- A published price range is too wide to budget against. Two separate guides put an exclusive solar lead at $50 to $300, and that six-fold spread sits inside a single number.
- The conversion rates are published, and unlike the prices they broadly agree. They are just kept on a different page from the price, which is the one place they would be useful.
- So a price is not comparable on its own. The only number that settles a buy is your own allowable cost per lead, and no vendor can publish it because it depends on your margin.
- Work it out in one division: gross profit per install, times the share of it you will spend to win the job, times your close rate.
- You are buying into a shrinking market. Residential solar is forecast to fall 21% in 2026, and the federal residential credit ended for expenditures after 31 December 2025.
Quick answers:
- How much does a solar lead cost in 2026?
- Why is the published price range for a solar lead so wide?
- What close rate should I expect on solar leads?
- How do I work out what I can afford to pay per solar lead?
- Are exclusive solar leads worth the extra cost?
- Is it still worth buying solar leads now that the federal tax credit has ended?
- How do I avoid paying for fake solar leads?
Every guide to solar lead generation prices a lead. Almost none of them price a customer, and that gap is why installers keep buying the wrong product at the right price. A lead is not a thing you own. It is a probability you rent, and the probability is what you are actually paying for.
This page does the part the price guides leave out. It puts the published prices and the published conversion rates in one place, then does the one division that turns them into a number you can act on.
What a Solar Lead Costs Right Now, by Product
The word on the invoice prices nothing, and neither does the range. Two of the guides below put an exclusive solar lead at $50 to $300. That is a six-fold spread inside one cell, and comparing it against a competitor’s range does not narrow it, because the width is not really disagreement between sellers. It is the span of everything they are each willing to call one product.
| Product | Aged Lead Store (13 Mar 2026) | ActiveProspect, citing Enervio (31 Jul 2026) | UpLead (7 Oct 2025) | The Leads Warehouse (4 May 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared / marketplace lead | $15 to $50 | $25 to $100 | $15 to $75 | not stated |
| Exclusive lead | $50 to $300 | $100 to $250 | $50 to $300 | not stated |
| Real-time lead | not stated | not stated | not stated | $40 to $120 |
| Inbound call | not stated | not stated | not stated | $100 to $300+ |
| Booked appointment | not stated | $150 to $500 | $200 to $500 | $200 to $400+ (door to door) |
| Aged lead | $0.60 to $1.50 (30 to 85 days) | not stated | as little as $0.25 (any age) | pennies to $10 (any age) |
A fifth source, SolarReviews, skips the product breakdown and says solar leads run $25 to $300 overall, with an exclusive opt-in web lead in a market like San Diego selling for as much as $300 and a call-centre lead in the same market going for $25.
One caution about counting sources. ActiveProspect’s aged, real-time, inbound-call and door-to-door figures are not its own. It attributes them to The Leads Warehouse, which is why only the Enervio-sourced rows appear in its column above. Four guides quoting one number is one number, not four, and reading agreement into it is the easiest mistake on this page. A single guide will not always agree with itself either: UpLead labels shared leads at $15 to $75 in its summary and describes them at $15 to $150 further down the same page. We have written up why the published ranges cannot be reconciled, and what actually sets the price, in the four-products breakdown.
The Numbers Every Price Guide Prints on a Different Page
Conversion data is not missing from this market. It is separated from the price. You have to leave the pricing article to find it, and when you do, it turns out to be the steadier half of the evidence.
| Source | Contact rate | Lead to appointment | Close rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| SolarReviews, on its own leads | 80 to 85% | 20 to 30% expected, around 33% national average | 3 to 7% |
| UpLead, describing SolarReviews leads | 75 to 80% | 30 to 35% | 3 to 10% to signed contract |
| Aged Lead Store, fresh exclusive | 50 to 70% | not stated | not stated |
| Aged Lead Store, fresh shared | 40 to 60% | not stated | not stated |
| Aged Lead Store, aged 30 to 85 days | 20 to 35% | not stated | not stated |
| The Leads Warehouse, real-time | not stated | not stated | 3 to 10% |
Read down the close-rate column and something useful happens. The figures converge. SolarReviews puts lead to close at 3 to 7%, The Leads Warehouse puts real-time leads at 3 to 10%, and UpLead describes SolarReviews inventory at 3 to 10% to signed contract. Contact rates cluster too, in the high seventies to mid eighties on fresh exclusive volume. Even lead to appointment, the noisiest row, holds together once you read it properly: SolarReviews publishes 20 to 30% as a realistic expectation and around 33% as its measured national average, and that average lands inside the 30 to 35% UpLead reports for the same leads.
