- Published prices run from $15 for a locksmith lead to $2,250 for a water damage restoration lead, and every vertical carries a range wide enough that a quote on its own tells you nothing.
- Two companies publish roofing prices that are ten times apart, $85 to $550 at Service Direct and about $60 at Aragon Advertising, because one number is what a roofer pays and the other is what a network calls a representative cost.
- You are quoted a price per call. You are billed on a duration threshold and a rejection policy, and those two settings decide what you actually spend per booked job.
The prices in this market are public. Service Direct, Aragon Advertising and HyperTarget Marketing all post their rates, covering home services, insurance and legal between them. Across those published figures a pay per call lead sells for somewhere between $15 and $2,250. Pay per call marketing is the model behind those numbers. A buyer pays a fixed amount for an inbound phone call that meets an agreed duration and qualification standard.
What a Pay Per Call Lead Costs by Vertical in 2026
Service Direct publishes the price range its clients set inside its marketplace for each home service category. Aragon Advertising publishes a representative cost per call from its own network. HyperTarget Marketing publishes a two-band range across the market. All three are in the table.
| Vertical | Published price per call or lead | Who published it |
|---|---|---|
| Water damage restoration | $500 to $2,250 | Service Direct |
| Mold removal | $75 to $650 | Service Direct |
| Roofing | $85 to $550 | Service Direct |
| Air conditioning and heating | $65 to $325 | Service Direct |
| Plumbing | $60 to $255 | Service Direct |
| Pest control | $40 to $195 | Service Direct |
| Electrician | $55 to $175 | Service Direct |
| Appliance repair | $22 to $85 | Service Direct |
| Locksmith | $15 to $75 | Service Direct |
| Medicare | About $20, converting to a sold policy about 20% of the time | Aragon Advertising (its own network) |
| Final expense | About $15, converting about 15% of the time | Aragon Advertising (its own network) |
| Roofing and pest control | About $60 and about $30, both closing to a booked appointment about 25% of the time | Aragon Advertising (its own network) |
| Simple home services, market-wide | $10 to $30 | HyperTarget Marketing |
| Legal, insurance and other high-value verticals | $50 to $150 and above | HyperTarget Marketing |
The disagreement in that table is the useful part
Roofing appears twice. Service Direct puts it at $85 to $550. Aragon puts it at about $60. Those are both current published figures from companies that sell calls for a living, and they are roughly ten times apart at the top end.
What each number describes explains the gap. Service Direct runs a marketplace where the contractor sets their own lead price and gets an exclusive call, so its range shows what buyers bid when nobody else receives the same call. Aragon’s figure is a representative cost inside a network that distributes calls at scale. Pest control shows the same pattern, $40 to $195 against about $30.
Read the range, not the midpoint. A supplier quoting you $95 for a roofing call is inside every published range on this page, which tells you almost nothing about whether the price is good. What tells you is the exclusivity, the duration threshold and the rejection policy attached to it.
What the Buyer Pays and What the Publisher Earns Are Two Different Numbers
Every price above is a buy-side number. The sell side publishes its own, and the two are rarely printed on the same page. Business of Apps lists what named networks pay the affiliates who send them calls: RingPartner up to $80 per lead, Digital Market Media up to $400 per lead, and eFax at $25 per call. It advises that the better networks should offer at least $15 per fixed lead, and reports that some offers reach $1,700 for a single lead.
Put the two sides on the same vertical and the economics become legible. HyperTarget puts a simple home services call at $10 to $30 to buy. Business of Apps puts the sell-side floor at $15. There is very little room between those figures. That is why the cheap end of home services is a volume business for everyone in it, and why quality complaints cluster there.
Aragon shows how blurry this line gets. Its advertiser guide gives about $20 as the representative cost of a Medicare call. Its affiliate guide describes the same Medicare call as worth around $20 to the affiliate who generated it. Both statements sit on its own site, and they cannot both hold once a network takes any margin. Ask any supplier which side of the transaction their published number describes.
The auction that sets both numbers in real time is covered in our guide to ping-post lead distribution, and the platforms that run it in our review of pay-per-call software.
Every Published Rate Is a Rate Per Billable Call
A published rate is a rate per billable call. A call becomes billable when it lasts past a set number of seconds, commonly somewhere between 60 and 120 depending on the vertical. Everything short of that threshold is free to you and unpaid to whoever sent it.
