no aged-lead cost table prices. If those hours are already paid for and sitting idle, aged data is the cheapest policy you will write all year. If you pay for every hour of dialing, the real cost per policy passes $500 at $25 an hour and keeps going.
Where can I buy aged insurance leads?
Aged Lead Store publishes a full per-record ladder by age band and order size, from $2.00 down to $0.10, which makes it the easiest seller to price before you spend. Second Chance Leads sells aged health and Medicare records but publishes no prices, so you request a quote by region. That suits a one or two state footprint. Agents also swap recommendations in the r/InsuranceAgent community on Reddit, where contact-accuracy complaints surface that no seller puts on its own site. Wherever you buy, ask for the resale count and the original source URL in writing.
How many Marketplace customers change plans or drop coverage in a year?
Almost four in ten, but the two halves are not equally useful to you. A KFF follow-up survey of ACA Marketplace enrollees, fielded February 12 to March 2, 2026, found nearly three in ten of the prior year’s enrollees switched to a different Marketplace plan and one in ten became uninsured. The switchers transacted, so they are worth a second call. Eight in ten who changed or dropped coverage told KFF it was because cover had become too expensive.