So the conversion half of this market is the trustworthy half. It is also the half that never appears in a pricing guide, and that is the actual defect. The numbers you need to turn a price into a decision are reliable, published, and always one page away from the price.
Work Backwards to Your Allowable Cost Per Lead
Stop asking what a solar lead costs and start asking what one is worth to you. That number is yours alone. It falls out of two things a vendor cannot know: your gross profit on an installed system, and the share of that profit you are willing to spend to win the job.
Here is the whole calculation.
- Leads per install = 1 divided by your close rate.
- Acquisition budget per install = your gross profit per install, times the share you will spend to win it.
- Allowable cost per lead = step 2 divided by step 1.
Run it with the published close rates. SolarReviews puts lead-to-close at 3 to 7%; take the midpoint of 5%, and you need 20 leads for every install. If you will spend a quarter of your gross profit acquiring the job, your allowable cost per lead is your gross profit divided by 80.
Put your own gross profit into that. An installer clearing $6,000 a job can pay about $75 a lead. One clearing $12,000 can pay about $150. Drop to the 3% close rate at the bottom of the published range and the same $12,000 job supports only about $90, because you now need 33 leads instead of 20.
Which is the point of doing the division at all. The $150 exclusive lead and the $40 real-time lead are not expensive and cheap. One of them is inside your number and the other is not, and which is which changes the moment your close rate moves two points. If you would rather build the ceiling up from gross margin per watt instead of per install, we have done it that way here.
Which Product Fits Your Operation
There is no best product here, only a fit between what a lead arrives as and what your team can do with it. The trade-off is really about who does the qualifying work and who carries the risk when it fails.
| Product | What you are paying for | Where it breaks | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aged | Volume at almost no unit cost, $0.60 to $1.50 at 30 to 85 days | Contact falls to 20 to 35% and keeps falling with age | Teams with spare dialler capacity and nothing to lose on a miss |
| Shared / marketplace | The cheapest live intent, $15 to $100 across the published guides | You are racing two or three buyers to the phone | Testing a new geography, or any market where budget is the constraint |
| Exclusive real-time | First and only contact, $50 to $300 | You still do all the qualifying, and you pay for the ones that fail it | Teams whose setters have capacity but not enough people to call |
| Inbound call | A person already on the line, $100 to $300+ | Volume is capped by someone else’s media, and it arrives when it arrives | Closers who convert on the phone and cannot chase |
| Booked appointment | Someone else’s qualifying work, $150 to $500 | No-shows and the contract’s definition of a “sit” | Small teams with no setter bench at all |
Some of these decisions are big enough to have their own pages. If you are weighing exclusivity, the cost-per-customer comparison of exclusive against shared carries the contact-rate math. If you are weighing whether to buy the appointment or set it yourself, the appointment-set against raw economics prices the no-shows and the backfill terms. There is also a strategy view that budgets against sat appointments rather than leads, which is here.
What Changed in 2026
You are buying leads into a contracting market, and that belongs in your numbers. The residential solar market is expected to decline by 21% in 2026, according to the Q2 2026 US Solar Market Insight report from Wood Mackenzie and SEIA, which also found a record 45% of first-quarter residential installations paired with storage. The other change is fiscal: the IRS states in Fact Sheet FS-2025-05 that the section 25D residential clean energy credit “will not be allowed for any expenditures made after December 31, 2025.” Fewer buyers, a larger financed amount, and a storage attach rate that changes what a qualified homeowner even looks like.