That single setting moves your effective cost more than the headline price does. Raise the threshold from 60 seconds to 120 and calls that used to bill stop billing, so you pay for fewer calls at the same quoted rate. Lower it to 30 seconds and you start paying for people who called the wrong number.
The threshold sits where a qualified caller has usually said enough to be recognized and an unqualified one has usually hung up. Legal intake needs longer than an emergency plumbing call because the qualifying questions take longer to ask. The vertical-by-vertical duration map is in our guide to insurance buyer pricing tiers.
Rejection codes tell you what you are really buying
The second setting is the rejection policy, which is your right to refuse a billable call and the reasons you may give. Five reasons account for most disputes.
- Sub-duration. The caller hung up before the threshold. This points at the ad and the landing page.
- Wrong intent. The caller wanted something adjacent that you do not sell. This points at keyword and audience targeting.
- Geography. The caller sits outside your licensed or serviceable area.
- Duplicate. The same caller already reached you inside the agreed lookback window.
- Prior contact or do-not-call. The caller has already opted out of hearing from you.
Agree the lookback window on duplicates before you sign anything. A blanket 30-day rule protects your spend and punishes a supplier for genuine repeat interest, so mature agreements tier it: same-day repeats do not bill, a caller returning weeks later does. Then pull your rejection report weekly and sort it by source. A source whose sub-duration rate is climbing is telling you its traffic changed before your cost per job does.
Working Out What You Can Afford to Pay
Your ceiling comes from three numbers you already own: the gross profit on a closed job, the share of billable calls you close, and the share of that profit you are willing to spend to acquire the customer. Multiply them together and you have the most you can pay per billable call before the channel stops earning.
Take the Aragon figures, since they publish a conversion rate alongside a price. A Medicare call at about $20 that converts to a policy about one time in five costs roughly $100 per policy sold. A roofing call at about $60 that books an inspection about one time in four costs roughly $240 per booked inspection. Neither number is expensive or cheap on its own. Each one only means something against what a policy or a roof is worth to you.
Run that calculation before you ask for a rate, then judge every quote against your own ceiling instead of against the market range. The published prices on this page are wide enough that almost any quote falls inside them, so the range is useful for spotting an outlier and useless for approving a deal.
Two things move your real cost more than negotiating the rate. The first is the conversion signal you feed your ad platform, because uploading every call as a conversion teaches it to chase call volume. We cover that in our guide to which calls to upload as conversions. The second is exclusivity. A shared call at half the price, competing against four other buyers, usually costs more per booked job than an exclusive one. Insurance pricing detail sits in our pay-per-call insurance leads guide, and contractors should read our HVAC lead generation cost benchmarks before setting a cap.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a reasonable cost per lead?
It depends on what a closed job is worth to you. The published ranges give you the boundaries. Service Direct posts $15 to $75 for a locksmith lead and $500 to $2,250 for a water damage restoration lead. HyperTarget Marketing puts simple home services calls at $10 to $30 and legal or insurance calls at $50 to $150 and above. A reasonable price sits below your gross profit per job multiplied by your close rate multiplied by the share of profit you will spend to win a customer.
Is pay-per-call worth it?
It is worth it when your sales process runs on the phone and you can answer promptly, because you pay only when someone calls and stays on the line past an agreed duration. Aragon Advertising reports that billable Medicare calls in its network convert to a sold policy around 20% of the time and roofing calls book an appointment around 25% of the time. It is a poor fit if your team cannot answer live, since an unanswered billable call still bills.
How much should I charge per lead?
If you are generating and selling calls, the published sell-side figures are your reference. Business of Apps reports RingPartner paying up to $80 per lead, Digital Market Media up to $400 per lead and eFax $25 per call, and advises that the better networks should offer at least $15 per fixed lead. Price your inventory against the conversion rate you can prove, because a buyer will pay more for a call that closes than for a call that connects.
Is it legal to pay for leads?
Buying and selling leads and calls is ordinary commercial practice across home services, insurance and legal marketing. The rules that matter concern how the consumer was contacted and what they agreed to, and they differ by vertical and by state. Ask any supplier to show you how consent was collected and how it is recorded before you accept traffic, and take advice from a qualified professional for your own industry.
We build paid media plans that price both sides of the call before a dollar gets spent, whether you are buying calls, selling them, or doing both. On a 30-minute call we will look at your duration thresholds, your rejection reports and your cost per booked job, and name the one or two changes most likely to move it. Book a free strategy call with Elevarus.