How to Buy Without Paying for Junk
Every rate in the table above assumes the lead is a real person who wants what you sell. That assumption is where solar lead spend actually leaks, because high volume and weak capture is exactly the combination that attracts fabricated and recycled leads.
Three things to require before you sign anything. Ask for a certificate of the consent event itself, not a claim that consent exists. Ask how homeowner status is established, because a checkbox on a form is not verification and renters cannot authorise an install. Ask what the return policy is for a lead that turns out not to be a real person, and get the answer in writing. How verification changes what you actually receive walks through the checks and the junk patterns specific to this vertical.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a solar lead cost in 2026?
It depends entirely on the product. Published ranges put a shared or marketplace lead at $15 to $100, an exclusive lead at $50 to $300, a real-time lead at $40 to $120, an inbound call at $100 to $300 and up, and a booked appointment at $150 to $500. Those figures come from Aged Lead Store, ActiveProspect citing Enervio, UpLead and The Leads Warehouse, all published between October 2025 and July 2026. SolarReviews gives a single overall band of $25 to $300.
Why is the published price range for a solar lead so wide?
Three reasons, and only one of them is about sellers disagreeing. The product labels are not standardised, so one vendor’s shared lead goes to two buyers and another’s to five, and the word does not tell you which. The guides are not independent either: ActiveProspect’s aged, real-time and inbound-call ranges are attributed to The Leads Warehouse, so those two agreeing proves nothing. Mostly, though, a range like $50 to $300 for an exclusive lead is not a price at all. It is a description of everything one seller will call exclusive.
What close rate should I expect on solar leads?
The published figures agree more than the prices do. SolarReviews puts lead to close at 3 to 7% on its own leads, The Leads Warehouse puts real-time leads at 3 to 10%, and UpLead reports 3 to 10% to signed contract on SolarReviews inventory. Contact rates run 80 to 85% at SolarReviews and 75 to 80% in UpLead’s account of the same leads. Aged Lead Store reports 50 to 70% contact on fresh exclusive leads, 40 to 60% on fresh shared, and 20 to 35% once a lead is 30 to 85 days old. Budget against the bottom of each range.
How do I work out what I can afford to pay per solar lead?
Three steps. Divide one by your close rate to get the leads you need per install. Multiply your gross profit per install by the share of it you will spend to win the job. Divide the second number by the first. At a 5% close rate and a quarter of gross profit spent on acquisition, your ceiling is gross profit divided by 80, so a $6,000 job supports about $75 a lead and a $12,000 job about $150.
Are exclusive solar leads worth the extra cost?
Only if contact rate is your binding constraint rather than budget. Aged Lead Store reports 50 to 70% contact on fresh exclusive leads against 40 to 60% on fresh shared, and exclusive costs several times more. If your setters have idle capacity, shared volume may still win on total installs. If they are already at capacity, every shared lead lost to a faster buyer is setter time you have already paid for.
Is it still worth buying solar leads now that the federal tax credit has ended?
The market is harder, not closed. The IRS states in Fact Sheet FS-2025-05 that the section 25D credit is not allowed for expenditures made after 31 December 2025, and Wood Mackenzie and SEIA forecast a 21% decline in residential solar in 2026. Both facts belong in your allowable cost per lead rather than in a decision to stop buying. A smaller market with a higher financed amount usually means a lower close rate, which lowers your ceiling.
How do I avoid paying for fake solar leads?
Require a certificate of the consent event rather than an assurance that consent exists. Require a stated method for verifying homeowner status, because a form checkbox is not verification. Require a written return policy for leads that turn out not to be real people, and test it in your first month rather than your sixth. High volume plus weak capture is the combination that attracts fabricated and recycled leads.
Get a Solar Lead Quote Built Around Your Numbers
Bring the ceiling you calculated above. Elevarus sells solar leads and inbound solar calls, priced per lead or per call, and the useful conversation starts with your close rate and your gross profit per install rather than with our rate card. Book a call and we will tell you honestly whether your number and this market can meet.
